118 .

london fog
yet Hyde completely negates it. The mist of uncontrolled urges obscures
Jekyll’s reason when he is transmuted into Hyde and is easily dispersed
by apprehension of danger; a far denser, darker fog descends on the other
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characters when they try to use their powers of reason to penetrate the
mystery of the two men’s relationship to each other. Utterson is first in-
troduced to us as a great walker of the city. Yet when Utterson takes the
cab journey through the fog with Newcomen, he seems unprepared, even
shocked, at what he glimpses through it. The fog is not used in this novel
to hide the murderer or his actions, but it does conceal the moral depravity
of some parts of the city. Finally, there is also a personal, psychological
angle to these descriptions. Stevenson uses his description of the fog to
explore his own personal nightmares, which, he wrote, “haunted, for in-
stance, by nothing more defi nite than a certain hue of brown.”141 This
would then take on the form of nightmarish “Brownies,” the depressions
which caused his periodic breakdowns and had contributed to his leaving
for France in 1873.142

VI
Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is ostensibly about a
single individual, but the Soho scenes make it clear that there is a wider
process of moral decay at work in the capital. In this sense the novel is
part of a wider discourse characteristic of the decade in which it was
written. In his semi-fictionalised autobiography, The Private Papers of Henry
Ryecroft, George Gissing described the following picture: “After a sleep-
less night, I fell into a torpor, which held me unconscious for an hour or
two. Hideous cries aroused me: sitting up in the dark, I heard men going
along the street, roaring news of a hanging that had just taken place. ‘Ex-
ecution of Mrs.’—I forget the name of the murderess. ‘Scene on the Scaf-
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fold!’ It was a little after nine o’clock; the enterprising paper had promptly
got out its gibbet edition. A morning of mid-winter, roofs and ways cov-
ered with soot-grimed snow under the ghastly fog-pall; and, whilst I lay
there in my bed, that woman had been led out and hanged—hanged. I
thought with horror of the possibility that I might sicken and die in that
wilderness of houses, nothing above me but a ‘foul and pestilent congre-
gation of vapours.’ ”143 This is based on Gissing’s own memory of the

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 King Fog . 119
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Figure 3.10 “November Mourning!,” by William Luker. The link is made directly between
London fog and death in this punningly titled illustration. This is from the popular book London
City (1891), by W. J. Loftie. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge Uni-
versity Library.

execution of the murderess Mrs.  Mary Pearcey on the morning of

23 December 1890.
A sketch by William Luker (1867–1951) the following year, titled “No-
vember Mourning!,” makes the connection between fog and death in a
very direct way (Figure 3.10). The title suggests that the horse is drawing
a hearse; it has to be led by a man with a flare because it cannot see
where it is going, and the lamps are of no use. The blinkers that the horse
is wearing cannot make things any easier for it. The other man in the
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picture can advance only by gingerly using a stick like a blind man to feel
his way; he may even be blind himself. The whole scene seems to be en-
veloped in a canopy of black. For many London fog was associated with
suicide: “A london Fog, ‘tis always here/At this inclement time of year!/
When people hang themselves or drown.”144
The association of fog with death was not accidental. The fog of 1873
provided seemingly irrefutable evidence that it could kill not just animals

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 120 . london fog
but people. Moreover, by the 1880s a metaphorical relationship between
social conflict and fog became apparent—a fear that the most brutal mem-
bers of the residuum could spread across London, moving from east to
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west, like the fog, to upset the social balance and wreak havoc and de-
struction. In the West End disturbances of 1886, indeed, this threat for a
time became a reality, further stoking the fires of social tension and anx-
iety. But the threat posed by fog had a more specific target than society as
a whole, and that was women, as we shall now see.
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