Whose fog is it anyway?

Yesterday I read one of the best chapters so far in London: the Biography.  Chapter 47 is entitled 'A Foggy Day' and in eight pages of perfection deals with reports of London fog from Tacitus to the 1960s.  Despite this long history, as Ackroyd says, fog is most closely associated with the Victorian era.  As he puts it:

"It can be said that fog is the greatest character in nineteenth-century fiction, and the novelists looked upon fog as might people upon London Bridge, 'peering over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all around them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds'.  "

He then goes on to say "the greatest novel of London fog is, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in which the fable of changing identities and secret lives takes place within the medium of the city's 'shifting insubstantial mists' ".  A remark which reminded me amusingly of an interview I head recently on Oneword radio (now deceased, sob!) with the author Ian Rankin.  As many of you will know, Rankin is a resident of Edinburgh and in choosing his favourite books he included Jekyll as one of his choices with a comment to the effect that although the story is supposedly set in London the city it portrays is really Edinburgh, "pure Edinburgh".  And I have to applaud such patriotic misappropriation.  You haven't really fallen in love with a book until you've made it your own in some such way. 

"Every reader reads himself.  The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself."

(from The Maxims of Marcel Proust compiled by Justin O'Brien and quoted by Michael Dirda in Readings.)

Comments

[Lance]

Sometimes the ways writers appropriate other works surprises us. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has said that the greatest Latin-American novel ever is Faulkner's The Hamlet. A great but somewhat unusual compliment.