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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Harriet Sherwood Arts and culture correspondent

Dickens exhibition to look at role of London fog in life and writings

A detail from an illustration by Arthur Rackham for 1915 edition of A Christmas Carol
A detail from an illustration by Arthur Rackham for a 1915 edition of A Christmas Carol. Photograph: Lewis_Bush/Arthur Rackham

In Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens described a day in London under a dark, heavy fog.

“Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither.” The sun “was for a few moments dimly indicated through circling eddies of fog”, wrote Dickens in what would be his last completed novel before his death in 1870.

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