London Fog: The Biography by Christine L. Corton, and: The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf by Jesse Oak Taylor (review)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of climes. Victorian London retains its fascination for scholars and the public, and dirt, grime, and pollution are central to its interest. The opening two paragraphs of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53) begin with two terse sentences—“London. . . . Fog everywhere”—which establish an atmosphere both moral and material (qtd. in Corton 51–52). London fog forms the ephemeral but ubiquitous subject for Christine L. Corton’s London Fog: The Biography and Jesse Oak Taylor’s The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf, which examine the ways in which London’s murky air was represented and reimagined during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both analyze familiar texts where urban fog and smoke play key roles, including Bleak House itself and other Dickens novels, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), the Sherlock Holmes stories, and works by Joseph Conrad. But both also dig deeper, incorporating rarely-read fiction as well as visual art from Punch cartoons to Claude Monet’s cityscapes. While there is much chronological and topical overlap between these two studies, however, similarities are less common than complementarity and even divergence. Corton’s study—accessibly written, beautifully illustrated, and extensively researched—is a pleasant and enjoyable exploration of London fog’s place in British culture over almost two centuries. Taylor’s work is a deeply stimulating and rewarding, but also troubling and challenging, meditation that reads Victorian literature through our own environmental anxieties and vice-versa. For Corton, London fog came and then went, becoming at last the object of nostalgia; for Taylor, its story is not over, as it led directly to—and is perhaps even a species of—anthropogenic climate change. Taylor’s work is essential reading for scholars of Victorian literature and culture, while Corton’s is more aimed at general readers or undergraduate students.

Corton frames her study as a biography, claiming at its beginning that “true London fog” was “born” in the 1840s, reached maturity in the 1880s, declined from World War I, and then died in 1962 (1). The eight chapters plus conclusion are arranged chronologically, moving from “The Birth of London Fog” (chapter 1) early in Victoria’s reign into the “Dickensian Gloom” (chapter 2) of the 1840s through 1860s. “King Fog” (chapter 3) covers the last third of the nineteenth century generally, while “Women in Danger” (chapter 4) examines the ways in which fogs functioned as sites of intrigue and anxiety, liminal periods when unusual encounters, romantic and sexual as well as dangerous and violent, were possible. Chapter 5, “The View from Abroad,” demonstrates that such representations were transnational, as visitors, exiles, and immigrants were fascinated by London’s distinctive atmosphere. “London Apocalypse” (chapter 6) argues that the Edwardian period was a turning point. London’s fogs were still seen as distinctive, almost natural parts of the city, and yet Corton finds a sense of optimism in texts that see a brighter and cleaner day in the future. Increasingly during the early twentieth century, she argues, the depths of metropolitan fog were depicted as part of the city’s past rather than its present. Chapter 7, “Land of the Living Dead,” continues the story into the interwar period, finding a persistent gloom even as the technological and regulatory means to ameliorate London fog were gradually adopted. The fog of London here echoes the fog of wartime trenches, “a world of ghosts” (269). “The Last Gasp” (chapter 8) of London fog spanned the 1940s and 1950s, with some attention given to...