London fog

“ A London fog, in November, is a thing for which I have a sort of natural affection—to say nothing of an acquired one—the result of a hackney-coach adventure, in which the fair part of [1503, 1504] the fare threw herself into my arms for protection, amidst the pleasing horrors of an overthrow.
“As an affair of mere breath, there is something tangible in a London fog. In the evanescent air of Italy, a man might as well not breathe at all, for any thing he knows of the matter. But in a well-mixed metropolitan fog, there is something substantial and satisfying. ”

“ The stillness of the autumn air breeds in London the noisome vapours of the fog; there is no wind, but, overhead, an easterly drift, which always sets in in the time of calms, condenses upon the wretched city the baleful gloom and smoke and soot from out of the pestilential East. ”

“ In fact, when it is not blindingly thick, a London fog lends itself to the most charming effects. It caresses the prevailing commonness and ugliness, and coaxes it into a semblance of beauty in spite of itself. The rows upon rows of humble brick dwellings in the streets we passed through were flattered into cottage homes where one would have liked to live in one's quieter moods, and some rather stately eighteenth-century mansions in Stoke Newington housed one's pride the more fittingly, because of the mystery which the fog added to their antiquity. ”

“ The gutters ran like little rivers, and on Lothbury and the Poultry, and on all the buildings behind the Bank and over London Bridge there came down a hot steaming fog that almost blinded, as the rain poured against the faces of those who had to encounter the storm. ”

“ A stranger to London, when the fog sets in at night, and he looks upon it for the first time, fancies his apartments filled with smoke, and begins by throwing open his doors and windows; thus making bad worse, by destroying all the warm air in the rooms. Even one well accustomed to the ins and outs of our far-stretching city is strangely deceived in distance, and the size objects assume, as they loom in dim and gigantic dimensions through the heavy fog. The gas-lamps appear as if placed three-story high, unless you stand close beneath them, for what light they emit is nearly all thrown upward ”

“ Round the bend of the road swung the first gold tramcar of a new day.
Ghosts of the Fog
Fog in London.
Men are like flat figures cut in black paper. All things become two-dimensional. Carts, motorcars, omnibuses are shadows that nose their way painfully like blind beasts. The fog has a flavour. Many flavours. At Marble Arch I meet a delicate after-taste like melon; at Ludgate Hill I taste coke.
Everywhere the fog grips the throat and sets the eyes watering. It puts out clammy fingers that touch the ears and give the hands a ghostly grip. ”

“ The fog that draws down and absorbs the smoke of the housetops, causes it to hang about the streets in impenetrable density, forces it into one's eyes and down one's throat, so that one is half-blinded and quite sickened—this atmospheric abomination has been much more frequent than usual. Just before Christmas, too, there was a heavy snow-storm, and even a tolerably light fall of snow has London quite at its mercy. ”

“ But you see the blizzard once in a generation or a century, while if you are good, or good enough to live in London, you may see a characteristic fog almost any year. It is another case in which the metropolis of the New World must yield to the metropolis of the whole world. Fog for fog, I do not say but the fog in which we left New York, on March 3, 1904, was not as perfect as our great London fog. But the New York fog was only blindingly white and the London fog blindingly black, and that is a main difference. ”

“ Once this condition of things prevailed, nothing could clear London but a breeze of wind from any direction. London frequently had a seven days’ fog, and sometimes a seven days’ calm, but these two conditions never coincided until the last year of the last century. The coincidence, as everyone knows, meant death—death so wholesale that no war the earth has ever seen left such slaughter behind it. To understand the situation, one has only to imagine the fog as taking the place of the ashes at Pompeii, and the coal-smoke as being the lava that covered it. ”

“ What, it may be asked, is the cause of the London fog? These fogs, which occur generally in the winter time, are occasioned thus: some current of air, being suddenly cooled, descends into the warm streets, forcing back the smoke in a mass towards the earth. But, my Noble Friend might ask, why are there not fogs every night? ”

