Domesticating Climate: Scale and the Meteorology of Luke Howard

Abstract

Between 1807 and 1819, English chemist Luke Howard kept a meticulous daily log of meteorological observations. Published as The Climate of London (1818–1820), these observations are interspersed with reports on the world’s weather gleaned from newspapers and personal correspondence. Howard records several different shifts in London’s weather over the course of any given day, demonstrating the mutability of weather from hour to hour. In his summaries of a whole season’s weather, however, he minimises the significance of these variations by emphasising means and averages, pattern and consistency. He likewise flattens variation over the reach of a decade so that despite the fact that the first two months of the Spring of 1816 are on average 8oF lower than the corresponding months of 1815, he is able to conclude in 1820 that the climate of London is fundamentally stable. Howard’s detailed meteorological accounting attempts to tame the climatic sublime of the early nineteenth century, and, in so doing, reassert his vision of an essentially orderly, ordained world—despite the devastating floods, crop failures and storms experienced by his correspondents (and despite his contemporaries’ theories of species extinction, geological catastrophe and permanent climate change). It is apiece with the essentially anti-Romantic efforts of his essay ‘On the modification of clouds’ (1802) to rescue clouds ‘from empirical mysteriousness, and the reproach of perpetual uncertainty’. This chapter argues that despite Howard’s attempt to domesticate the sublime, chasten the ‘vague and unphilosophical language’ of weather watchers and likewise fix the signification of clouds, his writing does not escape the influence of a literary culture deeply invested in the weather as a cluster of tropes signalling the limits of rationalism.