This text is taken from Bleak House by Charles Dickens, Chapter I.

Just reading the title “Chancery” the intelligent reader can undestand that the text may be about a lawsuit.

The text is arranged into different sequences. In the first and second one the writer describes the location through different aspects of the weather: damp, smoke and fog.

Dickens uses lot of nuouns and adjectives, linked to the semantic field of the weather, describing the awfull weather which corrispond to the atmosphere such as: “much mud”, “black drizzle” and “mire”. This image of “wet” is reinforced by the colour black which is present in “flakes of soot” and also by the similitude of the death of the sun.

In the fist sequence Dickens uses the image of Megalosaurus (which is a scientific term) to make a comparison between the monster in the Prehisoric era and the “mosters” in the real world of Holborn in London. That is to say that the Lord High Chancellor is not a positive character, but the reader can only suppose it by now.

The intelligent reader can understand that all this bad and balck atmosphere influences people’s mood “foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper”.

The writer underlines more and more that negative situation adding to the wet and black weather the fog, from now on fog is the protagonist.

So this element becomes a wet and black fog which wraps the whole scene: “fog everywhere”, “fog up the river”, “fog down the river”. Dickens uses verbs such as “rolls”, “flows” and “creeps” together with the noun “fog” to create an heavy sentation of invisibility.

The last three sequences the writes goes on through the description of the weather. In this leaden context the only lights are given by “gas looming through the fog”. This artificial light is not clear or shining as it should be but is like “much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and poughboy”.

After that Dickens comes back to the wet ad foggy aspect. He uses superlative adjectives “rawest”, “densest” and “muddiest” to describe the Temple Bar entrance, all to say that the fog and damp are not only outside but also inside the Court “at the very heart of the fog sits the Lord High Chancellor”.

The narrator of this chapter is omniscent and gives to the reader a panoramic view of the London. The eye of the reader is widen from the description of the street to outside the city “fog everywhere”.

The text ends with the repetition of the adverb “never” to underline the sensation of negativity “never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep”.

The overall effect is that the text is a large similitude between that particular November weather in London and the lawsuit, that the reader now understands it will not be solved by the Lord High Chancellor. Moreover the expression “fog drooping” is to create the imgine of something hanging in this case the lawsuite.