“ The Londoner, on the contrary, is usually self-centred, unsociable, phlegmatic, narrow. This pleasing quality foreigners politely excuse in him by calling it "the spleen," and account it, indeed, a kind of result of the London fog on character. The fog, or "London particular," as that incorrigible cockney, Sam Weller, called it, is thus described by a trenchant French satirist, Max O'Rell:
"The London fog, of universal reputation, is of two kinds. The most curious, and at the same time the less dangerous, is the black species. It is simply darkness complete and intense at mid-day. ”

“ And far, far below them the brown fog fell until it warmed into fire. Through the dense London atmosphere they could see below them the flaming London lights; lights which lay beneath them in squares and oblongs of fire. The fog and fire were mixed in a passionate vapour; you might say that the fog was drowning the flames; or you might say that the flames had set the fog on fire. Beside the ship and beneath it (for it swung just under the ball) , the immeasurable dome itself shot out and down into the dark like a combination of voiceless cataracts. ”

“ London fog is composed of soft-coal smoke, which, ascending from innumerable chimneys, is filtered in the upper skies, and then, mixed with vapor, is cast back upon the city by every change of wind. It is not unpleasant to the taste, and seems to be rather healthful than otherwise ”

“ There, in an atmosphere blue with smoke, where a great fire roared in winter to keep the chill of the London fog from the bones of those who, time and again, had been stricken with the fevers of the equatorial parts, a small group of men would sit and talk by the hour. ”

“ His advice to me was to get out of the London fogs as quickly as possible. No one who has not suffered a London fog can imagine the terrible gloom that pervades everywhere. One can see nothing out of the windows but a dense black smoke. ”

“ Brave winds, blowing fair, swiftly drove the Ghost northward into the seal herd. We encountered it well up to the forty-fourth parallel, in a raw and stormy sea across which the wind harried the fog-banks in eternal flight. For days at a time we could never see the sun nor take an observation; then the wind would sweep the face of the ocean clean, the waves would ripple and flash, and we would learn where we were. A day of clear weather might follow, or three days or four, and then the fog would settle down upon us, seemingly thicker than ever. ”

“ Lords much more usefully occupied in discussing London Fog. MIDDLETON moved for Royal Commission. MARKISS drew fine distinction. "What you really want to remedy," he said, "is not the fog itself, but its colour." Rather seemed to like the fog, per se, if only his particular fancy in matter of colour gratified. Didn't mention what colour he preferred; but fresh difficulty looming out of the fog evident. Tastes differ. If every man is to have his own particular coloured fog, our last state will be worse than the first. ”

“ A dense fog, with a deep red colouring, from the reflection of numberless gas-jets, and the pavement flooded with mud; a fitful illumination according to the strength of the gas, which flares forth in long jets from the butchers’ shops, while the less illumined parts are lost in gloomy twilight. If your nerves are delicate, you had better not pass too close by the gin-shops, for as the door opens—and those doors are always opening—you are overwhelmed with the pestilential fumes of gin. ”

“ Yet, how full of dignity and beauty is the city through which this wide, turbid river rolls!—"the slow Thames," says a French writer, "always grey as a remembered reflection of wintry skies." Here, by day, hangs that veiling blue mist, which is the combined product of London fog and soot, adding all the indescribable charm of mystery to the scene; and, as twilight draws on, the grand old buildings loom up, vaguely dark, against the sky, their added blackness of soot giving a suggestion as of solidity and antiquity ”

“ Even when the weather is fair the house shakes as though it would fall if any one comes upstairs rapidly, and the slight iron roof is entirely open at the eaves to catch any wind that blows. We could not keep a lamp burning, and the lantern kept for such emergencies having been broken by Paul, we were in semi-darkness. Late in the afternoon a cloud enveloped us so that we could see no farther than in a London fog. ”

