Dickens, Charles | "Fog up the river, where it flows among the green aits and meadows..."

From the Library of Jay Michael Haft

Dickens, Charles

Bleak House. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853

2 volumes, 8vo (210 x 130 mm). Engraved additional title–page, engraved frontispiece, 38 illustrations by J.K. Browne (“Phiz”), with the 10 “dark” plates; some foxing to plates, as usual, one or two closed marginal tears. Contemporary half green calf, and marbled paper-covered boards, smooth spines ruled and lettered in gilt, edges marbled; extremities rubbed. 

First edition, bound from the original parts — Dickens's commentary on urban environments.

"Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and would it not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dog, undistinguishable in mire" (Dickens, Bleak House).

Charles Dickens’s Bleak House offers plethoric instances of ill health incited by environment. In this opening paragraph, the novel's narrator is discussing weather in literal terms, but is also suggesting that something in the general insalubrity of London—not unlike Melville's New York (see the preceding lot)—breeds an uncanny atmosphere. Pollution causes “the death of the sun,” upending the natural world. With soot falling like snowflakes, in mourning for what the omniscient narrator and reader know has been disordered through the rise of this modern city, it becomes the disarray of the everyday world the metropolis’s inhabitants can’t escape. The passage is concerned with the actual filth that buries the city as well as its occupants—“[d]og, undistinguishable in mire,” and the notion of “ill-tempers” spreading like “infection”—implying a direct correlation between the physical salubrity of a place and its inhabitants, and establishing the theme of contagion, a central element of the novel’s plot. The opening continues:

[…] Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating a compound interest. […] Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among the green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollution of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwhales of barges and small boats" (Dickens, Bleak House).

The pervasive fog serves as one of the most considered aesthetic features of Bleak House. Other than its miasmatic properties—the insalubrity it carries—the mist is obfuscating, an agent of concealment, foreshadowing much of the later deception and confusion that arises in this novel of connections. It is noteworthy that Dickens begins this passage with the boat yard; the pervasive brume is not something London has produced solely on its own, but is partially, or at least potentially, foreign. This “sea smoke,” as it was sometimes referred to, has the capacity to carry in diseases from more exotic climes. It is not only the fever nests of the degraded corners of London that are to blame, but also this sense of passage and transmission. Related to these ideas of social panorama and conveyance, it is significant that Dickens does not open his narrative with the impressions of Esther Summerson (the first person narratorial perspective that alternates with the third person), but with this all-seeing presence. As he sets the tone for the tale, Dickens is suggesting a broader social truth—that burgeoning, unhealthy environments are everyone's concern.  

Dickens, in addition to being a prolific novelist, was one of the greatest social reformers of his day. On May 10th 1851, as he was planning Bleak House, he delivered the anniversary speech for London's Metropolitan Sanitation Association. Addressing the assembly, Dickens began: "That no one can estimate the amount of mischief which is grown in dirt; that no one can say, here it stops, or there it stops, either in its physical or moral results, when both begin in the cradle and are not at rest in the obscene grave [hear, hear], is now as certain as it is that the air from Gin Lane will be carried, when the wind is Easterly, into May Fair, and that if you once have a vigorous pestilence raging furiously in Saint Giles, no mortal list of Lady Patroness can keep it out of Almack’s. [Hear, hear]" (Dickens "Metropolitan Sanitary Association"). While Bleak House suggests an undeniable link between the direction of the wind and spread of disease, here, a year before the first installment of the novel was issued, it is clearly articulated. Significantly, Dickens is also citing a connection between physical and moral climates, as well as between pollution and contagion. It would seem that for the author, no corner of London was safe until it was made clean. This point is further underscored when Esther Summerson—the tale's heroine—contracts smallpox following an act of charity toward a neglected child (see lot 1004).

A charming copy of one of Dickens's most important novels.

REFERENCE:

Dickens, "Metropolitan Sanitary Association, 10 May 1851," The Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed. by K.J. Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. 127-132, (pp. 128-29); Dickens, Bleak House (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853), 1; Eckel 64–66; Gimbel A154; Smith I:10