“London particular”

In the opening minutes of The Divorce of Lady X (dir. Tim Whelan, 1938), two bobbies talk about the fog: “It’s pea soup, I’m afraid. The old London particular.” Wait a minute, wait a minute, thought I, I know that expression. It’s in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), courtesy of William Guppy, speaking to Esther Summerson:

He was very obliging, and as he handed me into a fly after superintending the removal of my boxes, I asked him whether there was a great fire anywhere? For the streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen.

“Oh, dear no, miss,” he said. “This is a London particular.”

I had never heard of such a thing.

“A fog, miss,” said the young gentleman.

“Oh, indeed!” said I.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites this passage as the first instance of London particular meaning “a dense fog affecting London.” What’s surprising to me is that London particular had an earlier, now obsolete, meaning: “a kind of Madeira imported through London.” As in “I uncorked a bottle of London particular” (1807). Dickens traded one particular for another, turning wine into fog.