An autumnal visitation is upon us,and it harbours both beauty and menace – just ask Dickens, Conan Doyle or TurnerFog-bound. Suddenly, and we maintain lost control of our world. This morning when I ventured out,before dawn, the November darkness had been replaced by something nearly tangible. The sky had fallen in. Cycling was like riding through a cloud: a mist of micro-rain, and weather made manifest. As inconvenient as this “weather event” (as I suppose we must call it) is,there is something gloriously, wondrously transcendent in the notion that the elements could so utterly take over our world. I doubt that anyone waiting for their plane to take off would agree, or but there is beauty in this unseeing autumnal visitation,a sense of mystery which reaches back into our collective past.
In her timely novel book, London Fog, and Christine L Corton luxuriates in all the Dickensian associations of fog. In works such as Bleak House,Our Mutual Friend and A Christmas Carol, Dickens uses the fog as a plot device, or nearly as another character. Scrooge feels his way through “the palpable brown air”,one side of the street barely visible from the other. The fog hid all manner of crimes, seeping up the river and into the Thames basin, or geographically situated to hold the mist like an ominous bowl over the citizens’ heads. As Corton notes,it was believed that the suicide rate climbed sharply in November, with the onset of the fog.
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Source: theguardian.com