This beautifully produced book from Harvard's Belknap Press engages with a major nineteenth- and twentieth-century meteorological and social phenomenon: the London fog, or what would come to be known by the 1890s as “smog.” Christine Corton's opening chapter of London Fog: The Biography provides an excellent overview of an environmental problem reaching back to medieval times and then engages in detail with the pollution-ridden era of nineteenth-century urban industrialism. The sections devoted to visual representation are first-rate. Plates have been well chosen. Here are splendidly foggy images of the London fog and the shadows and near-darknesses that it cast over the capital. Most other chapters are compelling and display a welcome refusal to discriminate in terms of evidence between high and low culture.

Dickens looms large. There are one or two minor problems in the chapter devoted to him: a tendency to paraphrase overfamiliar plots and a failure to draw on a now large secondary literature directly or indirectly concerned with the novelist's attitude towards the city and what he believed to be the major differences between town and country. In Dickens's time, market towns, villages, and hamlets quite close to the capital continued to experience nothing worse than traditional “white” mist. Cities, on the other hand, and particularly London, had been rendered unknowable by the dismal shroud of yellow-and-black mix of smoke and fog that hovered over them. The novels are invaluable, but Corton might have made greater use of the Journals and Letters, sources that register Dickens's deeply pessimistic thinking as he made his way from Kent towards the dismal urban core. Could the capital really be what so many people called it—the “greatest city the world had ever known”?

Corton's book is a painstakingly researched volume that may deter other historians from venturing into this murky terrain. But there are several structural weaknesses, particularly in relation to the ways in which the London fog fed into and became a major support for a cluster of at times disturbing scientific and sociological ruminations on the future of British cities. Corton makes passing comments on this complex and hybrid discourse but does not join up the dots: the reader is deprived of a sequential overview of what the later nineteenth-century fog-associated “London problem” was believed to be or how upper- and middle-class observers set about outlining what they quite wrongly perceived to be accurate diagnoses and viable solutions.

Corton has interesting things to say about Britain's pathbreaking fin de siècle “fog expert,” Francis Rollo Russell, Bertrand's uncle and unloved guardian. Russell's corpus should be dealt with as fully as the fictional representations Corton so competently explores. His life's work illuminates a generalized ideology shared by countless late nineteenth-century medical men, public health officers, and urban and social reformers. Russell was a respected amateur at the moment when a dilettante science was undergoing the twin processes of professionalization and theoretical spring cleaning. Convinced that smoke-stunned members of the working classes were increasingly likely to be drawn to the morally forbidden pleasures of the public house—Corton touches on this point—he believed that alcohol weakened what the social elite erroneously believed to be a deeply imbedded working-class commitment to self-denying moral and religious codes of behavior. Erosion of discipline led to an acceleration of a kind of biological deterioration reaching back to the onset of urban industrialism. Even earlier Enlightenment thinkers had warned that the inferior “races” were laboring under ever more injurious environmental deprivation.

Russell combined his underlying fog theory with a commitment to a distinctively metropolitan fin de siècle ideology associated with physical and moral degeneration. (Corton's alternative usage, “degeneracy,” is misleading: This term referred to four different sets of conditions—full-blown madness, congenital “idiocy,” what we now call “learning difficulties” and organic epilepsy. Each of the final three states was thought to push long-suffering individuals into an idiotic state similar to that experienced by those who lived in the lost world of the fully insane.)

Russell believed that atmospheric problems might already have pushed London's working-class population—and, even worse, their children—into a state of chronic mental and biological decline. To most fin de siècle observers there was only one logical and scientifically valid solution—a mass movement away from the city, a proposal that gained countless supporters during the worst of the fog cycles between the 1870s and 1890s. The poorest members of the metropolitan community should be moved to villages and hamlets. Once there, they would be taught long-forgotten preindustrial crafts and skills. According to Russell and many others, a crystal clear atmosphere would gradually restore full biological and psychological strength. And, although it was rarely spelled out, inner-city political dissidence among the great unskilled, brilliantly described by Gareth Stedman Jones in Outcast London in the 1970s, would diminish. At an extreme, a minority of commentators and authors argued that the capital should be pastoralized. An even smaller number ventured into the darker regions of what would soon develop into eugenics. Some individuals might need to be weeded out.

Corton fails fully to engage with these often subtextual and semi-hidden ideological discourses. Nevertheless, she has written an exceptionally well-conceived and constructed volume. She treats her subject with the full non-antiquarian seriousness it deserves.