part0004

Near the beginning of Hitchcock’s 1927 silent chiller The Lodger , respectable, lace-collared landlady Mrs. Bunting opens her door to a tall, cloaked man with his face muffled in a scarf, pale brown fog drifting into the hall as she decides whether to let him cross the threshold. Adapted from Marie Belloc Lowndes’ 1913 novel of the same name, Hitchcock’s film—subtitled “A Story of the London Fog”—encapsulates the tale’s central fear in this shivery doorstep encounter: what dangers linger just outside the apparent safety of an ordinary London terrace, hidden by fog, darkness, or simply the anonymity of the city? And what happens when the safe and sinister sides of London meet?

London’s reputation for fog dates back to the 1840s, following its rapid expansion during the Industrial Revolution. 1 Geography makes it naturally fog-prone; the low-lying Thames basin, surrounded by hills, meant that mist, dampness, and smoke from the growing city had been observed hanging in the air centuries beforehand. In 1661, for instance, the diarist John Evelyn lamented the “pernicious Smoake which sullyes all [London’s] Glory”. 2 But the dense yellow-brown haze which came to be known as “London fog”—sulphuric soot particles from fires and factories mixed with water vapour—became an increasingly common phenomenon from the early Victorian period onwards, noted by Londoners and visitors alike. During a record-breaking fog in 1890, the Chinese poet Huang Zunxiang wrote that “London is blacker than lacquer”; 3 Monet painted the Thames shimmering with smoke and shifting light, declaring that “without fog, London would not be a beautiful city”. 4 Travelling to England over Christmas 1876, a less enthusiastic Henry James informed American painter Elizabeth Boott that “the heavens [were] perpetually instained with a sort of dirty fog-paste, like Thames mud in solution”, and was one of the first to describe London fog as “pea soup”: “When I think of the Xmases I have passed in Rome & then look out into the pea-soup atmosphere of Piccadilly, I feel like taking to my bed.” 5 Traditionally, pea soup was yellow rather than green, a staple food of the poor made from dried yellow split peas, making it an obviously apt metaphor for something thick, unsavoury and associated with poverty.

The growing associations between London and fog both in reality and in the popular imagination turned it into a literary trope, often as a sooty stand-in for the murkily degenerate city itself. In Dickens’ Bleak House , the “London ivy” of coal smoke twists its way around Chancery with a suffocating gloom equal to the novel’s legal obfuscations, while in Belloc Lowndes’ domestic nightmare, the Buntings draw their red damask curtains against “the fog-laden, drizzling atmosphere of the Marylebone Road” in an unsuccessful bid to keep their home safe from external threats. In a rural setting, fog could be used to make a landscape wilder and weirder—Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles is all the more terrifying for springing onto Dartmoor through an impenetrable “swirl of white vapour”—and in the city, it cloaks the urban landscape with that same sense of strangeness. A thick pea-souper could make even the most densely populated area feel isolated and unknowable, with previously familiar landmarks appearing fuzzy and distorted.

Yet fog could also be comforting and thrilling in equal measures, its blurring of visual and psychological boundaries opening up new possibilities for adventure and transgression. Anything could materialise out of the smoke at any moment, magnifying the excitement as well of the threats of what James called the “delightful, dreadful city”. Despite his earlier distaste for the London winter, by 1893 James was praising the “friendly fog” which “flatters and superfuses” and “makes everything brown, rich, dim, vague”. 6 It could temporarily soften a hostile space; spending a chilly year in the city between 1919 and 1920, the Jamaican poet Claude McKay later wrote that “the feeling of London was so harshly unfriendly to me that sometimes I was happy in the embrace of the unfolding fog.” The tricksy dazzle of lights in the fog can have an illusory, theatrical quality; a century after James, Angela Carter’s Brixton showgirl Dora Chance recalls how it gave the streets of her youth a surreal underwater luminescence, “the lights of Electric Avenue glowing like bad fish”. 7

With the disappearance of true London fog in the years following the Clean Air Act of 1956, later fictional depictions of fog have often taken on an oddly nostalgic quality, a tangible, sepia-tinged indication that we are now in a less healthy, but more mysterious, past. On-screen portrayals of the city use fog as shorthand for “Victorian London”, from Basil Rathbone’s 1939 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to the 2014–16 gothic fantasy series Penny Dreadful . Recasting ordinary streets in a ghostly twilight haze, fog can make London feel both familiar and unfamiliar, cosy and uncosy, in a way that Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny” identifies as uncanny: “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well-known”. 8 It is this uneasy flickering between the two which makes fog such an effective symbol of London weirdness.

