Weatherland: the writers and artists who thrived under English skies

Weather watchers may be curious to learn the artists and writers who have also turned their eyes to the sky.

Cloud Study (1821) by John Constable.

John Ruskin began his career believing “there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of pleasant weather”. As well as being a brilliant art critic and an artist himself, Ruskin was also the most dedicated weather interpreter of 19th-century England.

As the years went by, however, and the weather of his time seemed to get gloomier and gloomier, he began to have his doubts. In two lectures he gave in 1884, published subsequently as The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, Ruskin prophesied “a disastrous breakdown in the covenant between man and nature”. Where formerly he’d seen the mystery of God’s creation in the sky, now he saw human error.

In contrast with Thomas Hardy, who at the time saw not spectres in the air but a realistic emptiness, Ruskin believed the weather had begun to look to be made “of dead men’s souls”.

Not surprisingly, Ruskin’s lectures received a mixed, even condescending response at the time. There is a way, however, in which the darkness of the Victorian age — the polemical fogs of Bleak House, the funereal “under-sky” of Tennyson — can be read as a dark forecast from the roots of the industrial era, of our own impending weather doom. For despite the fact Ruskin’s vision of “the light, the air, the waters, all defiled!” could hardly be called exact science, it is nevertheless true that the levels of sulphur dioxide in British air peaked in the very decade his lectures were given.

Notwithstanding his apocalyptic vision, Ruskin was undoubtedly a man of his times, a son who yearned to bottle clouds just as his father had bottled sherry. In her new book Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies, Alexandra Harris shows us how fascinating the weather has always been to us, as a science of the air and as a constantly shifting analog of our own perceptions and temperaments. Yes, the weather has always been a wild, and, to some, a godlike thing, replete with bucolic unpredictability and mythological import, with mystery and drama and Virgilian rhythm, serving not only as metaphor and foodstore but as moral guide.

Inevitably the drip drip drip of English rain returns as a refrain throughout these pages, as does the low sky over the squelchy field and the consolation of the warming hearth by which so many of the books and paintings Harris dis­cusses were written and painted. Going as far back as the wintry Anglo-Saxon exile poetry of The Wanderer, she delineates surprising patterns in the history of England’s relationship with the weather, the cultural cloudbreaks and occlusions, the aesthetic breezes and corrective tempests. She surveys how these phenomena are rendered and interpreted, how they are inscribed into stone, printed on manuscripts, painted on canvases, conceptualised and curated, and analysed behind the barometer’s glass.

By way of explanation of the strictly chronological method she uses, Harris notes how time and weather are so aptly conjoined in the French term les temps. A touchstone of her chronology is Virginia Woolf’s immortal Orlando, who lived through it all. Harris has written extensively on Woolf in the past, not least in her previous book The Romantic Moderns, and here she shows to what a large extent Woolf was influenced by the weather, specifically how the plots of many of her novels, To The Lighthouse and The Waves for example, are composed in a conditional tense particular to the weather’s changeability.

Woolf was undoubtedly weather-smart, as were so many of the artists and writers Harris looks at, from Charlotte Bronte, who couldn’t abide Jane Austen’s novels for their lack of fresh air (though Harris, rightly, disagrees), to James Thomson, whose now little known poem The Seasons had an enormous influence in the 18th and 19th centuries. Harris seeks disparities too, as between Robert Burton’s brilliantly neurotic The Anatomy of Melancholy and the “see what’s right by your feet” approach of Francis Bacon’s Historia Ventorum. But likewise she paves the way for convergences, such as that between Eric Ravilious, who painted “ordinary places and unremarkable conditions” very beautifully, and Julian Barnes’s stylistic aversion to “significant weather”. Underscoring this informative book, which is exquisitely published by Thames & Hudson, lies the fact Harris is one of those rare academics who has an ear for the language. Her perceptive and often original insights regularly find form here in sentences of great rhythm, assonance and lucidity.

As such, she is an excellent conduit and scholar for her vast subject, even despite those moments when, because of her chronological approach, she lapses briefly into a perfunctory tone. One suspects, too, this occurs only when the ground has almost been too well-trodden. Her pages on Shakespeare are a case in point. For the most part however, Harris’s infectious erudition and excellent narrative instincts shine through.

So it is that long before we reach the contrasting Victorian skies of Ruskin and Hardy we are already paying attention, not least to the radical “skying” of the paintings of Constable and Turner, in which air and light are brought to centrestage and dramatised for their distinctive aesthetic and formal powers. In these artists the water-and-light show of the perpetually rainy island of England becomes no longer a mere backdrop to human activity but a foreground of optical, even ontological, wonder.

This is the case too in the lesser known glider-paintings of Peter Lanyon who, like his pupil Howard Hodgkin, was a conscious inheritor of the long history of English weather representation, as well as being a modern interpolator of the skyer’s art. Born in St Ives in 1918, Lanyon liked nothing better than to be towed fast in his glider to the edges of Cornwall cliffs then flung out into the air. His was an abstract expressionism achieved through a vocational sense of place and with physical courage in collaboration with the weather. In Lanyon we are no longer looking up in wonder or fear or for ornament, instead we are inhabitants of the swift, disjunctive, yet birdlike silence of his soaring on the thermals. He intensified the gentian blue of the Cornish sky-world by immersing himself within it. Tragically, just as Shelley met his end sailing in a storm off Italy, Lanyon crashed his glider and died in 1964. A recent exhibition of his work at the Courtauld Gallery in London, however, has placed him rightfully in the league of his peers Pollock and Rothko.

Harris concludes her fascinating tale with a night in 2013 when she had her own presaging vision after listening to Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde being revived by a vibrant local community in Tewkesbury. In these final pages we realise Weatherland is more than just a cultural history of English weather. When Harris confesses that she herself is attempting to listen more closely to the rain these days, to tune to her environment in the way a Hardy character might, we feel the contemporary urgency of her project.

As with her earlier discussion of Lucy Hutchinson’s 1679 poem, Order and Disorder, we are inspired to tune in ourselves. In Hutchinson’s poem the biblical view of the firmament as a solid roof is reprised, bringing to mind the subsequent scientific discoveries about the nature of our atmosphere. Yes, it’s true that it does indeed have a limit, a gaseous roof if you like, also walls and a floor, but alas no chimney.

So despite the empyrean grandeur of our weather the space in which it takes place turns out to be, well, resolutely finite, unlike the human mind. By looking into the literature and art of one small but remarkable culture Weatherland shows how only seers and visionaries have confronted these truths before. The implication is that maybe it’s time we all did.

Gregory Day is a novelist and poet.

Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies

By Alexandra Harris

Thames & Hudson, 384pp, $55 (HB)