Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies
Alexandra Harris
Language: English
Pages: 432
ISBN: 0500518114
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The story of English culture over a thousand years can be told as the story of changing ideas about the weather. Writers and artists across the centuries, looking up at the same skies and walking in the same brisk air, have felt very different things. In a sweeping panorama, Weatherland allows us to witness cultural climates on the move. The Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest lived in a wintry world, writing about the coldness of exile or the shelters they must defend against enemies outdoors. The Middle Ages brought the warmth of spring; the new lyrics were sung in praise of blossom and cuckoos. It is hard to find a description of a rainy night before 1700, but by the end of the eighteenth century the Romantics will take a squall as fit subject for their most probing thoughts. There have been times when the numbers on a rain gauge count for more than a pantheon of aerial gods. There have been times for meteoric marvels and times for gentle breeze. The weather is vast and yet we experience it intimately, which is why Alexandra Harris builds her remarkable story from small evocative details. There is the drawing of a twelfth-century man in February, warming bare toes by the fire. There is the tiny glass left behind from the Frost Fair of 1684, and the 'Sunspan' house in Angmering that embodies the bright ambitions of the 1930s. Harris catches the distinct voices of compelling individuals. 'Bloody cold', says Jonathan Swift in the 'slobbery' January of 1713. Percy Shelley wants to become a cloud and John Ruskin wants to bottle one. Weatherland is a celebration of English air and a life-story of those who have lived in it. As we enter what may be the last decades of English weather as we know it, this is a history for our times.
more quickly on a tractor, and rural life was transformed wherever there was a car available. In a poem called ‘A Wet Night’ Hardy grumbled about the ‘hardship’ of a long walk in the rain, but then he stopped to consider that his forefathers, ‘sires of mine now perished and forgot’, would have thought such rain a trifle: they had trudged on in these conditions day after day.25 Work had changed, transport had changed, and the short-term weather outlook was more certain too: forecasts appeared in
Londoners (1956) is his immunity to the English chill: he arrives from Trinidad without so much as an overcoat and carries on as if the weather is just fine. But this is a ‘miracle of metabolism’ and everyone else is leaning close to the gas fire and ‘rattling with cold’. The grim South African exile in J. M. Coetzee’s novel Youth watches muffled Trinidadians under the ‘ghostly sodium lights’ on the Kilburn High Road and wonders how they stand it. For himself, John won’t admit to liking the
jagged summit reminiscent of an iceberg, the Shard is a giant enlargement of the ice-splinters painted by Abraham Hondius when the Thames froze in 1677 and looked like an inner-city Arctic. But if it advertises itself as a weather event in one moment, it can also fade away into mist. The aim of the delicately tapered glass at the very top is that it will disappear. This self-effacement is combined with the gesture of unroofed ambition by which the building claims the endlessness of the sky
storme of raine Did pour into his Lemans lap so fast That every wight to shrowd it did constrain, And this fair couple eke to shroud themselves were fain. The weather here is cosmic sex: Jove pours his fertile rain into the lap of the earth which is his ‘leman’, or lover. For the wandering mortals on the plain, the change has been made, the action begun. Una and the Red-Cross Knight seek shelter in a ‘shady grove’ which, as they walk, springs up around them to become Faerieland. This, then,
democracy, the divinely inspired interpreter of God’s ways to men. Finding Milton by his door, you would not want simply to talk about the weather. Nonetheless, he was a great weather-writer in an age when weather (as opposed to meteoric wonders) was not much written. A century and a half later, when the Romantic poets rejoiced in the sublime effects of mists and sun, it was Milton’s words they remembered. Wordsworth would come to think the storm in Paradise Regained was ‘the finest in all