A Commentary on Bleak House

The latter, while it could still be considered a physical fog, indicates instead the extended metaphor of the city's sickness, of the poverty, perhaps the lack of clothing leading to a frostbite in the 'implacable November weather'. The fog is representative of obscurity and it is the idea that things are being hidden, there are 'people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog', the city below them as far away as if they were in the clouds themselves, a representation of the confusion that will later surround Chancery and other mysteries of the novel. The fog connects all of the people mentioned and it affects them, just as Chancery will later play the same role within the characters. But the fog is also representative of something more, of everything that is bad in the city, from the poverty to the politics, and the Chancellor sits in Chancery at the heart of it, literally, but that he sits at the centre of this representative fog shows that he is also at the heart of what is bad with London, he represents the authority of high political powers, the rich and capitalism, something which is hinted towards with 'accumulating at compound interest'.
             Dickens' concern was primarily the social hierarchy and how fair, or unfair, it was. In the given passage, as mentioned previously, the fog cruelly pinches the little boy and yet, here, where it all comes to a head, 'the raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest' there sits a man who is seemingly untouched by all the nastiness of the city around him and instead, he is 'in his High Court'. This is a direct show of his opinion on the current situation; that the city is divided, and Two Cities showed that he thought this extended beyond just London and England. Dickens' sketches are the direct descendants of the essayists of the Romantic Era, the subjects are similar, the content is all urban, and for Dickens this continues on in Bleak House.