Dickens' London and Mr. Darcy's, Too

“Hell is a city much like London — A Populous and smoky city” Percy Bysshe Shelley*

The excerpt below is taken from the opening paragraphs of Chapter I of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. It is a brilliant description of what London was like in 1852-53 when Bleak House was serialized. However, it is not that far off from a description of London in the time of Fitzwilliam Darcy. By 1812, there were a million souls living in London, and most of them heated their homes and cooked their meals with coal. When combined with soot pouring out of industrial chimneys and the mists and fogs of the Thames Valley, the result was London's famous pea-soup fog, a thick and often yellowish, greenish, or blackish smog caused by air pollution containing soot particulates and the poisonous gas sulfur dioxide. With the arrival of the railroads in the Victorian Era, an already serious problem got considerably worse.

Nelson's Column - Trafalgar Square

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping 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…

Double-decker Bus

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

It would be 100 years later, after the Great Smog of 1953, when an estimated 4,000 people died prematurely, and 100,000 more were made ill because of the smog's effects on the human respiratory tract, that laws were passed to clean up England’s polluted cities.

*The asthmatic William III bought Kensington Palace, the former Nottingham House, outside of London, in 1689 in order to get away from "sooty London." 

An Interview with Fitzwilliam Darcy by Mary Simonsen

Today, I am visiting with Jakki at Leatherbound Reviews where I interview Mr. Darcy about time travel in connection with my new release, Another Place in Time. Previously, I interviewed modern-day time traveler, Christine O'Malley, regarding her first impressions after her initial meeting with Fitzwilliam Darcy. You can read that post here.

Christine O'Malley also visited with Maria Grace on her blog Random Bits of Fascination where she wrote about what it would be like to visit Regency-Era London. I am reposting her blog post here. 

An excerpt from Another Place in Time: Soon after the carriage exited Manchester Square, they plunged into the chaos that was London, the capital of the commercial world. The cacophony was extraordinary. Hackney drivers shouted, sellers advertised their wares, pamphleteers screamed scandalous headlines, and horses neighed. It was like New York City at rush hour, except with horses, dogs, cats, and the occasional pig thrown in for interest.

By Christine O'Malley, Time Traveler

Prior to journeying to London in 1812 with Fitzwilliam Darcy, I had visited modern London three times. I consider it to be the most vibrant city in the world—then and now. In 1812, London was the undisputed capital of the commercial world. Its main highway, the River Thames, was chock-a-block full of ships of every shape and size, and those ships carried every imaginable commodity. For the well-heeled of London, the world came to their doors with coffee, tea, spices, muslin, and so much more.

But London paid a price for its success. The only way to get around Town was by horse. As a result, its streets were clogged with even worse traffic than there is today, and you crossed the street at your peril. The most efficient way was to travel by river, but if you chose that route, you had best bring a bouquet of posies or a handkerchief dipped in vinegar as the Thames served as London’s sewer, serving more than one million people. Because the city was powered by coal, the beautiful dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral that Londoners see today was covered with soot as was Westminster Abbey and every other building (thus the reason for black umbrellas).

London Street Scene

My first stop on my tour of London with Fitzwilliam and Georgiana Darcy was Lackington’s, also known as the Temple of the Muses, a bookstore that would be the envy of any modern urban store. After returning to the carriage, Mr. Darcy ordered the driver to take us down the Strand where we were able to catch glimpses of the river traffic, St. Mary le Strand, Somerset House, and Northumberland House (now gone). Nearby Fleet Street served as headquarters to a vibrant press, and Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a pub still in existence, was serving pub grub and ale. 

Northumberland House

Another day, while Mr. Darcy rode with Mr. Bingley in Rotten Row, Georgiana and I paid a visit to Westminster Abbey, but the familiar narthex (vestibule) was not built until the mid 20th Century. We visited the south transept and the grave of Chaucer. Because later poets requested that they be buried near the first poet to write in the vernacular, the transept would come to be known as Poet’s Corner.

Georgiana and I also visited Carlton House. Fitzwilliam had been invited to join us, but because he disapproved of the Prince Regent’s lifestyle, he declined, preferring to spend his afternoon at Brooks’s, one of London’s many men’s clubs.

The White Tower (aka Tower of London) stood high above the city, but public executions at Tyburn (now the site of the Marble Arch) had ceased to provide entertainment for the public. Although Trafalgar Square had yet to be developed, Charles I was already sitting on his horse in front of what would become, two decades later, the National Gallery. After bumping along in a carriage, dodging hundreds of other conveyances, and stepping gingerly whenever we exited the carriage, we returned to the Darcy home on Manchester Square.

While Georgiana enjoyed London during the Season and visiting the shops, Darcy loved London for its history, architecture, and energy. During his time in Baltimore, when he saw photographs of modern London, he nodded his head in approval. Although the man’s sensibilities were firmly rooted in the early 19th Century, he admired the engineering required to build the Gherkin, the efficiency of the Underground, and the crowds walking the streets listening to iTunes and talking on their smart phones because Mr. Darcy loves gadgets! Unfortunately for Mr. Darcy, cell phone reception in 1812 is terrible!

Another Place in Time is available at Barnes and Noble in e-book and on Amazon in e-book and in paperback.