Unlike the weather fronts that seem to drench us with monotonous regularity, studies of the history of the weather have been noticeable only by their scarcity. Indeed, and at the expense of overstretching the analogy, they have resembled much more closely Francis Galton's anticyclones, those weather systems that have graced the British Isles far too rarely of late. Until recently, that is. Following the example set by the likes of James Fleming, Vladimir Jankovic and Mark Monmonier, there has been a steady increase in the number of book-length academic studies of the history of the atmospheric sciences, not to mention the publication of a number of popular-science books and articles in scholarly journals. The two books under review here are therefore welcome additions to what is a gradually burgeoning field.
Jan Golinski has been a central figure in this field for some time, although this is his first book-length study of the history of meteorology, his previous contributions having been confined to book chapters and journal articles. Indeed, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment brings those studies together and combines them with new material, to explore ‘how experiences and understandings of the weather reflected cultural change in the eighteenth century’ (p. 7). Golinski is careful not to delude the unwitting reader. This is not, he forewarns us in the introduction and reminds us in the conclusion, a history of the emergence of meteorological science in the eighteenth century. But that is not to say that one does not learn a lot about it along the way.
As a number of authors have noted, and as Golinski affirms, ideas of climate were reconceived in the eighteenth century through the application of systematic study, which attempted to normalize and regularize the weather. This shift was achieved through daily recording, using instruments like the barometer. Such activities placed weather study within a wider Enlightenment discourse, so that the climate would reflect the ‘regular actions of physical laws that were manifestations of God's providential benevolence’ (p. xii). But routine and regular recording of British weather also revealed, or at least confirmed, other aspects of its character. It was seen as ‘generally benevolent – both moderate overall and gently variable in temperature and precipitation’ (p. 57). The weather was an asset to agriculture and to the health of the population. Even the constant wind and rain served to fertilize both the soil and the populace; physicians in the mid-eighteenth century noted that the British people appeared to flourish in damp conditions. Generalized from the individual body to the body politic, the weather was seen to define the very character of the nation. Indeed, the British saw the climate as a vital component in an emerging sense of national identity. It was a providential asset of the nation – a divine gift to health and prosperity, in the same way that other nations' climates were seen to retard their development.
The weather, of course, resisted its reduction to observable regularities. Anomalies and extreme events continued to evoke primitive superstition and weather-lore – attitudes meant to be at odds with Enlightenment values. That a variety of discourses of the weather could circulate in eighteenth-century Britain was a result of its very public nature, with the literate middle classes realizing the value of listening to the experiences and sayings of their unlettered neighbours. Indeed, as Golinski notes, the ‘science of the weather was built upon the speech of many informants’ (p. 76). He highlights the fact that although the country was becoming more literate it still referred to oral tradition. Although it was urbanizing it was still rooted in rural life; although increasingly rational, it was still superstitious.
In perhaps the best chapter of the book – the first – Golinski brings many of his main arguments together in the analysis of one weather diary, written by an anonymous Worcestershire meteorologist in the first years of the eighteenth century. The document, Golinski observes, ‘joins observations and theoretical ideas together with a record of personal experience’, where at times the author ‘gave free rein to a poetic impulse to concatenate metaphorical and allusive terms’ (p. 15). In doing so, the Worcestershire author was trying to find an adequate language to describe weather and his reaction to it, bodily and emotionally – unsurprising, positioned as the author was ‘between learned and popular cosmological traditions at the dawn of the Enlightenment’ (p. 15). In the conclusion Golinski raises the question of why the compilation of weather diaries like that in the Worcestershire account occurred only in fits and starts, with large gaps in the record. Partly it was because these accounts were chorographical by nature rather than cartographic; they aimed to record the history of a circumscribed locality rather than a geography that covered diverse points. In other words, eighteenth-century meteorologists hoped to ‘grasp the temporal connection between weather events rather than to map the movement of weather across the face of the earth’ (p. 209).
The edited volume Intimate Universality continues this meditation on the geographies of weather and climate. As the title suggests, the book's contributors consider the changing relations between the local and the global in meteorology, noting as they do that it ‘is a science of no place and every place’ (p. xviii). The substantive essays set out to map out the nature of this seemingly paradoxical terrain in different historical contexts, including the drawing rooms of Georgian Britain (Jankovic), Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory (Richard Staley), mobile climatological observatories in converted Opel motor cars in interwar Austria (Deborah Coen), the airways of mid-twentieth century America (Roger Turner and Gregory Cushman) and the conference rooms where responses to climate change threats are actively being discussed today (Fleming). In other excellent chapters, Katherine Anderson highlights the tensions between the representation of local observation and of global – or at least hemispheric – processes by tracing the history of meteorological mapping over the course of the nineteenth century, while Gregory Good examines John Herschel's thinking on meteorology, which attempted to reconcile an emphasis on observation with a strong focus on theoretical development – historiographical locals and globals, if you will.
It is inevitably more difficult to pursue coherent agendas across edited volumes than across monographs, but viewed as a whole Intimate Universality certainly helps us to reconsider modern atmospheric sciences as an effortlessly global enterprise. As both that volume and British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment also remind us, it is the weather itself that can so easily confound our tendency – in the global north at least – to think of it as somehow global and abstract, as well as benign, natural, even at times tamed (even if only by waterproof coats, weather warnings and storm drains). In relation to this last point, both volumes also urge us to give more time to the politics of the weather. In his conclusion Golinski finds parallels between attitudes to the weather in eighteenth-century Britain and those expressed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the USA, while the editors of Intimate Universality note that in our struggles with the weather ‘we are all in it together’ (p. xviii). True to a degree, but as Hurricane Katrina exposed, it is usually the poorest of society that are in it more than others.
