A WEATHER REPORT
The
British Empire owed much to the desire
to
find a more congenial climate,
a
better cup of tea, and someone to make it.
Much
bloodshed and horror
over
some rain and a cold wind.
Shelley
was obsessed with wind, Wordsworth
fretted
over clouds, and Keats
had
a thing for mist and damp, which didn’t
do
his fragile health much good at all.
Samuel
Palmer painted golden corn
in
a permanent summer twilight, while Turner
was
very much excited by violent storms as much
as
Constable was by a light drizzle and the sort
of
dappled light that used to set Gerard
Manley
Hopkins off; on the whole, English
Romanticism
has always been a conversation
about
the weather.
The year
1816, for example,
the
Year of No Summer when Mount Tambora
in
the Dutch East Indies erupted and plunged
the
Northern Hemisphere into volcanic winter
of
famine – now that was a thing indeed: no
oats
for the horses led to the invention
of
the bicycle, and in North America
the
settling of the Midwest, and the apocalyptic
gloom
probably spurred on the Book of Mormon.
Meanwhile,
in Villa Diodati, overlooking
Lake
Geneva, the ungenial weather kept inside
Byron,
Shelley, Dr Polidori, and Mary Shelley
(who
wasn’t having any of their male nonsense),
so
to entertain themselves they got to writing,
hence
we have Mary’s Frankenstein (Yay!),
Byron’s
poem “Darkness”, and Polidori
stole
Byron’s “A Fragment” and wrote The
Vampyre
which
later inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula.
Virginia
Wolfe’s Orlando measures out the
epochs
with
weather reports, heights wuther on the moors,
and
in Dickens it always seems to be dripping.
Tennyson
is the apotheosis of rising damp.
It’s
as if the creative talent of England is a kind
of
natural barometer.
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