Evil! -- one seemed to see it everywhere
October 2, 2015 9:30 AM   Subscribe

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a bronchial spasm. That is, at least, according to William Delisle Hay’s 1880 novella The Doom of the Great City. It imagines the entire population of London choked to death under a soot-filled fog. The story is told by the event’s lone survivor sixty years later as he recalls “the greatest calamity that perhaps this earth has ever witnessed” at what was, for Hay’s first readers, the distant future date of 1942. -- Brett Beasley in the Public Domain review on one of the first modern urban apocalypse stories.
posted by The Whelk (7 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
Hay’s contemporary F. A. R. Russell consistently noted higher instances of death from asthma and respiratory complaints during intense fogs, and he published widely in an effort to raise public concern about them. But Hay’s literary precursors (like the public in general) tended to see the fog as a mere nuisance.

For those who aren't aware, London's "fogs" were actually intense smog events. One smog in 1952 (ten years after this novella's setting) killed somewhere between 4,000 and 12,000 people (I've seen the math and I'd guess 12K is much closer to the mark).
posted by pie ninja at 9:55 AM on October 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


Just to wave the tsarist flag a bit, I've read two urban apocalypse stories from decades earlier in Russian, both involving comets striking Earth: Vladimir Odoevsky's 1828 “Dva dni v zhizni zemnogo shara” [Two days in the life of the terrestrial globe] (a sort of "benign apocalypse" in which there is a harmonious merging of the sun with the earth) and Osip Senkovsky's 1833 Fantasticheskie puteshestviya Barona Brambeusa [The Fantastic Journeys of Baron Brambeus], in which the baron visits an island in the Arctic, where his expedition finds what they think is a hieroglyphic record of the impact of a huge comet that destroys a great city (and the civilization it had created in the far north).
posted by languagehat at 11:38 AM on October 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


a sort of "benign apocalypse" in which there is a harmonious merging of the sun with the earth

Oh, yes?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:34 PM on October 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


It imagines the entire population of London choked to death under a soot-filled fog.

Saved only by the Klinneract...
posted by maryr at 12:39 PM on October 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Interesting. There's a tradition of English disaster novels in which the protagonist welcomes the apocalypse - Richard Jeffries' After London (1885) springs to mind, all the way through to the eagerly embraced disasters of early J.G.Ballard. Something in the air maybe?
posted by thatwhichfalls at 12:59 PM on October 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


I always thought the protagonist in "The Day of the Triffids" got off far too easy. Even if he didn't actually welcome the apocalypse, he survived in spite of a major injury & disability, only to face a disconcerting deus ex helicoptera at the end.
posted by sneebler at 3:17 PM on October 2, 2015


The phrase you're looking for is Cosy Catastrophe (SLTVT).
posted by Major Clanger at 3:49 PM on October 2, 2015


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