There is much more than just the weather in this exemplary monograph. It can be described as an x-ray of Victorian intellectual life disclosing an anatomy of scientific culture not simply in the realm of weather forecasting and physical meteorology but also in its positioning with regard to the state, empire, professionalization, and popular knowledge. While it can be read as a history of science, it can as profitably be used as an account of political, institutional, and religious issues of the period known for its earnest ambition for intellectual progress. More specifically, it is an account of how modern societies came to regard weather prediction as a most conspicuous resource in a bid to acquire meteorological knowledge and enact environmental rights based on the timely access to reliable information.

The book opens with an extended discussion on the Victorian cultures of prophecy and prediction. Katherine Anderson shows that the story of weather prediction is first and foremost a story of how something as suspect as “prediction” could be applied to something as fickle as weather, in the time and place in which “prediction” and “prophecy” played formative roles in understanding the social, political, and spiritual norms of leadership, accreditation, and authority. That the beginnings of weather prediction, to a great extent, lay in situating the meteorological knowledge within a sphere of prophecy meant that the concrete attempts at forecasting had to overcome a high bar of expectations fueled by nagging doubts that continue to thrive (forecasters, wrote Irwin Shaw, are “the liars of science, portentuously surrounded by inacurate instruments, confidently deluding you with false visions of the future” [“The Climate of Insomnia,” in Short Stories: Five Decades (New York, 1983), 460]).

The analysis continues with an examination of almanacs as both one of the main conduits of the idea, and one of the targets of the debates over the credibility and moral responsibility, of weather prophets. Unpicking the fiscal and cultural meanings of print culture while scrutinizing the almanac content together with the issues of authorship and authenticity, Anderson draws attention to weather prediction (and astrometeorology) as a phenomenon with both atavistic and revolutionary overtones. The argument is that the mutual accusation of inadequacy and unwarranted promises voiced in both the elite and popular camps had to do not only with the negotiation over method, verification, and the limits of knowledge but also with social reform, audiences, and the marketplace.

Turning to the emergent “scientific” practices, Anderson follows meteorology's Baconian career(s) of data collecting, collaborative research, and network building. She identifies three such enterprises: one driven by the indefatigable James Glaisher in the form of a smorgasbord of research exploits, the nexus of which lay in the charismatic, if self-serving, persona of a metropolitan go-getter. The other had its nurturer in George James Symons, whose stewardship over 3,408 stations owed its success to a wise management of provincial volunteers. The third was thought up by Robert Fitzroy, the director of the government's newly (1854) founded Meteorological Department, whose data came from the continental observatories and the merchant vessels of Navy fleets.

Fitzroy features prominently in the narrative as he appears to be the first to venture in the direction of forecast. His guesstimates of the approaching storms—storm warnings—were expressly designed to aid navigation by a system of coastal warning codes that caused heated debates about their accuracy and the economic stakes involved. The lethal strain that such debates exerted on the career of the Department of Meteorology (Fitzroy committed suicide in 1865) suggests that the Victorian scientists worked their way toward public respectability through the struggles over individual judgment, professional credentials, the limits of applicability, and the organization of empirical work.

Empiricism indeed was the key. Anderson lucidly dissects the anthropology of its heroic monotony and the bid for standardization within the frameworks of statistics, uncertainty, and chance that were beginning to dominate scientific debate anywhere from demography to thermodynamics. Forecasting, for example, survived Fitzroy's demise as an art of “probable weather” in the era that touted statistics as rising above individual judgment and epitomizing the Victorian fixation with certainty, accountability, and public transparency.

All of these, in the end, however, had to be thwarted by the caprice of atmospheric events, and it is one of the lasting qualities of Anderson's study to be able to resurrect the varied response to this caprice, favoring frustration and despair over and above triumph and self-congratulation. And the response was sometimes remarkable. Some commentators put premiums on visceral “weather wisdom” and at-a-glance mapping. Others sought automation in the observation process, improvement in nomenclature, and faster transfer of data. Some claimed that none of this would work: the unpredictability of weather was the epitome of divine interposition and the bulwark against the hubris of rationality. The more practical turned toward the wider panorama of world weather and, in particular, to India, where they hoped to master the relatively homogenous space whose regularities and extremes presented a laboratory worth looking into.

The book concludes with this shift of attention and its effects on the relation between meteorology and the state. Especially revealing in this last section are the discussions on the split between physical (theoretical) meteorology and climatic (applied) work that, in a succinct form, shows early expectations of the institutionalized use of meteorological knowledge for the proper provision of citizens and governance of the states. Equally important in this respect is the controversy over sunspots and Indian famines (Mike Davis's work on the subject is left out), which, again, provides an early example of thinking over “causal attribution” and “recreancy” that inform current disaster research.

Anderson wraps up by convincingly asserting that the most prioritized goals of modern meteorology have unmistakably Victorian blueprints: “the need to work on a global scale, to coordinate and control individual activities, to create a hierarchical system that could decipher knowledge and then transmit it to waiting audiences” (293). Predicting the Weather provides a truly outstanding contribution to our understanding of these aspirations.