Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery

The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery: Selected Prose of James Thomson (B.V.), edited by William David Schaefer, offers the first truly representative collection of Thomson’s prose, rescuing a neglected body of work from obscurity and scattered editions. While Thomson’s poetry—most notably The City of Dreadful Night—has ensured him a place in Victorian literature, his prose has long remained inaccessible, surviving mainly in rare volumes or ephemeral periodicals such as the National Reformer, the Secularist, and Cope’s Tobacco Plant. Previous collections, whether Bertram Dobell’s ill-chosen Biographical and Critical Studies or Foote’s narrowly focused Satires and Profanities, presented only partial and often misleading portraits of Thomson’s achievement. By gathering sixteen previously uncollected writings with sixteen of his strongest earlier pieces, Schaefer creates a comprehensive edition that illuminates the full range of Thomson’s secularist satire, social criticism, literary essays, and prose phantasies.

The volume situates Thomson within the turbulent intellectual climate of nineteenth-century free thought and secular radicalism, highlighting his evolution from Christian-influenced idealist to uncompromising atheist and cultural pessimist. Thomson’s caustic critiques of religion and society, his meditations on literature from Blake and Shelley to Leopardi and Whitman, and his haunting imaginative prose works reveal a writer both steeped in Victorian debates and profoundly ahead of his time. Schaefer’s editorial arrangement—grouping the texts by theme while providing historical notes—underscores the coherence of Thomson’s intellectual development while preserving the diversity of his prose forms. More than a supplement to his poetry, this collection establishes Thomson’s prose as a vital expression of Victorian radical thought and a compelling record of one man’s struggle with faith, art, and the human condition.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.