Writelike Charles Dickens: The fog in Bleak House

The main chunks

Let's look at how this snippet works.

We'll break it into five chunks:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions 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 gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck.

Bleak House(1852)

This snippet is fundamentally a tour. But it has a particular structure:

  • The intrusion: Dickens introduces an intrusion into the envrionment. In this case, it's fog.
  • Poles 1 & 2: The intrusion appears at two opposite ends of the environment.
  • Poles 3 & 4: The intrusion appears in two more opposite ends, along a different axis.
  • Things: We follow the intrusion as it relates to a series of things.
  • People: We follow the intrusion as it relates to a series of people.

So you can see that this visual tour guide (the fog) and the tour follows a kind of progressive logic (west-east, north-south, things, people).

☝️  That's the structure we will work with in this lesson.

👇  But it's worth calling out just how frequently the word 'fog' appears. 

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions 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 gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck.

Bleak House(1852)

You can see how frequently fog appears, and how it divides each chunk into even pieces (either short, medium, or long).

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