The stories and essays in this collection span the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. The earliest featured is Rhoda Broughton’s 1868 renters’ cautionary tale “The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth”, and the latest is Sam Selvon’s 1957 immigrant’s-eye meditation on alienation, belonging and transience, “My Girl and the City”. All written within the decades when London was at its foggiest, they reflect a hundred years of huge social change and the birth of many things now thought of as part of “modern” city life. Londoners of the 1860s and 1870s could travel by Tube, shop at the newly opened Whiteleys and Liberty department stores, message each other via up to twelve postal deliveries a day or the recently nationalised telegraph system, and jostle for living space in an increasingly crowded city, whose population would more than double between 1841 and 1891. These changes were coupled with corresponding societal concerns and more prurient moral panics about rising crime, crowded and insecure living conditions, and the degeneracy of a lawless, sexually licentious underworld just outside the doorstep. 9

In the twentieth century, wartime blackouts and air-raids made the city newly strange. Thomas Burke’s 1935 memoir London In My Time recalls how during the first world war, “night-London seemed a changeling […] All outdoor lamps were painted blue, and all shop and house lights thickly screened.” In Elizabeth Bowen’s 1945 The Demon Lover , a woman returns to an eerily quiet, bombed-out Kensington to find her family home a dusty, distorted echo of the warm, welcoming space she left behind. Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners , published the same year as the Clean Air Act, shows West Indian immigrants navigating a grimy postwar capital made still more disorienting by smog, “the lights showing in the blur as if it is not London at all but some strange place on another planet”. 10 In a continually shapeshifting, fog-blurred city, how could anyone be sure what dangers—or delights—the next street would hold?

Ghost stories and weird tales provided a space to explore many of these urban anxieties. The cobwebbed underside of the fairy tale, horror stories have always been used to work through collective societal fears, whether the concern that wolves might gobble you up if you stray from the path or the suspicion that a serial killer might be stalking the streets. The murders of 1888 attributed to Jack the Ripper directly influenced Belloc Lowndes’ creation of the anonymous “Avenger” in “The Lodger”—the original 1911 short story upon which she based her later novel is reprinted here—and the mythology surrounding the Ripper has several parallels with the Victorian folktale of Spring-Heeled Jack. The urban eerie tale often focuses more broadly on the contrast between civilised, brightly lit modernity and darker, atavistic fears about what might lie just beyond the glow of the streetlamp—and the constant possibility that one might slip from one side to the other. Arthur Machen’s weird London fiction turns on the potential for the most quotidian city street to suddenly reveal something strange, whether a sinister ritual or something more magical—as can be seen in his psychedelic 1930s tale of a portal to fairyland in Stoke Newington, “N”.

The ghost story was also a hugely popular form for Victorian women writers, enabling them to discuss gender dynamics, sexuality, the constraints of domestic life and other taboo topics. The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of increasing activity for women’s rights movements and wider debate about women’s role in public life, with many of these issues explored under the guise of supernatural fiction. In 1868, the year that Broughton’s “The Whole Truth” was published, the University of London became the first British university to admit women, with the country’s first National Society for Women’s Suffrage formed the previous year; however, women would not be granted independent legal existence in England and Wales until the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act.

Over half of the stories in this collection are by women, and their London-set tales often reflect women’s experiences negotiating an urban environment largely designed by and for men. Lettice Galbraith’s eerie 1893 tale “In the Séance Room” explores specifically gendered horrors: unwanted pregnancy, a terrified young woman, and an unscrupulous man able to avoid the consequences of his actions—until an encounter with a medium brings justice from beyond the grave. Twenty years later, feminist writer Violet Hunt’s 1911 “The Telegram” examines the dilemma of a single woman in her 30s wishing to retain her independence, inviting readers to decide whether the tale’s true terror lies in a supernatural threat or more earthly social pressures.

The ability of weird tales to juxtapose paranormal and real-world fears also raises the question of what counts as weird, uncanny or eerie for whom, and why. Even when nothing supernatural is happening, a place, situation or person can be presented as weird if the narrator views it as other in terms of gender, sexuality, class or race. One of the most notorious London examples of this is the racist mythology built up about Limehouse, London’s Chinese community and the “Yellow Peril” by white writers like Sax Rohmer and Thomas Burke in the early twentieth century, with Burke’s bestselling 1916 short story collection Limehouse Nights proving particularly influential. Compared with Rohmer’s unequivocally sinophobic depiction of an evil Chinese criminal mastermind in his Fu Manchu novels, the carnival glitter of Burke’s blue-lit opium dens is presented as a transgressively alluring alternative to the lives of those “who comfortably wake and sleep and eat in Hampstead and Streatham”. 11 However, his more sympathetic but still hugely problematic portrait of Limehouse as an exoticised other has exercised a long hold over the popular imagination, even filtering down into much more recent “weird” depictions of Chinatown such as the BBC’s 2010 Sherlock episode “The Blind Banker”.

