The term “smog”—smoke plus fog—was coined to describe London’s air, adamgopnik writes. What can the fog of Dickensian England tell us about New York’s newfound haze?
” for a model with which to map our uncertainty. Dickens’s novel opens with a matchless movies-before-there-were-movies evocation of the London fog:
In this case, the template is a particularly helpful translation of our recent experience. The “fog” in Dickens’s story isn’t really “fog” at all, in the strict sense of a low-hanging cloud of water droplets. Like the haze that enveloped New York, hanging over our streets and skies, that “fog” was a compilation of pollutants and effluents and ominous accidents. It was a signal of the environmental crisis of that time, much as the smoke this week was a signal of the crisis of our own.
not too long ago, “The images Dickens chose to open his novel are images of literal pollution, but they are also metaphors for moral pollution, the corruption of human nature by vanity, greed, and ethical blindness.
Yet the truth of Dickens’s fog is that the bright light of reform was lit in its darkness. The fog didn’t cause cholera—sewage in the river did—but to the Victorians the fog in the street and the “miasma” rising from the river all seemed part of the same big, depressing, overwhelming, and unfixable atmospheric poison. Then programs of change—expensive and government-funded—actually began to bring relief.
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