Here is my sentence by sentence breakdown for the paragraph from Bleak House. I did it while reading it in real time. Took about ~30mins.
London.
I think this is telling us where we are? like setting the location of the scene. I don’t know what kind of scene it is or what.
Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
I looked up what Michaelmas term was, because the phrase ‘Michaelmas term lately over’ didn’t make sense to me. According to google AI overview, it’s the first academic term of the year (~October to ~December). So that terms has finished recently (“lately over”). So we know when, at least when within the year. So it’s basically the middle of winter in the UK? I’m guessing that it’s academic related and not just “midwinter” or “December” is relevant.
The sentence also tells us that the Lord Chancellor is sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
I looked it up, and the Lord Chancellor is like the highest judge, and Lincoln’s Inn is one of the four Inns of Court in London. Legal facilities I guess.
Implacable November weather.
Okay it’s November. This is making sense with the Michaelmas term thing I found out.
The weather is implacable. I’m guessing it’s pretty cold and wintery, or getting that way.
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 Holborn Hill.
So these sentences are so far are fragments. That’s unusual. But it’s an artistic thing. They each are descriptive of the scene.
It’s very muddy in the streets. So it’s been rainy and miserable?
But it’s muddy “as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth”. I don’t think the author means that it’s not muddy, but that it’s very muddy. It’d be weird to talk about a street being not muddy, because you don’t really expect a street to be muddy. Although if this is set further in the past, then the streets were probably dirt, and would get quite muddy with rain.
“but newly retired” sounds like the waters had gone from the earth. But it’s muddy, which means there is lots of water on the earth.
Does the author mean the seas? but I don’t see why they would. Or do they just mean that the water has dried up?
Anyway it’s seems like the author means there is so much mud in the streets it looks like a prehistoric, uncivilised scene.
Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
Another fragment and not a sentence. It describes smoke and soot coming down from chimneys. It’s drizzling with rain too, and that’s mixing with the smoke and soot. The smoke is being described as going into mourning for the death of the sun, because it’s lowering from chimneys and not rising up like you’d expect. That’s from the drizzling rain bringing it down.
There is no sun because of the weather/season.
Dogs, undistinguishable in mire.
Another fragment. a mire is swampy or boggy ground. Thats a metaphor for the muddy streets I suppose. The dogs are undistinguishable (indistinguishable(?)) because they’re muddy (“in mire”)?
Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.
Another fragment (I’ll stop saying that till it changes).
The horses are also really muddy, so that is what was meant by “in mire” before. They aren’t as muddy (“scarely better”) presumably because they are taller. Though they are splashed to their “blinkers” which are things which I know cover their eyes or restrict their vision, so they’re muddy quite a way up them.
Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this 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.
Big sentence.
People are in a foul mood because of the weather and the mud situation. They’re slipping where others have slipped. It’s getting worse and worse.
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Okay the paragraph describes a scene in London, where it’s near the end of the year, wintery. The streets are muddy as hell. Dog and horses are covered in it. Everyone is having a hard time and in a bad mood. They’re slipping over and stuff. The weather sucks. it’s dark, it’s raining. You can’t tell whether the sun has risen and whether a day has really started cos it’s so cloudy and miserable. The Lord Chancellor sits in a court. He seems important and we don’t know why yet.
Ok so after watching the video. I didn’t know it was a Charles Dickens novel. That makes sense for the muddy streets time period (I think Dickens was like 1800s England?).
I thought I did okay! I still don’t get how the sentence about the “waters newly retired from the face of the earth” worked. But I think I understood the meaning well: that it was muddy as hell and the scene looked prehistoric (the megalosaurus thing).