The ‘Crazy Clock’ of York: Collapsing Time and Unstable Reality in James Montgomery’s Urban Topographic Poetry

Abstract

This chapter offers an account of James Montgomery’s poetic descriptions of York, written from his cell beneath York Castle in 1795 where he had been sentenced for treason and sedition. Montgomery vividly imagines walking the streets of York, strategically replicating and subverting the stock characteristics of earlier examples of topographical poetry, penned by London-based poets such as Jonathan Swift and John Gay, as he relays his purely conceptual tour. Montgomery finds in York a city which refuses to be understood as temporarily present, always instead read as the city it once was. Montgomery’s poetry needles at the complex negotiations of fact and fiction bound up in the city’s performance of its own history, revealing that this is a performance that York has sustained since at least the eighteenth century. The idea of York, like the idea of the city, Montgomery concludes, is miasmic, obscuring the truth that the freedom of all citizens is fragile and under perpetual assault.