London: The Biography полностью

The greatest novel of London fog is, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) in which the fable of changing identities and secret lives takes place within the medium of the city’s “shifting insubstantial mists.” In many respects the city itself is the changeling, its appearance altering when “the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths.” Where good and evil live side by side, and thrive together, the strange destiny of Dr. Jekyll does not seem quite so incongruous. Then for a moment the mist melts and the curtain lifts, revealing a gin palace, an eating-house, a “shop for the retail of penny numbers and two penny salads,” all this life continuing beneath the canopy of darkness like a low murmur of almost inaudible sound. Then once again “the fog settled down again on that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings.” This also is the condition of living in London-to be “cut off,” isolated, a single mote in the swirl of fog and smoke. To be alone among the confusion is perhaps the single most piercing emotion of any stranger in the city.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote of “the great town’s weltering fog” as somehow erasing all the signs and tokens of the city, blurring “Spires, bridges, streets, and squares as if a sponge had wiped out London” (1856). Fear of this invisibility actively assisted the programme of building and decoration that marked the Victorian city. Building News, in 1881, discussed the fact that “the smoky atmosphere has done its best to clothe our most costly buildings in a thin drapery of soot … they soon become dark and sombre masses … all play of light and shade is lost.” That is precisely why architects decided to clothe their buildings in bright red brick and shining terracotta so that they would remain visible; the features of nineteenth-century building, which may seem vulgar or gaudy, were attempts to stabilise the identity and legibility of the city.

Of course there were some who extolled the virtues of the fog. Dickens, despite his lugubrious descriptions, once referred to it as London’s ivy. For Charles Lamb it was the medium through which his vision, in every sense, was conceived and perfected. Where some saw only the amounts of sulphate deposited in the bowels of the fog, particularly in the City and the East End, others saw the murky atmosphere as clothing the river and its adjacent areas “with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanile, and the warehouses are palaces in the night.” This devoted invocation is from Whistler, the painter of mist and smoke at twilight, and it contrasts sharply with a comment about the building of the Embankment in the same period as his atmospheric works of art. “Who would think of promenading along the channel of a great hazy, ague-giving river in any case?” But Whistler’s opinions were shared by other artists who saw the fog as London’s greatest attribute. The late nineteenth-century Japanese artist Yoshio Markino noted that “Perhaps the real colours of some buildings in London might be rather crude. But this crude colour is so fascinating in the mists. For instance that house in front of my window is painted in black and yellow. When I came here last summer I laughed at its ugly colour. But now the winter fogs cover it and the harmony of its colour is most wonderful.” It is sometimes observed that the buildings of London look best in the rain, as if they had been built and coloured especially for the sake of showers. A case can be made, then, that even the private houses of Londoners are designed to be pleasing in the fog.