FOG BECOMES INSTITUTION
I went looking for a way into Bleak House by Dickens. It’s a big, sprawling book that spawned layers of marginalia and underlined passages. It took me three months and when I turned the final few pages, I sighed. It was not a sigh of relief, but of contentment and of acknowledgement in the pleasure of discovering such ingenuity in the written word. I sat with the question for a good while asking why it had drawn me in. Digestion took its time, and eventually, I realised what kept pulling me back. Dickens had a particular talent for making physical spaces behave like states of mind, and institutions behave like physical weather.
“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows, fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs, fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships, fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners…”
Dickens does something extraordinary here, right at the beginning. The fog begins as weather, becomes geography, enters the machinery of the city, and finally enters the human body. When the Chancery appears inside it breathing the same descriptive air as the mud and soot, and by the time Dickens calls Chancery “most pestilent of hoary sinners” in a sentence still technically describing weather, institution and atmosphere have fused into one continuous substance, and the reader can no longer locate the seam where the description of London ends and where the judgement of the court begins.
Dickens grew up watching London become an industrial city. He seemed to have concluded that a system revealed its morality architecturally before it revealed it in any person’s action. Fog, with the Chancery inside it, seeps into everything, obscures distinctions, has no obvious centre. Just like the way bureaucracy consumes lives without anyone in it committing a crime. The system breeds livelihoods at the same rate it destroys the people caught in it. Nobody has to be corrupt. The building does the corrupting.
The houses in Bleak House have memories even when their inhabitants would prefer they didn’t. The one that stayed with me most was Tulkinghorn’s ceiling where one can already feel Dicken’s setting the trap without saying so:
“…lawyers lie like maggots in nuts… it’s painted ceilings, where Allegory, in Roman helmet and celestial linen, sprawls along balustrades and pillars, flowers, clouds, and big-legged boys, and makes the head-ache––as would seem to be Allegory’s object always, more or less.”
And a few lines later, once he places Tulkinghorn beneath it:
“Here, beneath the painted ceiling, with foreshortened Allegory staring down at his intrusion as if it meant to swoop upon him, and he cutting it dead, Mr Tulkinghorn has at once his house and office.”
Tulkinghorn’s ceiling becomes almost a joke. The painted allegories stare down at him while he ignores them completely. At Chesney Wold, Dickens makes the house do something quietly sinister. The house remembers. The ancestral portraits have been watching the Dedlocks for generations and when Lady Dedlock’s secret begins to surface, the house seems to register it before the family does.
“The cold sunshine… looks in at the windows and touches the ancestral portraits with bars and patches of brightness never contemplated by the painters. Athwart the picture of my Lady, over the great chimney-piece, it throws a broad bend-sinister of lights that strikes down crookedly into the hearth and seems to rend it.”
And as the light changes inside Chesney Wold:
“Then do the frozen Dedlocks thaw. Strange movements come upon their features…”
Eventually the shadow falls over Lady Dedlock’s portrait, becoming “threatening hands” raised against her. The house does not judge her. It watches the family history repeat itself, unfolding disgrace in silence, and outlasting her, which is somehow worse.
Tom-all-Alone’s is the logical extreme of the same idea. It is prose poetry that turns an unattributed ruin into a living, vengeful thing.
“Darkness rests upon Tom-All-Alone’s… the lamp of Life burns in Tom-all-Alone’s, heavily, heavily, in the nauseous air, and winking… at many horrible things. The moon has eyed Tom with a dull cold stare, as admitting some puny emulation of herself in his desert region unfit for life… the blackest nightmare in the infernal stables grazes… and Tom is fast asleep.”
Dickens lets the darkness expand until it fills every space in the neighbourhood. He describes the place unfit for life and then immediately shifts from physical description into political satire: Parliament has been making speeches about Tom, arguing about how to get Tom right while Tom continues towards destruction.
“Tom only may and can, or shall and will, be reclaimed according to somebody’s theory but nobody’s practice.”
There are committees, speeches, institutions, principles, arguments, classifications. But the actual human beings remain in the mud, a stagnant channel of mud.
INSTITUTION BECOMES LANGUAGE
But Dickens doesn’t leave this machinery in buildings. Eventually it gets into the names.
