London Fog: The Biography by Christine L. Corton (review)

Biographies traditionally encompass a life from birth – often written straight through in chronological order – to death. Christine Corton announces the ambitious scope of London Fog in her subtitle; she has undertaken the biography not of a person or of a group of people, but instead of a meteorological phenomenon, the weather pattern over the city of London known as “true London fog, thick, yellow, and all-encompassing.” Her opening paragraph lays down the shape of a whole life in the history of London’s fog: born in the 1840s, matured by the 1880s, dead by 1962 (1). She accounts for weather, at length and in detail, in order to study the cultural responses that grew up under its influence. Through a wealth of written and visual metaphorical references, most of them culled from fiction throughout the life span of London fog, Corton expands on the outline found in her opening and satisfies the demands of her undertaking. In its wide sweep, this book might prove to be most useful as a comprehensive reference work on its subject.

This, then, is the history of a metaphor as well as the history of one major source of pollution and its eventual amelioration. Such an approach to actual history through a metaphor expressed largely in fiction creates problems that are not easy to resolve, yet Corton’s analysis is engaging and convincing, largely owing to the sheer bulk of her evidence and her determination to pursue the narrative arc of the problem’s solution through more than one hundred years of real, if delayed, political and technological action. It is not easy to decide what exactly metaphor can show us about the past, or how the constraints of a particular verbal metaphor can focus our understanding of past realities. Since a metaphor’s form juxtaposes similarity against difference, its contrasting terms can teach us about a culture’s self-contradictory mindset and most characteristic paradoxes. Philosophers of language, in fact, have long argued that metaphors habitual to a culture reveal fundamental orientations to the world rather than serve as mere distraction. At their best they can open a window onto the paradoxical oppositions underlying the cultural conventions of the past. No matter how omnipresent in a culture, a metaphor can develop important insight most reliably if it makes possible a viewpoint otherwise closed, or changes the angle of vision on real events in a way that sheds new light.

By this test, Corton’s cavalcade of literary examples is more repetitive than enlightening beyond the obvious; over and over again, fog indicates confusion, deception, suffocation, chaos. One major problem in her reliance on multiple fictions for evidence is that she is forced to provide many bare bones plot summaries, often of unsophisticated novels, novellas and short stories, although she also includes important figures like Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Even with a major author like Dickens, she cannot depend on a reader’s familiarity with the texts. Since the meaning of these many examples of metaphorical fog is nearly always consistent and straight forward, her analysis runs the risk of devolving into a simple list of one example after another.

Corton explains in her Acknowledgements at the end that the project began with Dickens’s use of fog metaphors; this work survives in the present volume as chapter 2 “Dickensian Gloom,” where she examines The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, with an especially detailed analysis of Bleak House. The remaining chapters, on the real life story of London fog up to the present day, trawl through a long list of fictional examples of the metaphor, almost all of them used with less artistry than in these Dickens novels. Consequently, Dickens Quarterly readers will be particularly familiar with the second chapter’s very appropriate application of the power of the metaphor, but will join the more general reader in learning about meteorological and political history for the rest of...