What is Michaelmas Term?
The text of Bleak House begins: London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall… Fog everywhere. “Term” referred to both the academic sessions of Oxford and Cambridge and the periods during which the Courts were in session. As of 1831, the Michaelmas term was set for November 2 to 25th. (The other three terms of the year were Lent, Easter and Hilary.) Was it really so foggy? Daniel Pool, in his excellent and fascinating guide What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew (Simon and Schuster, 1993), points out that at certain times of the year — with November the worst — “a great yellowness reigned everywhere” in London: At eight o’clock in the morning on an average day over London, an observer reported the sky began to turn black with the smoke from thousands of coal fires… The fog was so thick, observed a foreigner at mid-century, that you could take a man by the hand and not be able to see his face, and people literally lost their way
