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.
I have never read Bleak House, nor do I even know the outline of the plot. This is what I’m getting from it:
The scene is London. Michaelmas’ term (shift?) has just finished, and the Lord Chancellor is now sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
The weather is cold, wet and overcast, as one would expect for November.
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 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 and horses are covered in the mud up to their eyeballs, and their owners can hardly tell which ones are theirs.
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.
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?
I really love your breakdown here. You should move to teach English in Kansas, they need you.