Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies by Alexandra Harris (Thames & Hudson, £24.95)
The English are traditionally mocked for their obsession with the weather. They are also, of course, mocked for the weather itself. Yet Alexandra Harris, the author of Weatherland, is not centrally concerned with the famous asperities of the English weather; the climate in this country, she observes, has remained more or less the same over the past millennium.
By looking at the ways in which English writers have described the weather, Harris seeks to fathom how the world appears to different people at different moments in time. What has changed is not the weather but the way the English perceive it. As Harris writes: “I have tried to hang a mirror in the sky, and to watch the writers and artists who appear in it.”
Did people in the past look at a sunset or snow in the same way we do? What did a rainbow look like to those who lived before the time of Isaac Newton? Are certain conventions, in certain eras, so powerful that they recondition the way we see the world? Harris’s answer is that literary and artistic portrayals of the weather say more about the sensibility of a particular epoch than they do about its meteorology.
This idea is playfully but clearly expressed in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928), in which the main character lives through 300 years of British history. As Orlando moves through the centuries, the weather changes, evoking the atmosphere of each era. For example: “The first stroke of midnight sounded… A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The 18th century was over; the 19th century had begun.” Woolf’s technique, says Harris, shows that “as cultural preoccupations change, we find affinities with different kinds of weather…Weather gathers associations and our associations shape our experience of weather.”
The Romans, who shivered in their inhospitable northern outposts, longed for the warmer temperatures of home. Anglo-Saxon poets deployed the hostile elements as a poetic backdrop for their overarching sense of doom: Storms crash against these rocky slopes, Sleet and snow fall and fetter the world Winter howls, then darkness draws on The night-shadow casts gloom and brings Fierce hailstorms from the north to frighten men…
The summer is barely present in Anglo-Saxon literature. The sun, the “candle of the sky,” is pale and forlorn. Mortal life is described as a bird entering a bright warm hall, where there is feasting and laughter, before flying out into the stormy darkness, never to be seen again. The outside world is dangerous and threatening and, in writing of that time, the bleak weather enforces the malaise. In the medieval era, the atmosphere changed again, and Oxford scholars Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon were influenced by Aristotle’s precise taxonomies—“hot and cold, moist and dry”—and by mathematical arrangements of reality—the four seasons, the four humours and the four elements.
During the Renaissance era, Shakespeare riffed abundantly on the weather and famously tormented Lear and Macbeth with meteorological carnage. In Hamlet, he even argued, teasingly, for the conditional nature of perception: Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel? Polonius: By th’mass and ‘tis like a camel indeed. Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet: Or like a whale? Polonius: Very like a whale.
As Harris writes: “Our minds recoil from blankness, which is why it is hard to watch the clouds for a few minutes and not see creatures. We long for shape as we long for narrative.” There is also the question of how what we see can be influenced by those around us. “We also have a wonderful, dangerous capacity to see what we are told is there,” she writes—as Polonius does in this example.
The Romantic writers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were transfixed by the revolutionary possibilities of individual experience. When Percy Bysshe Shelley exclaims to the west wind, “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is,” he fashions a double metaphor: he wants the wind to play him, as it plays the trees; and he wants the wind to inspire him, so he can render his ecstasies in a completely new way. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Harris explains, “watched himself watching the weather. He wanted to know why he found certain conditions exhilarating. Why did the moon behind clouds haunt him? And how did his mood change what he saw?”
Coleridge sought to understand the authenticity of his own experience, in the hope, perhaps, that authentic verse would follow. Harris continues: “He was drawn to the extremes of the earth and of weather. The magnetic poles worked irresistibly on his dreams, and English places around him metamorphosed in their image. The hills and gorges of north Somerset became to him the land of Kubla Khan, with its caves of ice and sunless seas.”
Later Romantic works, such as Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, also merge reality and dreamscape, as Frankenstein is rescued in a “land of mist and snow”—with a nod back to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The remote north, an obsession of 19th-century explorers, was mined for symbolism by many writers; its intractable blankness used to evoke solitude, loneliness and horror. Yet all was not gloomy with the Romantics; there were moments of irony too. William Hazlitt describes his friend Coleridge hearing a thunderstorm and “running out bare-headed” to experience its poetic power; in a comical, and very English, way—“the clouds only muttered a few angry sounds, and let fall a few refreshing drops.”
The modernists—including Woolf—developed this Romantic approach to the weather by shining a light on the dynamic uncertainty of inner experience. Harris quotes from Between the Acts (the last novel Woolf wrote before her suicide in 1941), where Bernard imagines himself “lying in a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining”: “Enormous clouds come marching over the sky, tattered clouds, wisps of cloud. What delights me then is the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury. Great clouds always changing, and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch. Of story, of design. I do not see a trace then.”
Here the self seems to dissolve into the immensity around it. But there is a paradox: without Bernard observing it there is no scene at all, no clouds changing and no helter-skelter. Generalising truths are always thwarted by the unique nature of each individual.
The examples Harris supplies in this well-researched and lucid book are pleasingly idiosyncratic. Her writers are at times overwhelmed with joy and then with despair; at times deferential to prevailing orthodoxies, and, at others, avid with revolutionary fervour.
The book also objects to the outdated idea of the “pathetic fallacy.” This is the theory that, for example, when King Lear addresses the elements as if they hear him (“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage!”) he is guilty of the sentimental personification of nature.
