Yusupov Oybek Nematjonovich Ahmedova Nigora Shavkatovna

 
Text 2 
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 Holbom Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft 
black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as fullgrown snow-flakes 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-comers, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping 
and sliding since the day broke (if that 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. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows 
among green aids 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 wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the 
stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; 
fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. 
Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with 
fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds. 
Gas looming through the fog in diverse places in the streets, much as the sun may, 

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from the spongy fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the 
shops lighted two hours before their time - as the gas seems to know, for it has a 
haggard and unwilling look. The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, 
and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, 
appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple 
Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits 
the Lord Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. Never can there come fog too 
thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and 
floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary 
sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth. 
(from 
Bleak House 
by Ch.Dickens). 
Stylistic Analysis 
The passage presents the description of the foggy November weather in the 
City of London: before 1879 Temple Bar was the gateway that marked the westward 
limit of the City. This famous beginning of Dickens’s novel attracts the reader’s 
attention by its unusual syntactic-structural composition. The author uses mostly one-
member sentences extended by means of various participial constructions. One-
member sentences also function as main clauses in complex sentences, which are long 
and intricate, thus conveying the hustling and jostling atmosphere of the overcrowded 
streets - muddy and slippery under the sooty drizzle. To enhance the expressiveness of 
the description, to create an appropriate setting and emotional atmosphere (which are 
quite important in terms of the content-conceptual information of the novel) Dickens 
resorts to various EMs and SDs used in convergence. The paragraphs abound in 
different kinds of parallel constructions with syntactic anaphoras and epistrophes, 
phonemic (alliteration), morphemic and word repetitions, cases of inversion, 
parenthetical constructions, comparisons and similes, epithets and metaphors. 
The unexpected comparative hyperbole used in the first paragraph (“as if the 
waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth and it wouldn’t be wonderful 

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to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so”) is extended by one more comparison 
(“waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holbom Hill”), the whole picture thus 
acquiring a ring of irony. The ironic effect is then increased by the following 
comparative-metaphoric description of flakes of soot: “as big as full-grown snow-
flakes gone into mourning, one might imagine for the death of the sun”. (One can also 
notice that the presentation of the City “inhabitants” begins with the description of 
dogs, horses and only later - foot passengers, all of them being splashed with mud).
So, the key word of the first paragraph is the word “mud” as well as its 
synonyms and other thematic words containing the integral seme of “being unclean”: 
mud, smoke, black drizzle, mire, crust upon crust of mud, dirty city. The image is 
supported by additional metaphoric associations, brought up by the writer’s 
employing specific lexis, connected with the spheres of commerce and financial 
transactions (“adding new deposits”, “accumulating at compound interest”). 
The key word of the second paragraph is the word “fog”. Itis used in anaphoric 
parallel constructions to intensify the general mood of the whole description of this 
almost suffocating smog inthe “great (and dirty) city”. The word “fog” is repeated 17 
times in 11 sentences. The emotional intensity is created by means of 
themorphological repetition in numerous participles used to characterize the all-
penetrating fog which appears to be personified by the author: it is described as if it 
were some animate creature, mysterious and ominous (“creeping, lying, hovering, 
drooping, pinching”). At the end of the passage the two thematic lines - “mud” and 
“fog” – are combined; and the emotional-evaluative climax is achieved in the fourth 
paragraph through the use of the superlative degree of adjectives in parallel 
constructions complicated by root repetition and polysyndeton (“The raw afternoon is 
rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near ... 
Temple Bar.”). The thematic words “mud” and “fog”, as a result of foregrounding, 
acquire symbolic sounding and become the key words of the wholepassage, 
symbolizing the bureaucratic and mercenary system of legal proceedings in London in 

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the times of Charles Dickens. This long, detailed description culminates in a short 
sentence, where we find inversion and the framing repetition of the theme of the first 
sentence: “And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of fog, 
sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.” The repetition of the 
word “high” and the use of the possessive pronoun “his” produce an ironic effect: the 
pomposity of the style and the folklore structure of the sentence present a striking 
contrast. 
The final sentence - the author’s denunciation of the Law system - stands out 
against the metaphorically veiled picture presented in the preceding paragraphs. It 
produces a strongly publicist impact on the reader: “Never can there come fog too 
thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and 
floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary 
sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth.” The stylistic convergence is 
quite remarkable here. We can observe the use of parallel clauses with the inverted 
anaphoric “never” and a case of simple, synonym repetition in the form of a binomial 
with alliteration (“mud and mire”), emotionally colored epithets (“groping and 
floundering”), the parenthetical metaphoric description of the Court (“most pestilent 
of hoary sinners”). This direct negative characteristic used against the background of 
the ironically elevated ending of the sentence (“in the sight of heaven and earth”) aims 
at causing a strongly negative reaction on the part of the reader: the author’s censure 
and accusation of the Court of Chancery are most obvious in this sentence, which can 
be qualified as a typical sample of English oratorical style. We should also pay 
attention to the title of this chapter of the novel - “In Chancery”. The interesting link 
between the title and the theme of the passage is based upon the play on words: the 
word “Chancery” here means the Court of Lord Chancellor, but it is also one of the 
elements of the idiom “in chancery”, which means “in a desperate position”. So the 
pun implicitly conveys the true essence of the law system of those times as it is 
depicted by Charles Dickens in his novel. 

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