Neal Ascherson on the last fogs of London
Names for the [London] fog evolved during the 19th century. ‘Pea-souper’ is sometimes attributed to Melville, who wrote in 1850 of encountering ‘the old-fashioned pea soup London fog – of a gamboge colour’. This suggests that the expression was already well-worn. (Corton, given to rather engaging fits of pedantry, here goes off into a disquisition about dried pea varieties, soup preparation and the diet of the Victorian poor. She also points out that thick yellow fog had a distinct taste, and that some Londoners and visitors, impressed by the gamboge-coloured pease pudding, played with the idea that fog might actually be nourishing.) ‘London Ivy’ was another term. The word ‘smog’ was invented in 1904 to describe fog by the ‘Smoke Abatement’ campaigner Henry des Voeux, and transferred only later to chemical air pollution by powered traffic. ‘London Particular’, on the other hand, had a much longer history. Charles Dickens is supposed to have thought it up for an 1851 article about conditions in Spitalfields, quoting a weaver who complained of a ‘black London genuine particular’ which stained clothes. He repeated the phrase famously in Bleak House. Corton, however, finds it in the caption to an 1827 cartoon by Michael Egerton (her selection of London fog illustrators, from Cruikshank to David Langdon, adds entertainment and insight all through the book.)
Corton salutes Dickens’s mastery of ‘the use of fog as extended metaphor’. And of course no fog in literature approaches that introduction to Bleak House with ‘Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows, fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollution of a great (and dirty) city …’ Fog, ultimately, swaddling the High Court of Chancery, ‘most pestilent of hoary sinners’. To say that Dickens multi-tasks his metaphor is a hopeless understatement. To choose a few allusions from those pages, fog stands for the end of the world, for cruel poverty, for undeserved sickness, for reversion to an age of dinosaurs, for the unnaturalness of cities and industries, for impenetrable arrogance and stupidity.
A specially lurid use, picked out by Corton, is fog as rapist and murderer. In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens placed ‘a sobbing gaslight in the counting-house window and a burglarious stream of fog creeping in to strangle it through the keyhole of the main door’. Dickens used fog as a vehicle for revenge, as the dissolution of the individual, as a general indeterminacy in which transformations happen. There seems to be nothing the man couldn’t do with this stuff which, as Guppy in Bleak House complains, ‘smears, like black fat’.
