LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. 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. 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. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. 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.
Are you able to visualize what is happening in this passage?
This is from Bleak House by Charles Dickens, if you are curious.
Yes, but I spent a lot of my childhood reading things like Sherlock Holmes, Jules Verne, count of Monte cristo, Oliver twist, etc.
I would argue Sherlock Holmes, Verne, and Monte Cristo (which I really like) read nothing like the slob OP posted. (I’ve never read Oliver Twist though).
I would argue that passages like this (Monte cristo) train you to understand OP’s slob: “I was then almost assured that the inheritance had neither profited the Borgias nor the family, but had remained unpossessed like the treasures of the Arabian Nights, which slept in the bosom of the earth under the eyes of the genie.”
Also, Oliver twist is by the same author as op.
No… I read your quote straight through and without issues. I had to re-read many of the sentences in OP’s quote and put effort to make sense out of them. Your quote feels normal, with flourishes, but normal. OP’s quote doesn’t. For me there is no comparison.