“ The only drawback on this industrial conveniency is the darkness of its sky. The night and day are too nearly of a color. It strains the eyes to read and to write. Add the coal-smoke. In the manufacturing towns, the fine soot or blacks darken the day, give white sheep the color of black sheep, discolor the human saliva, contaminate the air, poison many plants, and corrode the monuments and buildings.
The London fog aggravates the distempers of the sky, and sometimes justifies the epigram on the climate by an English wit, "in a fine day, looking up a chimney; in a foul day, looking down one." ”

“ People confound the climate of London with the climate of England; they talk of the isles of mist in the West of Europe. A very poetical idea that, but as untrue as poetical. Many parts of these islands are as clear and sunny as any of the inland countries of the Continent.
The winter-fogs of London are, indeed, awful. They surpass all imagining; he who never saw them, can form no idea of what they are. He who knows how powerfully they affect the minds and tempers of men, can understand the prevalence of that national disease—the spleen. In a fog, the air is hardly fit for breathing ”

“ There is an insensate wish in the human witness to have nature when she begins misbehaving do her worst. One longs to have her go all lengths, and this perhaps is why an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, of violent type is so satisfactory to those it spares. It formed the secret joy of the great blizzard of 1888, and it must form the mystical delight of such a London fog as we had experienced. ”

“ London has the advantage of one of the most gloomy atmospheres in the world. During this opening spring weather, no light and scarcely any warmth can penetrate the dull, yellowish-gray mist, which incessantly hangs over the city. Sometimes at noon we have for an hour or two a sickly gleam of sunshine, but it is soon swallowed up by the smoke and drizzling fog. The people carry umbrellas at all times, for the rain seems to drop spontaneously out of the very air, without wailing for the usual preparation of a gathering cloud. ”

“ So heavy was the gloom, that gas was lighted in all the shop-windows; and the little charcoal-furnaces of the women and boys, roasting chestnuts, threw a ruddy, misty glow around them. And yet I liked it. This fog seems an atmosphere proper to huge, grimy London; as proper to London as that light neither of the sun nor moon is to the New Jerusalem.
On reaching home, I found the same fog diffused through the drawing-room, though how it could have got in is a mystery. Since nightfall, however, the atmosphere is clear again. ”

“ The little that we can really call our own is dearer to us [205] than all the world—is our world, in fact. An Italian sunset steals and enwraps the senses into, as it were, a third heaven. A London fog is one of the most hideous things in this world; yet a genuine Londoner finds something in his native fog dear to him as the sunset to the Italian, and I confess to the barbarism myself. ”

“ A fog ashore is a nuisance which may cause one to arrive as much as an hour late at the office, may make one miss an appointment with one's dentist, or, worse still, an appointment to lunch or dinner with some opulent acquaintance. I have even heard of a London fog which was so thick that the conductor of a motor-omnibus, who had left his vehicle to discover his whereabouts, was unable to find it again. I feel sorry for that man, for a fog ashore is always an inconvenience and a nuisance, sometimes even a positive danger. But a real fog at sea is ever a ghastly nightmare ”

“ And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us, Every One!
247-1 The fogs of London are famous. A genuine London fog seems not like the heavy gray mist which we know as a fog, but, as Dickens says, like “palpable brown air.” So dense is this brown air at times that all traffic is obliged to cease, for not even those best acquainted with the geography of the city can find their way about. ”

“ But, clear of London, the fog changed to cold, white mist, which the sun gradually broke into masses of pearl light, and the east wind blew away in wreaths that caught awhile in hedgerows and low woodlands, till at last sun and east wind together made the whole landscape clear and bright to the horizon. ”

“ In the dull days of autumn and winter, when the heavy, damp air wafted inwards from the sea shrouds London with a dirty pall of fog thickened and discoloured with the smoke belched forth skywards from the long throats of thousands of tall factory chimneys and emitted from hundreds of thousands of household and workshop fires, the dweller in this vast overgrown city is tempted to range himself for the moment among the belauders of better times in the past. ”