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