London: The Biography полностью

Fog was called a “London particular” with some measure of satisfaction, since it was a unique emanation from what was then the largest and most powerful city on the earth. Darwin wrote that “there is a grandeur about its smoky fogs.” James Russell Lowell, writing in the autumn of 1888, remarked that he was living within a yellow fog-“the cabs are rimmed with a halo” and the people in the street “like fading frescoes”-but at the same time “It flatters one’s self-esteem”; he was proud to survive such an extreme condition of the city.

In turn the fog itself conjured up images of immensity. “Everything seems to be checked,” wrote a French journalist of the nineteenth century, “to slacken into a phantom-like motion that has all the vagueness of hallucination. The sounds of the street are muffled; the tops of the houses are lost, hardly even guessed … The openings of the streets swallow up, like tunnels, a crowd of foot passengers and carriages, which seem, thus, to disappear for ever.” The people in this fog “are innumerable, a compact army, these miserable little human creatures; the struggle for life animates them; they are all of one uniform blackness in the fog; they go to their daily task, they all use the same gestures.” So the fog renders the citizens indeterminate, part of a vast process which they themselves can hardly understand.

One other aspect of this darkness severely affected the inhabitants of London. Every observer noticed that the gas-lights were turned on throughout the day in order to afford some interior light, and noticed, too, how the street-lamps seemed like points of flame in the swirling miasma. But the ambience of the dark fog settled upon many streets which had no lighting at all, thereby affording cover for theft, violence and rape on an unprecedented scale. In that sense the fog was indeed “particular” to London because it intensified and emphasised all the darker characteristics of the city. Darkness is also at the heart of the notion of this black vapour as an emanation of sickness. If “all smell is disease,” as the Victorian social reformer Edwin Chadwick thought, then the acrid smell of the London fog was a sure token of contamination and epidemic fear; it is as if the contents of a million lungs were being disseminated through the streets.

The very texture and colour of the city carried all the marks of its fog. The author of Letters from Albion, written as early as 1810, noticed that above the level of the ground “you see nothing but the naked brick fronts of the houses all blackened by the smoke of coal,” while an American traveller remarked on the “uniform dinginess” of London buildings. Heinrich Heine was the author of one of the most evocative and instructive remarks upon the city-“this overworked London defies the imagination and breaks the heart” (1828)-and he himself observed that the streets and buildings were “a brown olive-green colour, on account of the damp and coal smoke.” So the fog had become part of the physical texture of the city, this most unnatural of natural phenomena leaving its presence upon the stones. Perhaps in part the city defied the imagination, in Heine’s phrase, because in that darkness “which seems neither to belong to the day nor to the night” the world itself was suspended; in the fog it became a place of concealment and of secrets, of whispers and fading footsteps.

It can be said that fog is the greatest character in nineteenth-century fiction, and the novelists looked upon fog as might people upon London Bridge, “peering over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.” When Carlyle called the fog “fluid ink” he was rehearsing the endless possibilities of describing London through the medium of the fog, as if only in the midst of this unnatural darkness could the true characteristics of the city be discerned. In the narratives of Sherlock Holmes, written by Arthur Conan Doyle from 1887 to 1927, the city of crime and of unsolved mysteries is quintessentially the city of fog. On one foggy morning in A Study in Scarlet, “a dun-coloured veil hung over the housetops looking like a reflection of the mud-coloured streets beneath.” In “the steamy, vaporous air” of a “dense drizzly fog” in The Sign of Four, Dr. Watson soon “lost my bearings … Sherlock Holmes was never at fault, however, and he muttered the names as the cab rattled through squares and in and out by tortuous by-streets.” London becomes a labyrinth. Only if you “soak up the atmosphere,” in the cliché of travellers and sightseers, will you not become bewildered and lost.