Analzye the following passage from Charles Dickens' Bleak House for syntax and sentence structure. What is the purpose of the passage?London....

With syntax and sentence structure, Charles Dickens is
setting the mood for the introduction of the case of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce in the High
Court of Chancery. Notice that these sentences in the first paragraphs of Chapter 1 of
Bleak House are actually not sentences at all, but fragments. 
Fragments are usually missing either the subject or the verb, or the fragments are
dependent clauses and need a complete sentence to lean
on.

So for sentence structure, we see a long sequence of
fragments. For syntax, or word order in the sentence fragments, we largely see
nouns--possible subjects--and descriptive words and phrases, but no verbs. Remember that
-ing words that seem to be verbs are verbals--or words based on
verbs--that serve as adjectives that modify nouns or pronouns.

Because
of their incomplete nature, a long sequence of fragments can have a confusing effect
because we can sense information is missing. We have a list of descriptions like a
journal entry or notes, an impression of action, but no complete thoughts because the
verbs or action words of the sentences are missing. We have fog and mud and mire and
drizzle everywhere with people “slipping and sliding” in “ill-temper.”  Fog blurs
vision; mud cakes and hides a clean appearance and impedes progress; slipping and
sliding in mud gives the impression of having no solid ground to stand
on.

Fog is everywhere. And this last that I wrote is a complete
sentence, giving a sense of a finished thought. Note that in the passage you provide,
Dickens writes:

readability="9">

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river,  fog
down the river, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of
collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships;
fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small
boats...

And he writes it all
in fragments!  Again, this leads up to the introduction of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, a case
that has been in the court so long that principal characters involved have matured,
grown old, or died. No one quite recalls all the details of the case, though many legal
officials hope for a profitable settlement or payment for working on it.  Dickens
expresses his contempt for the inefficient legal system finally in complete sentences in
this passage:

readability="15">

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog
is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction,
appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar.
And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the
Lord High Chancellor
in his High Court of
Chancery.

Thus
through a long sequence of fragments, Dickens sets a mood of mental fogginess or
obfuscation around a case bogged down for decades in the legal system just like a
dinosaur in primeval mud.