LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Are you able to visualize what is happening in this passage?
This is from Bleak House by Charles Dickens, if you are curious.
Yup, I was able to understand and visualize all of it. The only thing I didn’t know was what “Michaelmas” was, but I determined its salient meaning well enough from context (it’s a Christian festival celebrated on September 29, which is redundant information with the immediately following reference to “implacable November weather” which sets the approximate time of year just as well).
The passage can be summarized into two fundamental points of information:
- The weather on this particular day in London was typical.
- Charles Dickens was paid by the word.
Ah, thanks for the Michaelmas. I thought it was either a name of a politician or something I’m not British enough to understand. The rest of the text was fine.
had almost the same line of thought, that some leader’s term got over
Yes I can. And disagree with virtually everyone else; I think that this along with virtually everything else by Dickens is absolutely top class writing. The meaning of every individual phrase isn’t the point, the whole passage just gives the perfect impression of the scene he is trying to convey. Also, remember much of Dickens’ stuff was written to be read out loud. Try that, it helps!
All right, so taste aside, I would make the argument that Dickens’ writing is absolutely not “top class” by virtue of the fact that he was paid by the word and many have argued this contributed to his style of employing a lot of run-on sentences in his work. Don’t get me wrong—I do think he was a good writer, but I tend to agree that his verbosity detracted from the quality of his writing, not added to it.
Tl;dr the weather sucked. Everything was muddy and covered in soot.
Michaelmas out this bitch, yo, and LC up in Lincoln’s crib. Weather is off the hook, frfr. Streets so muddy like Noah’s flood just got done, I ain’t even be shook if a Dino come roaring up at me lmao. Chimney smoke be hanging low like Snoop Drizzle in town and ash be falling like fuckin snow, no cap. Watching the dogs and horses getting about covered in filth like they be swimming in it. Shit is wild, fam, homies on foot got no rizz, they be slipping and sliding on mud just tryna get along down the street for reals, stepping in mud and it be stepping back on them like they only drip.
Kind of, “It was very muddy in London” but nobody talks like this today, so it sounds very strange. I’m personally not a fan. I don’t think there’s a complete sentence anywhere in that passage.
Sentence fragments, capitalized and punctuated like fresh immigrants assimilating to their new mother.
Nabokov seemed to think that the fog was important. I guess it’s a novel about a legal case, and maybe the metaphor is the “fog” of legal confusion.
Nabokov? You mean that guy from The Police song?
Hey - don’t stand so close to me.
Nabokov is fun, because he had an opinion on basically every author ever. If you feel frustrated about something you read in an English class, you can probably find an essay by Nabokov reading that author to filth.
Like c’mon man - if you don’t feel something reading the Grand Inquisitor passage in Karamazov - are you human?
Sure. It paints a very vivid picture, I love it.
Never read anything by Dickens before except for A Christmas Carol (and that was for school) but this is now on my reading list :^)
Oh of course it’s Charles fucking Dickens Yeah I get the gist of it but it’s unpleasant to read and doesn’t tell me much
I have never read Bleak House, nor do I even know the outline of the plot. This is what I’m getting from it:
LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. The scene is London. Michaelmas’ term (shift?) has just finished, and the Lord Chancellor is now sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
Implacable November weather. The weather is cold, wet and overcast, as one would expect for November.
As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
The streets are incredibly muddy, as if the waters of the Biblical Flood of Noah had just receded. So muddy, one would not be surprised to find a giant amphibian frolicking in it up on Holborn Hill.
Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
Smoke drifts downward from the chimneys; soft black ash the size of snowflakes coats exposed surfaces. It’s as if everything is dressed in black to mourn the death of the Sun’s warmth and light.
Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.
Dogs and horses are covered in the mud up to their eyeballs, and their owners can hardly tell which ones are theirs.
Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Pedestrians fight through the crowded street, their umbrellas bumping into each other, like a seething angry mob. They slip and lose traction at street corners, like the thousands of pedestrians that came before them since the day broke (although “daybreak” is a meaningless term for a day as grey and cloudy as this one.) The mud continues to cake on their boots where the pavement ends, as if the mud was somehow multiplying like money in a rich man’s investment account.
The streets are incredibly muddy, as if the waters of the Biblical Flood of Noah had just receded. So muddy, one would not be surprised to find a giant amphibian frolicking in it up on Holborn Hill.
I really love your breakdown here. You should move to teach English in Kansas, they need you.
Ah, the old usage of wonderful. That threw me for a bit.
I get essentially the same, although not being familiar with the references makes some parts unclear.
I’m assuming Michaelmas is a name, but maybe it’s a celebration (like Christmas) and the word term here is implying the author’s feelings about it.
Same with the Chancellor part. What does sitting in the hall mean? It’s an Inn, so not in official capacity then? Is it a metaphor or common turn of phrase?
Is Holbern hill steep? Or is it a famously gentle hill? The use of “wonderful” here tripped me up at first too since it’s so different from how we’d use it now.
What are chimney-pots? Are they just chimneys or something else?
Understanding and being able to visualize are different things. Some people can’t visualize at all
Yes, but it was a slog. My summary:
the weather was dreadful, some high muckety muck is back from Michaelmas break. The scene is in London. All the people and critters in the street are covered in mud. The ground is slippery with mud (and probably horse crap, but we’re too polite to mention it). OMG the weather sucks, very wet and dreary. Everyone’s in a bad mood. Did I mention it’s wet and icky and muddy and the weather is bad?
I started reading, I drifted away at about the mud part so I restarted. This is really not my cuppa tea when it comes to text. On the second run I did better but no, I didn’t manage to visualize everything. The Megalosaurus sentence doesn’t make much sense to me. The text is convoluted, boring, and depressing but yes I guess I see the shitty street, the animals, the people -a crowd-, the miserable weather.
I’m aware of more information I’m not really processing but I’m just too annoyed at the text to apply the necessary brainpower required to digest it. It’s almost 2 AM and I’m tired.
Then I make it to the end and realize it’s Dickens, and that explains everything. I never liked his writing. Good night.
I can read it, but for some reason I read it like a screenplay being read about some old-timey detective story.
No, because aphantasia. I love the turns of phrase, though.
I also read the news about the same research article you did.
I was surprised how much I could understand, based on how much trouble people in the study had. Sounds like a wet miserable city our Lord Chancellor is in.
I can’t really visualize things in general. Due to that, if you tell me it’s muddy that’s most of the information I get. My brain won’t automatically try to put mud on the horses or add other details.
Here the specifics help a lot and I have a better sense of the muddy day for it.
