The sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw, the streets were wet and sloppy. The smoke hung sluggishly above the chimney-tops as if it lacked the courage to rise, and the rain came slowly and doggedly down, as if it had not even the spirit to pour.

Dickens uses dense, sensory description and personification to make the weather mirror a broader mood of urban despondency. The “smoke” that “lacked the courage to rise” and the rain that falls “doggedly” turn London’s atmosphere into a moral and emotional climate: heavy, dispirited, and resistant to change. The passage exemplifies Dickens’s talent for animating the city itself—fog, soot, damp, and mud become active agents that press on the inhabitants. Beyond scene-setting, the imagery suggests stagnation and fatigue, preparing the reader for a narrative world in which hardship is ordinary and hope must struggle upward against the weight of environment and circumstance.