Beyond the pall … how London fog seeped into fiction

Cloaked in symbolism, the choaking smog of Dickens and Jack the Ripper conceals murder and corruption in everything from Sherlock Holmes to Star Trek

I am not old enough to have lived through a yellow or black, dirty and suffocating London fog, but like many others I feel I have experienced it, especially through TV adaptations of the classics, with their inevitable use of fog as a backdrop to tales of mystery and evildoing set in 19th-century London. No representation of Sherlock Holmes or Jack the Ripper would be complete without it. Switch on the fog machine and light a dim gas lamp in the street and you have immediately told viewers what to expect.

But for many writers London fog was much more than a simple scene-setting device. Charles Dickens first conjured the image of foggy Victorian London in fiction. You can almost feel the clammy, tactile greasiness of the vapour as you read the opening passage of Bleak House (1853), with its evocation of fog coming “down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city”.

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