But the mad Lear is, like anyone else, free to see nature as he wishes. Harris’s Weatherland is a beautiful and wild place, governed only by the fleeting truths of individual experience.
By looking at the ways in which English writers have described the weather, Harris seeks to fathom how the world appears to different people at different moments in time. What has changed is not the weather but the way the English perceive it. As Harris writes: “I have tried to hang a mirror in the sky, and to watch the writers and artists who appear in it.”
Did people in the past look at a sunset or snow in the same way we do? What did a rainbow look like to those who lived before the time of Isaac Newton? Are certain conventions, in certain eras, so powerful that they recondition the way we see the world? Harris’s answer is that literary and artistic portrayals of the weather say more about the sensibility of a particular epoch than they do about its meteorology.
This idea is playfully but clearly expressed in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928), in which the main character lives through 300 years of British history. As Orlando moves through the centuries, the weather changes, evoking the atmosphere of each era. For example: “The first stroke of midnight sounded… A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The 18th century was over; the 19th century had begun.” Woolf’s technique, says Harris, shows that “as cultural preoccupations change, we find affinities with different kinds of weather…Weather gathers associations and our associations shape our experience of weather.”
The Romans, who shivered in their inhospitable northern outposts, longed for the warmer temperatures of home. Anglo-Saxon poets deployed the hostile elements as a poetic backdrop for their overarching sense of doom: Storms crash against these rocky slopes, Sleet and snow fall and fetter the world Winter howls, then darkness draws on The night-shadow casts gloom and brings Fierce hailstorms from the north to frighten men…
The summer is barely present in Anglo-Saxon literature. The sun, the “candle of the sky,” is pale and forlorn. Mortal life is described as a bird entering a bright warm hall, where there is feasting and laughter, before flying out into the stormy darkness, never to be seen again. The outside world is dangerous and threatening and, in writing of that time, the bleak weather enforces the malaise. In the medieval era, the atmosphere changed again, and Oxford scholars Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon were influenced by Aristotle’s precise taxonomies—“hot and cold, moist and dry”—and by mathematical arrangements of reality—the four seasons, the four humours and the four elements.
During the Renaissance era, Shakespeare riffed abundantly on the weather and famously tormented Lear and Macbeth with meteorological carnage. In Hamlet, he even argued, teasingly, for the conditional nature of perception: Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel? Polonius: By th’mass and ‘tis like a camel indeed. Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet: Or like a whale? Polonius: Very like a whale.
As Harris writes: “Our minds recoil from blankness, which is why it is hard to watch the clouds for a few minutes and not see creatures. We long for shape as we long for narrative.” There is also the question of how what we see can be influenced by those around us. “We also have a wonderful, dangerous capacity to see what we are told is there,” she writes—as Polonius does in this example.
The Romantic writers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were transfixed by the revolutionary possibilities of individual experience. When Percy Bysshe Shelley exclaims to the west wind, “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is,” he fashions a double metaphor: he wants the wind to play him, as it plays the trees; and he wants the wind to inspire him, so he can render his ecstasies in a completely new way. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Harris explains, “watched himself watching the weather. He wanted to know why he found certain conditions exhilarating. Why did the moon behind clouds haunt him? And how did his mood change what he saw?”
Coleridge sought to understand the authenticity of his own experience, in the hope, perhaps, that authentic verse would follow. Harris continues: “He was drawn to the extremes of the earth and of weather. The magnetic poles worked irresistibly on his dreams, and English places around him metamorphosed in their image. The hills and gorges of north Somerset became to him the land of Kubla Khan, with its caves of ice and sunless seas.”
Later Romantic works, such as Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, also merge reality and dreamscape, as Frankenstein is rescued in a “land of mist and snow”—with a nod back to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The remote north, an obsession of 19th-century explorers, was mined for symbolism by many writers; its intractable blankness used to evoke solitude, loneliness and horror. Yet all was not gloomy with the Romantics; there were moments of irony too. William Hazlitt describes his friend Coleridge hearing a thunderstorm and “running out bare-headed” to experience its poetic power; in a comical, and very English, way—“the clouds only muttered a few angry sounds, and let fall a few refreshing drops.”
The modernists—including Woolf—developed this Romantic approach to the weather by shining a light on the dynamic uncertainty of inner experience. Harris quotes from Between the Acts (the last novel Woolf wrote before her suicide in 1941), where Bernard imagines himself “lying in a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining”: “Enormous clouds come marching over the sky, tattered clouds, wisps of cloud. What delights me then is the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury. Great clouds always changing, and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch. Of story, of design. I do not see a trace then.”
Here the self seems to dissolve into the immensity around it. But there is a paradox: without Bernard observing it there is no scene at all, no clouds changing and no helter-skelter. Generalising truths are always thwarted by the unique nature of each individual.
The examples Harris supplies in this well-researched and lucid book are pleasingly idiosyncratic. Her writers are at times overwhelmed with joy and then with despair; at times deferential to prevailing orthodoxies, and, at others, avid with revolutionary fervour.
The book also objects to the outdated idea of the “pathetic fallacy.” This is the theory that, for example, when King Lear addresses the elements as if they hear him (“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage!”) he is guilty of the sentimental personification of nature.
But the mad Lear is, like anyone else, free to see nature as he wishes. Harris’s Weatherland is a beautiful and wild place, governed only by the fleeting truths of individual experience.
