How best to solve the pollution problems of a city sunk so deep within sulfurous clouds that it was described as hell on earth? Simply answered: Relocate all urban smoke-creating industry and encircle the metropolis of London with sweetly scented flowers and elegant hedges.
In fact, as Christine L. Corton, a Cambridge scholar, reveals in her new book, London Fog, this fragrant anti-smoke scheme was the brainchild of John Evelyn, the 17th-century diarist. King Charles II was said to be much pleased with Evelyn’s idea, and a bill against the smoky nuisance was duly drafted. Then nothing was done. Nobody at the time, and nobody right up to the middle of the 20th-century, was willing to put public health above business interests.
And yet it’s a surprise to discover how beloved a feature of London life these multicolored fogs became. A painter, Claude Monet, fleeing besieged Paris in 1870, fell in love with London’s vaporous, mutating clouds. He looked upon the familiar mist as his reliable collaborator. Visitors from abroad may have delighted in the fog, but homegrown artists lit candles and vainly scrubbed the grime from their gloom-filled studio windows. “Give us light!” Frederic Leighton pleaded to the guests at a Lord Mayor’s banquet in 1882, begging them to have pity on the poor painter.
The more serious side of Corton’s book documents how business has taken precedence over humanity where London’s history of pollution is concerned. A prevailing westerly wind meant that those dwelling to the east were always at most risk. Those who could afford it lived elsewhere. The east was abandoned to the underclass. Lord Palmerston spoke up for choking East Enders in the 1850s, pointing a finger at the interests of the furnace owners. A bill was passed, but there was little change. Eventually, another connection was established: between London’s perpetual veil of smog and its citizens’ cozily smoldering grates. Sadly, popular World War I songs didn’t do much to encourage the adoption of smokeless fuel.
It wasn’t until what came to be known as the “Great Killer Fog” of 1952 that the casualty rate became impossible to ignore and the British press finally took up the cause. It was left to a Member of Parliament to steer the Clean Air Act into law in 1956. Within a few years, even as the war against pollution was still in its infancy, the dreaded fog began to fade.
1. Which of the following can be inferred from Paragraph 2?
2. The word “grime” (Para. 3) is closest in meaning to（ ）.
3. Which would be most heavily affected by London’s pollution according to Carton’s book?
4. The author mainly shows in the last paragraph that（ ）.
