Grey and dreichy

London Fog: A Biography. By Christine Corton. Belknap Press; 391 pages; $35 and £22.95.

JOHN EVELYN, a 17th-century diarist, lamented the “Stink and Darknesse” of London, and suggested moving smoke-producing industry out, beyond a sweet-smelling hedge to be planted round the city. In the 18th century Joseph Haydn found London’s fog so thick “one might have spread it on bread”. But it was not until the 1830s, when the city’s population exceeded 2m, that London fog became the famous sulphurous pea-souper.

London, in its river basin ringed by hills, has always had what the Scots call “dreich”; cold, wet winter mists that in early November led to flights being cancelled at Heathrow. Pea-soup fogs were quite different; they were so polluted with soot from domestic and industrial coal fires that people coughed up black mucus. As the Times put it in 1853, London’s fogs converted “the human larynx into an ill-swept chimney”. In 1921 a sample cubic inch of air contained 340,000 sooty particles. One of the last great fogs, in 1952, was so thick that a performance of “La Traviata” at Sadler’s Wells was cancelled after fog seeped into the theatre. No one could see the stage.

Christine Corton takes a subject that is now scarcely more than a heritage item—like gaslight and hansom cabs—and puts it where it belongs among the great public- health movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. The difficulty for the clean-air reformers was that unlike, say, sewage or water, fog was never a candidate for grand public engineering works—though someone did once suggest piping clean air in from the countryside. The answer was regulation, which brought legislators up against the two great pillars of a capitalist society: the free market and private property, as embodied in the sanctity of hearth and home. Industry’s right to buy the cheapest, smokiest coal, and the citizen’s right to his or her own fireside, meant that every attempt at properly enforceable anti-smoke legislation was doomed—until the Clean Air Acts of the 1950s and 1960s.

Of course, fog was not solely a public- health problem. With the help of wonderful contemporary illustrations, Ms Corton vividly describes the chaos it brought—pedestrians groping, traffic crawling, accidents, crime and drunkenness soaring. The melting, blurring, looming transformations of fog seemed to symbolise the dissolution of society itself. Writers saw the possibilities, and Ms Corton pursues their metaphorical fogs through every kind of moral, psychological and social disintegration. Charles Dickens, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, all are here—plus a mass of fascinating and forgotten popular literature—their cultural meanings perceptively analysed, if a little doggedly at times.

This is a rich and multifaceted book, but it is perhaps the politics of fog that provokes most thought. Even after the so-called “Great Killer Fog” of 1952, the government was unconvinced it had a role. Despite 12,000 extra deaths, Harold Macmillan, then a Conservative minister, grumbled at public expectations and suggested a committee: “We cannot do very much, but we can seem to be very busy—and that is half the battle nowadays.”