Jonty Claypole

The only filthy air to be found in 1600 in Britain was the air of London.

And so that, I think, is Shakespeare very cleverly

not only telling us that the air was filthy then and foggy, but also it's his way of telling his audience the story he's telling isn't just set in Scotland.

It's about things which are happening or could happen in London as well.

And then even as you're saying, so the pea supers by the 1960s, the death rate is huge.

Even in Dickens' time in the 1850s, it's thought that around one out of every 200 deaths in London was from fog events.

And beyond that as well, measles and tuberculosis became a lot deadlier while these fogs were on.

And we love an act, Sophie, a legal act.

..that Dickens' influence on law and social change in England at the time can be very hard to prove, but yet there is this endless stream of coincidences that when Dickens turns his attention to something...

public interest arises and the law is pushed through pretty shortly afterwards.

And in 1853, which is when the serialisation of Bleak House is coming to an end, Parliament is able to push through the first Smoke Act, which starts to introduce legislation to restrict the amount of emissions going on.

And the last thing I want to say about The Fog is that we take it as a bit of a cliche now, but this is the first literary fog.

It seemed to be the first one, the first time that we have The Fog as a prominent character in a work of fiction.

And it sets the path for Robert Louis Stevenson, for Conan Doyle, for T.S.

Eliot in The Wasteland, through to a novel we talked about a few months ago, Marjorie Allingham's Tiger in the Smoke.

And Sophie, you talked then about...

how that book is deliberately evoking Bleak House.

And the brilliance of the way he treats the fog is that on one hand, it is a very real fog.

He is describing the poisonous fog as it was experienced by Londoners every day.

And also it's an allegorical fog.