The extract is a part of the first chapter of “Bleak House” written by Charles Dickens in 1853. After a first sight to the extract, what comes to surface is the title “In Chancery” from which the intelligent reader can understand the connection with a judicial system, Chancery Court: indeed C. Dickens through this work wants to elaborate a satirical view about the inefficient english judicial system.
The first part of the chapter has an introductive function indeed it is a description of the story’s setting and the intelligent reader can understand it from the first word of the extract: “London”.

Before starting talking about the content, from this brief part is possible to understand the type of narrator: it is a 3rd person omniscient narrator but also after an overall reading of the 1st chapter is possible to understand that C. Dickens uses also a 1st person narrator, Esther Summerson.

The extract is organized into five different parts that represents different part of a day in London. The first one describes the city during a miserable day in November, in particularly it describes a metaphorical fog and rain, through the use of death’s semantic field (“death of sun”) and dark colors. Gray connected with the smoke of the chimney-pots and black: used to underline the idea of an industrial city due to the pollution and the mud on the streets.

The second paragraph opens with the term “fog” that the writer uses for twelve times to highlight it on the reader’s mind and to create the idea of something that starts to cover all things around: C. Dickens represents this idea at the end of the paragraph with the sentence “chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds” where people on the bridges seem to be on a balloon or airplane and see all the clouds. In this part C. Dickens uses the language to explore the idea of fog all over London and to do this he uses different techniques like the variation of the sentences’ length, punctuation, repetitions and personifications.

The last paragraphs represent the whether during the afternoon when the raw becomes rawest, the dense fog densest ecc. In this part the writer recalls the first line of the extract where he presents the Lord Chancellor, high judge of the four of Chancery, sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall where the fog, mud and mire ‘ll never be able to reach it.
However after the reading of this extract, the intelligent reader knows only a general setting of the work but is not able to understand the protagonists and the type of the story yet.

Last but not least, the writer does not use a limited vocabulary and also he does not use a correct grammar form, probabily to underline the irony of the story. An important point that C. Dickens and also others writers before hime, use is the alternation between present tense and past tense: the novelist wants to use this form to keep active the reader’s attention and try to bring him/her into the story.