A Great and Dirty City: Dickens and the London Fog

From ’pea soupers’ to mists rolling over the Thames, fog was quite a big feature of fast-industrialising Victorian London. So it makes sense that it wends its way into a lot of Dickens’ work, be it the hazy marsh country at the beginning of ‘Great Expectations’ or the smoggy capital that backdrops to most of his work. This new exhibition at the Charles Dickens’ Museum explores why Victorian London was so full of dense murky clouds and why Dickens was inspired by the phenomenon that’s led to the quintessential dark and filthy ‘Dickensian’ city we think of today. Among the items on display are a first edition of Dickens’s ‘foggiest’ novel ‘Bleak House’, an original pen and wash illustration by Frederick Barnard who illustrated nine of Dickens’s works and Dickens’s own fire poker used to tend his dining room fire while he lived at Gad’s Hill.