Stories from the perspectives of those being othered provide vital counter-narratives to metrics of weirdness set by white, male and/or straight writers—and often have similarly little need to introduce supernatural elements in order to show their protagonists navigating alienating, uncanny or threatening situations. Claude McKay’s account of a black boxer crushed by a white fan’s anger in a Holborn restaurant, recounted in his 1937 autobiography A Long Way from Home , shows the bewildering speed at which a safe-seeming environment can turn hostile. A generation later, Trinidad-born Selvon’s 1957 story “My Girl and the City” records the disorienting experience of adjusting to the city’s ceaseless spin of images and adverts (“Hurtling in the underground from station to station, mind the doors, missed it!, there is no substitute for wool”) but also the electric exhilaration of becoming charged with the city’s energy and a sense of belonging, when “[e]ach return to the city is loaded with thought, so that by the time I take the Inner Circle I am as light as air”.

Most of the stories collected here are fictional accounts of weird London, previously published in anthologies and popular periodicals like McClure’s Magazine and Woman’s Journal . However, I have also included four non-fiction pieces: an excerpt from McKay’s A Long Way from Home ; Burke’s wartime memories from London In My Time ; an 1884 report in literary magazine All the Year Round speculating on the identity of Spring-Heeled Jack; and Virginia Woolf’s flâneuse’s guide to stepping out into “the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow”, Street Haunting (1927). The Londons glimpsed in these accounts—a basement soldiers’ club in Drury Lane, manicured suburbs terrorised by a fire-breathing ghost, a shopping trip for a pencil transformed by twilight—offer further constructions of the city and how it was experienced, showing the potential for strangeness in the most mundane urban encounters.

In more recent decades, writers like Iain Sinclair and Will Self have brought psychogeography into the mainstream, while novels from Neil Gaiman’s 1996 fantasy Neverwhere to Helen Oyeyemi’s darkly delicious 2019 Gingerbread offer fantastical takes on London’s Russian-doll potential to contain other hidden Londons beneath the streets or behind closed doors. This book includes some of the forerunners of these traditions, with the lamplit wanderings of Burke and Woolf, Machen’s occult mysticism and the increasingly frayed tweedy urbanity of E. F. Benson’s “spook stories” building up an eerie alternative map of London over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Into the London Fog takes you on a tour through the city’s darkened streets, shadowy alleyways and seemingly quiet suburbs, from Vauxhall Walk to Regent’s Canal. While many tales begin in the most pedestrian of places—a semi-detached house in Crystal Palace, damask-curtained lodgings on the Marylebone Road, a Putney antique shop—it doesn’t usually take long for things to take a weirder turn.

Like London fog itself, the power of the weird tale lies in its potential to suddenly shift from benign to baleful as the light changes. The stories in this collection all invite you to make your way through the smoke to take a closer look at some of the more uncanny corners of the city, just out of sight—but all you need to do is turn into a sidestreet, or look up, or down.

Elizabeth Dearnley is a folklorist, artist and Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies within the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her work explores engagement with public spaces, alternative maps, eerie landscapes, fairy tales and folk horror, and she has curated several projects exploring how folktales interact with the modern world, including immersive 1940s Red Riding Hood retelling Big Teeth and The Sandman for the Freud Museum London. She is the co-creator of The Secret Diary of Bloomsbury, which collects submissions from visitors and residents of Bloomsbury to tell a collective story of life in the area.

This collection has its origins in a paper I gave at the University of Portsmouth’s Supernatural Cities conference in June 2019 on the Flâneuse Diaries project I co-created with Michael Eades, a 21st-century experiment in street-haunting inviting women to keep diaries recording their impressions of Bloomsbury. Thank you to Eilís Phillips, Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott and Karl Bell from the Supernatural Cities Research Group, to the Bloomsbury Festival for including the Flâneuse Diaries in their 2018 line-up, and to all the women who took part in the project.

Thanks are also due to Michael, who in addition to collaborating with me on the Flâneuse Diaries (and sister project The Secret Diary of Bloomsbury), shares an equal enthusiasm for weird London, and who offered invaluable insights and reading suggestions as this collection took shape. I’d also like to thank Sarah Sigal for conversations about Virginia Woolf, street-haunting and alternative perspectives on cities, and Andy Johnson for his helpful comments on the introduction. Particular thanks are due to Sasha Garwood Lloyd for her careful reading of the introduction and headnotes, her generously shared knowledge of the Victorian underworld and 19th-century women’s writing, and long walks around London.