British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (review)

In this engagingly written book, Golinski's subject is the widespread attention that the weather received during the Enlightenment in private conversation, diaries, public philosophical discourse, international correspondence, and instrumentation. In Britain, the weather was an ever- present topic of conversation both because of its changeability and because of the view that however variable, Britain's temperate climes reflected, even influenced, the country's largely equable political and economic climate. However understood, either as the focus of systematic study or as a topic consistently evoked in historical and geographical discussion, the weather "was recognized as a material influence on human health and welfare that significantly affected the development of the world's peoples" (xiii). Nonetheless, given its extremes and its unpredictability, the weather refused to succumb to the Enlightenment's bias for rationality and utility.

This book should interest scholars in several different fields. Golinski apprises social and cultural historians, particularly, of the connections between weather, climate, social well-being, and bodily deportment in eighteenth-century Britain. His attention to an anonymous diarist's account of the Great Storm of 1703 will appeal to literary scholars interested in epistolary conventions. His account of how practitioners cultivated a formal language for correspondence about, and the scientific recording of, the weather—a rhetoric of precision, in thermometry and barometry especially—will prove instructive to historical meteorologists.

Historians of science and of technology will benefit from Golinski's engagement with the social context of instrumentation. In this regard, a useful companion volume would be Hasok Chang's discussion of the social and institutional history of chemical thermometry in Enlightenment London's Royal Society—Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (New York, 2004). As Golinski more than once notes, his book is not primarily a history of meteorology, to which both Vladimir Jankovic, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820 (Chicago, 2000), and Katherine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago, 2005), have made significant contributions. But it fits well with their accounts.

Most significantly, Golinski supplements that now more commonplace view of Enlightenment history not as the preserve of urbane philosophes debating among themselves but as a social history of lived experiences and quotidian practices. Precisely because of this excellent study of weather and of climate in the Enlightenment, the forecast for Enlightenment studies in general is now brighter.