Into the Darkening Fog: Eerie Tales of the London Weird. Edited by Elizabeth Dearnley

Into the Darkening Fog: 

Eerie Tales of the London Weird

Edited by Elizabeth Dearnley

Into the Darkening Fog is the sixteenth volume in the British Library’s brilliant “Tales of the Weird” Series.  The theme which serves as a thread through the works in this anthology is the notorious fog which plagued the capital city from the Victorian Era onwards, and which, as editor Elizabeth Dearnley explains in her Introduction to the volume, came to an end following the enactment of the Clean Air Act of 1956.  Dearnley chooses works published between 1868 and 1957, “the decades when London was at its foggiest...”   That said, London and the (literary) uncanny have an association which pre-dates the 19th century, a tradition which has since lived on in the works of such authors as Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and, more recently, Gary Budden.   

Given the wealth of weird and supernatural fiction set in London, one of the more surprising and unexpected aspects of this anthology is that it includes five works of non-fiction (if you include the anonymous article on “Spring-Heeled Jack”).  Thus, alongside weird tales by Elizabeth Bowen (represented by her excellent The Demon Lover), Arthur Machen, Edith Nesbit, EF Benson and others, there are also essays (or journalistic/memoir extracts) by the likes of Virginia Woolf, Thomas Burke and Sam Selvon.  Albeit sharing the same eerie atmosphere as their fictional companion pieces, they can be considered “weird” only if one applies a very generous interpretation to the term.  That said, these works are haunting in their own right, and they introduced me to authors I hadn’t come across before (particularly Claude McKay and Sam Selvon), so I’m not complaining. 

The volume is divided into fourteen sections representing different locations in London and each story has a brief but informative introduction about the author and chosen text.  Like the protagonist of Machen’s N you will find yourself on a journey through a foggy twilit city and you may well discover a door to the mystical, hidden behind the mundane...    

This is the full contents list:

Temple:                               The Telegram by Violet Hunt

Regent’s Park:                     In the Séance Room by Lettice Galbraith

Kensington:                        The Demon Lover by Elizabeth Bowen

Mayfair:                     The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth by Rhoda Boughton

Soho:                                War, an extract from “London in my Time” by Thomas Burke

The Strand:                             Street Haunting by Virginia Woolf

Holborn:                              Pugilist vs Poet, an extract from “A Long Way from Home” by Claude McKay

Stoke Newington:                   N by Arthur Machen

Whitechapel:                          The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes

Waterloo:                                My Girl and the City by Sam Selvon

Crystal Palace:                        The Mystery of the Semi-Detached by Edith Nesbit

Vauxhall:                                 The Old House in Vauxhall Walk by Charlotte Riddell

Putney (&Bloomsbury):        The Chippendale Mirror by E.F. Benson

Peckham:                                Spring-Heeled Jack by Anonymous

292 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 20, 2020