British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (review)

The British Broadcasting Company has on occasion given a one-word weather forecast for the whole of the British Isles: "changeable." Jan Golinski describes how the special relationship of Britons to their weather developed from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, a period during which British identity became intertwined with British climate. The somatic and psychological health of individuals as well as the degree of civilization of the entire nation were linked to climate by a wide range of Enlightenment writers: men of letters such as Samuel Johnson and Joseph Addison; physicians such as John Arbuthnot and George Cheyne; and natural and moral philosophers alike, including Stephen Hales and David Hume. As Golinski shows in this engaging and wide-ranging book, the weather was the nodal point at which scientific observation, the cultivation of self, public hygiene schemes, medical regimens, theories of national character, and literary satire intersected in the long British Enlightenment.

The Hippocratic revival of the mid-eighteenth century underscored the connections between health and climate. Learned physicians such as Thomas Sydenham remarked on correlations between prevailing weather conditions and the waxing and waning of various illnesses; observers in British colonies noted the deleterious effects of local heat and humidity on British bodies accustomed to more temperate regions. Just as Linnaeus in Uppsala experimented with the acclimatization of exotic plants, British settlers in the colonies were the involuntary subjects of reverse experiments in adaptation to unfamiliar climatic conditions. Colonists primed by Ptolemaic theories of climate bound to latitude were sorely disappointed to find out that, for example, Boston winters were considerably harsher than those of Rome, also at circa 42 degrees north. The savagery of New World weather, with its hurricanes, blizzards, and tornadoes, became proverbial. By the mid-eighteenth century, Americans proudly claimed to have tamed their climate by cutting down forests. More generally, climate and civilization were thought to stride hand in hand: blessed with a temperate but variable climate, Britons had been spared both the lethargy of the tropics and the brutality of the arctic and made robust and mentally agile by the vagaries of their weather.

Older theories concerning the connection between the quality of airs and health were given a new lease on life by the Enlightenment fascination with the barometer and discoveries in pneumatic chemistry. Handsomely encased in wood and brass, the barometer became part of the furniture of Enlightenment, a decoration and conversation piece in gentlemanly parlors. Although savants could not quite agree on exactly what barometers measured, daily readings were widely assumed to give some indication of the quality of the air, high pressure producing high spirits and vice versa. More metaphorically, the barometer became a favorite figure for mercurial sensibilities. Reforming physicians devised ambitious plans to rid cities of their characteristic stink; radical natural philosophers experimented with the mind-bending and allegedly salubrious effects of dephlogisticated air and laughing gas. On hand from several manuscript weather journals, Golinski describes how the alterations of mood, from melancholy to elation, were likened and causally connected to fluctuations in the state of the air by the diarists. The very act of keeping a weather journal over years regularized the observer's life by enforcing a regimen of immobility and fixed hours.

Golinski turns in a mixed verdict on just how enlightened Enlightenment pre-occupations with the weather were. Despite reams of records of temperature and barometer readings, very little progress was made toward ascertaining the natural laws that governed the weather, much less in making reliable predictions. Despite much castigation of vulgar errors and peasant superstitions, savants often turned to the weather wisdom of farmers, sailors, and even animals. Despite stern warnings against the perils of enthusiasm and rabble-rousing portents, catastrophic weather events like the storm of 1703 called forth admonitions to repent in the face of divine wrath. In the opening and closing pages of the book, Golinski...