Did you know that Her­man Melville was the first to com­pare London’s fog to pea soup, in 1849? No, I did­n’t either. I found this in Chris­tine Cor­ton’s bril­liant new his­to­ry of the Big Smoke — Lon­don Fog. It was­n’t just a prob­lem in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry either. In the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry Joseph Haydn, who was liv­ing in Great Pul­teney Street, com­plained: “There was a fog so thick that one might have spread it on bread. In order to write I had to light a can­dle as ear­ly as 11 o’clock.”

But the fogs of the mid­dle of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry were espe­cial­ly thick, thick­er even than Melville’s pea soup “of a gam­boge colour”. Thomas Miller, a writer, said “it is some­thing like being imbed­ded in a dilu­tion of yel­low peas-pud­ding, just thick enough to get through it with­out being whol­ly choked or com­plete­ly suf­fo­cat­ed. You can see through the yard of it which, at the next stride, you are doomed to swal­low, and that is all.”

It’s thick­ness and over­pow­er­ing smell of car­bon and sul­phur gave it the almost tan­gi­ble den­si­ty of food. HV Mor­ton, in The Heart of Lon­don (1925), sug­gest­ed that the city’s fog even had a local taste: “The fog has a flavour. Many flavours. At Mar­ble Arch I meet a del­i­cate after-taste like mel­on; at Ludgate Hill I taste coke.”

Bob Hope, the Lon­don-born come­di­an, con­tin­ued the food theme, jok­ing that Cal­i­forn­ian smog was “fog with the vit­a­mins removed”. By the way, inter­est­ing­ly Cor­ton notes that the word “smog” was nev­er real­ly used at the time to describe Lon­don’s fog and was only used in ret­ro­spect.

Any­way, I enjoyed Cor­ton’s high­ly orig­i­nal study immense­ly. You can read my review of it on the Guardian’s site.