How does Dickens use language to explore this idea of fog all over London?
In “Bleak House”, Dickens uses language to create an atmosphere of fog all over London. He uses different techniques to do this, one of which is a variation of sentence length and another is his punctuation. He also uses repetition and personification.
Firstly the lengths of the sentences are short or long. At the beginning he uses a sentence, but not a grammatically correct one: “Fog everywhere”. Sentences must contain a verb and this one does not. However it still makes sense because it is a statement for the rest of the paragraph. Also this sentence only contains two words which make it really short. After this sentence comes a really long, five clause complex sentence. The sentence length here has a huge difference in comparison to the first. Dickens wrote it like this purposely so it gives the effect of the fog appearing suddenly, for him then to do the opposite and make the moment slow, long and reflective. This creates a miserable atmosphere which is here to stay.