Longing for the protective darkness of the mystical tradition, Matthew Arnold, in his ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’, seems to sense that the Victorian age was about to sever its last bonds with Miltonic ‘utter’ darkness and to replace its teeming dynamism with ‘total darkness’. Dissociating darkness from the chiaroscuro of early modern times, gurus of positivism and self-styled torchbearers of reason in the wake of Keats’s Apollonius in ‘Lamia’ were over-eager to sanitise and depopulate darkness in the name of cold Enlightenment. One of the most fanatic successors of Apollonius proves to be the uncanny monk in the cathedral episode in James Thomson B.V.’s The City of Dreadful Night. Proclaiming the death of God and of all dark demons, he is a precursor of Professor Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula whom petit bourgeois assistants aid in the act of pulverising the last vampiric inhabitants of darkness. With Oscar Wilde’s student in the poem ‘The Sphinx’, the reader has already crossed the threshold into sanitised darkness where raucous Walpurgis nights only happen in the minds of sadistic bullies. In the end, it is Thomas Hardy’s Egdon Heath that, as under a magnifying glass, summarily shows the brutality of ‘total’ darkness and how it annihilates monstrous and Promethean creatures alike.