ABSTRACT
It is in Bleak House (1852-1853) that Dickens first spectac ularly exercises a troubled panoramic vision of human existence in the new metropolis. The celebrated opening passage on the London fog is of course a piece of bravura writing that estab lishes what amounts to a symbolic atmosphere for the novel
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(another formal anticipation by Dickens of a modernist proce dure), making the dirty fog a meteorological correlative for the suffocating obfuscation of British legal institutions that is the chief context of the action. What is most remarkable about the fog of these initial paragraphs, however, is not that it is sym bolic, not that it is rhetorically displayed with the grand insis tence of anaphora that Dickens used with such virtuosity, but that it is so precisely observed. The urban phenomenon that arrests the novelist’s attention, as it will even more in Our M u tual Friend, is pollution, and the appalling black fog he describes is really what we would call smog: “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.”2 The death of the sun here is a scarier notion than the giving in of the sun in Dombey. In a manner characteristic of the later Dickens, it is a halfjoking, fanciful conceit that triggers somber implications far in excess of the play of wit ostensibly intended in the conceit. The sun seems to have died because it is nowhere visible in this smog-enveloped cityscape. But what the eye of the observer picks up is the gravest reversal of the order of nature-flakes of soot, produced by all that burning coal, flutter down instead of snowflakes, as though nature were wearing mourning, and, in the logic of the image, the sun is not merely hidden by the smog but extinct. Though introduced as a kind of nervous joke, the death of the sun is no laughing matter: the very phrase is part of our culture’s primary language for apocalyptic endings, from the biblical prophets (compare Jeremiah 4 :2 3 : “I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form, and void; and the heavens, and they had no light”) and the Book of Revelation to modern science fiction.
