Writelike Charles Dickens: The fog in Bleak House

Fog in the eyes and throats

For the final sentence, Dickens shifts focus from things to people.

Because this is the most complex snippet in this lesson, we're going to start with a simplified version of the highlighting, so you can see the underlying three-part pattern:

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)

The people

We follow the fog as it interacts with three types of people:

  • Greenwich pensioners (retired sailors)
  • Skipper (captain of a boat)
  • Apprentice (working for the skipper)

The category

You might notice that all these people are from a single category: they are all sailors.

(In the same way that the things in the previous snippet were all from the category of 'boats', Dickens is being systematic in his description.)

The axis

You might also notice that once again this list isn't random; it's organised along an axis of age (old, middle-aged, young).

The places

Each of these people are put in a location that tells us a little bit more about the world:

  • The pensioners wheezing by the fireplaces in their wards (which are communal halls provided by the navy, where pensioned sailors could live).
  • The skipper is down in his cabin.
  • The apprentice is shivering up on deck.

Again, notice how each of these places tells us something about the station in life of each of these groups of people.

For the purposes of our rewrite, it might help to break this snippet down in more detail. Here's a more granular highlighting approach:

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)
  • Intrusion: The fog.
  • Focus: Before naming the person, focus on a specific physical detail specific to anchor them.
  • Person: Identify the person, using adjectives for extra detail.
  • Place: Finally, place the person in a location using a prepositional phrase.
  • Connector: These are long clauses, so Dickens uses semicolons, as well as commas for subordinate clauses.
  • Action: This snippet mixes it up with verbs. One action (wheezing) is attributed to the pensionsers; the other (cruelly pinching) is attributed to the fog. The rest of the snippet is made of verbless fragments.

Here is the more detailed pattern applied to our worked our examples:

Sweat in the elbow creases and earlobes of committed grandparents, insisting on driving over for a visit; sweat on the mattress and pillows of the despairing parents, up in their stifling bedroom; sweat brightly splashing from their squealing kids on the backyard trampoline.

Gators in the bingo lounge with the Concordia Village retirees, fleeing on their mobility scooters; gators in the back of the patrol van of the irritated cop, on his way to the jail; gators hungrily snapping at the hands and feet of the screaming prisoners in the cells.

  • Think of three types of people who could be affected by your intrusion.
  • Ideally, choose people who are connected in some way (e.g. they are all from a shared category of some kind).
  • If you can, choose people who represent some kind of spectrum within that category (Dickens used age; what might you use?).
  • As you write about each person, first focus on a physical detail, then identity the person, then locate them in a place.
  • Try expanding the description of the first person using a verb, and have the intrustion act on the last person.
  • Connect clauses with semicolons and use commas inside the clauses when needed.
Write your variation here.
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