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Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—Repeated Images:
When Dickens describes London, a great deal of his language at the beginning of the novel emphasizes its endless, repetitive streets and impenetrable, gloomy weather. It's worst, it seems, where the London legal system makes its home, as Dickens tells the reader in Chapter 1:
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time [...]
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 High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
Everything is "raw," "dense," and "muddy" in London, but it's all much rawer, denser, and muddier near the "leaden-headed" old corporation of the High Court. These dense visual images of obscurity suggest that the mystifying "fog" emanates from the Inns of Court; Dickens later makes it clear that in Bleak House, this is symbolically if not literally true.
The visual image Dickens provides here of the Lord Chancellor is like a spider in the middle of a misty web. He is right in the middle of the "leaden-headed old corporation," as if he is himself the highest concentration somehow of this "obscurity." Dickens repeats the phrase "at the very heart of the fog" later in the same chapter, as he describes the Chancellor's seat within the Courtroom itself as "right in the midst of the mud, and at the very heart of the fog." Dickens's repetition of the visual imagery of obscurity cements the idea that Chancery is grim, gloomy, and incomprehensible. The Inns of Court are so present in the lives of all the characters of Bleak House, but their inner workings and their true purpose are deliberately hazy.
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