Dickens exhibition to look at role of London fog in life and writings

Museum show will seek to illustrate extent and impact of fog then and draw parallels with air pollution now

In Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens described a day in London under a dark, heavy fog.

“Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither.” The sun “was for a few moments dimly indicated through circling eddies of fog”, wrote Dickens in what would be his last completed novel before his death in 1870.