Weatherland : Writers and Artists Under English Skies
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.