In Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens described a day in London under a dark, heavy fog.
“Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither.” The sun “was for a few moments dimly indicated through circling eddies of fog”, wrote Dickens in what would be his last completed novel before his death in 1870.
Fog – also known as “pea soupers”, “London ivy” and “London particular” – swirled through Dickens’s work, and is likely to have contributed to his own breathing problems. Later this month, it will be the subject of an exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum.
Through letters, original partworks of his writing, illustrations and domestic objects, the exhibition will illustrate the extent and impact of fog in 19th-century London, caused by burning coal in industrial and domestic settings. It will also draw parallels with contemporary issues of air pollution.
“Charles Dickens was surrounded by fog his whole life. It affected him – and his characters – from childhood to his final days and became an inspiration and a looming presence in his books,” said Frankie Kubicki, the museum’s senior curator.
“Fog and smoke were not always seen negatively though; while pollution is often used by Dickens to represent a malevolent force or a shady character, London’s coal fires and twinkling gas street lamps can be heartwarming, nostalgic sights, which comforted Londoners.”
Among the objects on display is a fire poker from Dickens’s last home at Gad’s Hill Place in Higham, Kent. Dickens was a “very active person” and often undertook tasks that servants might normally have carried out, said Kubicki. “I can imagine him tending his fire. Fires for Dickens symbolise home and comfort, but actually in London it was domestic coal fires that were such a huge problem rather than industrial smoke.”
Original first edition parts of the author’s “foggiest” novel, Bleak House, which was first published as a 20-part serial, will be on show. In the work, Dickens describes “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 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….”
The display also includes a “beautiful lace handkerchief” owned by the Dickens family. “People used handkerchiefs to cover their mouth and nose in dense fog, so it has interesting parallels today with the use of masks both to protect from air pollution and the Covid pandemic,” said Kubicki.
In letters, Dickens wrote about his own “chest trouble” – coughing, wheezing, breathlessness and being unable to sleep – which was almost certainly asthma exacerbated by poor air quality.
“Dickens wrote about what he saw, and [fog] is such an important part of the London experience in the 19th century – you couldn’t live in London without being plagued by it,” said Kubicki.
“These fogs were dense and difficult and really common throughout the 19th century, often yellowy, rusty, stinky, greasy fogs. But, in a literary sense, he also used fog as a symbol for deception or confusion.”
The exhibition will also look at how London has tried, and usually failed, to tackle air pollution over the past 200 years, most recently through the ultra low emission zone and its expansion.
“Although we no longer experience the lingering fogs, thick with lethal sulphurous fumes, that Dickens describes, the quality of our air remains a significant concern,” said Cindy Sughrue, the museum’s director.
A Great and Dirty City: Dickens and the London Fog at the Charles Dickens Museum in London from 29 March until 22 October.