He satirises the aristocratic political class by running an entire faux-alphabet of interchangeable names. When Lord Boodle laments that if the government falls, it must be replaced by Coodle, Doodle, Foodle, Goodle––all the way through to Zoodle––it is a parody of the Tory rotation of power with different letters, identical sound, and identical function. Dickens is making the point that these are not really names but placeholder syllables that are interchangeable and swappable without anyone noticing.
Doodle, Coodle, and Co. capture language as system where the entire alphabet produces paralysis through sheer procedural noise. They rhyme seamlessly with the main themes of the book. Boodle-Coodle-Doodle is a critique of accountability. These men are interchangeable because the system is rigged to survive without ever answering for itself. Chancery paralyses through paperwork, Parliament paralyses through naming, and both produce nothing while consuming everything. Jo the crossing-sweeper cannot read a single letter and is mocked, prosecuted and literally killed by a society that treats illiteracy as subhuman. Meanwhile the ruling class plays the entire alphabet game as a kind of empty parlour game. Their names are pure signifier with no substance behind the letter.
It is the same move as Krook who hoards the entire archive but cannot read a word of it and eventually combusts under the weight of its own undigested collection. And Chancery’s unreadable will tells us that meaning is inversely distributed to power. Those with textual authority––judges, lords, lawmakers––produce the least meaning. Those most desperate for meaning are locked out of the system.
LANGUAGE BECOMES MACHINERY
Now Chancery returns here but changed how we see it, at least. Paper. Names. Files. Arguments. Precedents, Bills, Clerks, Documents. What makes it frightening is that it doesn’t require a conspiracy.
Chancery’s self-perpetuation runs through misaligned incentive. Lawyers and clerks are paid by the duration and complexity of a case, not by its resolution, so the system’s actual optimisation target is its own continuation. Nobody has to be corrupt. Vholes is scrupulously honest by his own lights, feeds his three daughters on the case and genuinely believes he is serving Richard. Dickens shows us a system can produce harm as pure emergent behaviour with no villain anywhere inside it. Kenge’s closing defence of the wrecked estate, that the great machine has worked as it should, is not hypocrisy. He means it. The machinery grinds people whether or not anyone intends it to and the moral question becomes whether individuals can stay decent inside it.
Then we have Richard.
MACHINERY BECOMES LOOP
Chancery keeps him waiting without imprisoning him physically. Instead, it produces a psychological loop and makes waiting a way of life. Richard is fed hope by Vholes a trickle at a time, just enough movement and hope to justify staying in it until the staying has consumed him entirely. This was the point at which Bleak House began to feel uncomfortably contemporary. The objective may not be to help the person but simply to keep the person inside the system because the loop doesn’t need to resolve.
Attention has no bankruptcy. A feed can keep drawing on you long after Chancery would have run out of estate. Does this not sound familiar? A feed on your phone trained to maximise the time you spend looking at it is doing the identical thing Chancery does. Chancery optimises for continuation. Modern systems optimise for continuation too. The mechanisms differ, but the structure rhymes and it shows how little human behaviour has actually changed.
Here is a contemporary specimen of the same machinery as this is written today.
THE LOOP BECOMES MODERN
Dickens never had to invent Krook’s ending. He only had to notice that an archive nobody can read behaves the same whether it burns or simply survives. Meaning does not need a fire to go missing. It only needs to end up in the wrong hands kept by someone with no power to act on what it says. History obliges with its own version, closer to home and requiring no metaphor at all.
Sixty-draft copies of the Auditor-General’s 2026 report on Malaysia’s 1MDB state fund were produced. Fifty-three were destroyed. One official, told to destroy her copy along with the rest, kept it instead – watermarked “09,” saved in secret, intended only for the next Auditor-General. That single surviving copy later became the central evidence in the criminal trial over the report’s tempering. The trial ended in acquittal anyway.
Wherever he is, Dickens is probably twirling his moustache at that. He would have recognised the shape of it immediately. The archive survives, the meaning arrives late and to no one who can use it, and the machine keeps running regardless of the verdict. Fact or fiction, the loop continues. It only needs someone, somewhere, still trying to read what’s left of it. That is why the fog felt familiar the whole way through.
The book closes but the alphabet doesn’t.
I am leaving Dicken’s register while it’s fully live in me, at least for now, and moving on to another, close in era but a different tradition entirely. The next brick is an epic, denser, and unmistakably a roman révolutionnaire. Hugo’s Les Misérables will be my winter companion with Duo the green owl is holding my hand in French, hopefully lighting the way as I go.
