Notes on Victoriana - 003
London Fog - Thick Enough to Spread on Bread
Before it was an over-priced coffee, the London Fog was a phenomenon that had haunted the great city for centuries. While earliest accounts of thick fog rolling over the Thames Valley date back to the 12th and 13th Centuries, it was the speedy advancement of the Industrial Age throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries that cemented the popular account of dense, undulating banks of fogs shrouding the streets of London and choking its residents into hazy submission. Most of this popularity no doubt arises out of the works of such Victorian authors as Charles Dickens, R.L. Stevenson, George Gissing, Oscar Wilde, and A.C. Doyle, who used the fog to drape their narratives with an atmosphere of mystery.
Fog is a weather condition consisting of tiny droplets of water suspended in the air yet close to the ground, rather like a low-lying cloud. Terrain effects its formation, and it usually occurs near a large body of water such as the Thames, condensing only when the difference between the air temperature and dew point is less than 2.5 degrees Celsius. While these natural conditions brought the fog to London, it was the human element that gave the London fog its own unique traits. Throughout the Industrial Age, the main source of heat for homes and factories was coal, the burning of which pumped sooty particles and poisonous sulphur dioxide into the air. On foggy days, this soot would mix with and become trapped by the water droplets, effectively creating a cloud of smog (a term not coined until the early 20th Century) that would settle on the metropolis and linger within the confines of its narrow streets and alleys. It was often described as “very thick,” with 18th Century composer Joseph Haydn, on a visit to London, saying it was “so thick that one might have spread it on bread.” This dense mixture led locals to refer to particularly bad bouts as “pea soupers” or “London particulars.” An 1871 New York Times article emphasized the popularity of these nicknames, commenting that in London, “… particularly, the population are periodically submerged in a fog of the consistency of pea soup.” Along with the apparent near-solidity of these foggy shrouds there also came the odours of the city – the horses, the slaughter yards, the tanneries – as these evil smells would become trapped and buffeted within the vaporous slurry, the colour of which varied from a deep grey to yellow to green and even black.
The worst of the London particulars often carried a death sentence. Infants, the elderly, and any one in-between who suffered from a respiratory illness were all vulnerable, with hundreds dying each year due to the noxious and suffocating fogs, tendrils of which were known to creep through cracks and under doors to invade homes and shops. There was also the issue of visibility, with the streets and pavements becoming impenetrable beyond anything more than a few inches. Streetlamps and lanterns were hopeless in the mire. Horse-drawn carriages often collided, and pedestrians were run-down by both horses and each other. In October 1899, Police Constable J.T. Stebbings lost his way while on the beat one foggy night and stumbled into the Regent’s Canal and drowned. Other dangers came from those who took advantage of the conditions. Criminals utilised the fog for its cover, assaulting and robbing men and women on the streets before vanishing instantly. While the popular myth around Jack the Ripper suggests that he, too, took advantage of the fog to carry out his grisly murders, weather reports from the dates of his crimes show that this was not at all true. In fact, October of 1888 – in the midst of the Ripper’s infamous “Autumn of Terror” – experienced some of the foggiest nights of the year, but the killer never struck once that month.
Yet there is a romantic allure long associated to the fogs of Victorian London. Visitors were drawn to the city in hopes of experiencing its effects and would complain if the air was too clear. The Impressionist artist Claude Monet was inspired to paint it from his top floor room in the Savoy Hotel. As stated above, writers particularly latched on to its value as a narrative device when building atmosphere and tension in their stories. In his 1851 novel Bleak House, Dickens begins the first chapter with one of the most quoted and poetic selections of all his prose when he describes the dreary weather of London in November, citing the fog in particular:
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 in 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 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. Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets… The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest… Never can there come fog too thick…
In his shocking 1886 thriller The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson gives readers foreboding scenes full of obscuring fog. In chapter four, it is described as a “chocolate-covered pall” that gives the lawyer Mr. Utterson, as he travels through the districts of London “a marvellous number of degrees and hues of twilight.” Occasionally the fog lifts and breaks up to reveal dingy streets before settling down again “as brown as umber.”
Like Jack the Ripper, Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes is indelibly linked with foggy nights in London, yet he, too, rarely worked under such conditions. Early in Holmes’s career, in 1889’s The Sign of Four, the reader is treated to a richly atmospheric scene along the Strand, where a “dense, drizzly fog lay low upon the great city.” Later, in The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans, the only Holmes story to use fog in any significant way, Doyle opens with, “In the third week of November, in the year 1895, a dense yellow fog settled down upon London. From the Monday to the Thursday, I doubt whether it was ever possible from our windows in Baker Street to see the loom of the houses opposite.” He goes on to write: “…we saw the greasy, heavy brown swirl still drifting past us and condensing in oily drops upon the window-panes…”
There’s no doubt that the use of fog in so much of popular fiction from the era has created the romantic cultural image of the London fog that exists today. Yet the real London fog of today is nothing near to what it once was. It still exists, of course, thanks to the low-lying terrain of the surrounding Thames Valley, but the last great example of a true fog-cum-smog was during the Great Smog of December 1952, which killed some 12,000 people in and around London. Desperate action to clear the air followed, and with the advent of affordable electricity in the superseding years, the need for coal-burning to produce heat and fuel dropped drastically, taking the sooty particulates that created the great pea soupers of old with it. Any tourist who arrives in London today clutching her volume of Holmes stories and hoping to wander the impenetrably fog-shrouded lanes of Whitechapel will likely be sorely disappointed.
Photo Credit: “Waterloo Place.” Leonard Misonne, 1899.
References:
Article. “The Ghost of Mud or a Poetic Veil? Fog in Victorian London.” Reframing the Victorians. 9 November 2015. http://reframingthevictorians.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-ghost-of-mud-or-poetic-veil-fog-in.html
Article. Victorian London – Weather – Fog. The Dictionary of Victorian London. https://www.victorianlondon.org/weather/fog.html
British Police History. “Regent’s Canal Police.” https://british-police-history.uk/f/regents-canal
Corton, Christine L. “Have we learned the lessons from the history of London’s fogs?” The Guardian. 29 January 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/29/london-fog-air-pollution-history-christine-corton#:~:text=It%20is%20small%20consolation%20to,had%20a%20natural%20fog%20problem.
Martinez, Julia. Article: “Great Smog of London.” Britannica.com. https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Smog-of-London
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Everyman’s Library, London, 1991 edition.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Original Illustrated Stand Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Facsimile Edition. Wordsworth Editions Limited, London, 1989.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Strange Tales. Arcturus Publishing Ltd, London, 2022 edition.