During the long eighteenth century, the drive to impose order by classifying and categorizing all possible aspects of the natural world led a number of gentleman scholars to apply their most careful attentions to keeping painstaking and detailed records of the weather of the British Isles. While their studies failed to provide information that would enable man to tame or even to control the weather—something that continues to elude us—the results of these eighteenth-century studies not only changed popular contemporary attitudes toward weather in the Enlightenment era but planted the seeds for the scientific discipline that would become meteorology. Taking records of weather patterns became a respectable, if tedious, intellectual undertaking in which dedicated observers attempted to uncover regularity in the fluctuations of their local climates and produced observations that ultimately shaped the relationship Britons had with their environment and their sense of national identity.

Jan Golinski, professor of history and humanities at the University of New Hampshire and author of Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (1992) and Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (2005), describes the changes brought about in national consciousness by weather diarists and natural philosophers in British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment, a fascinating work that reveals the many connections between climate and culture. Before the Enlightenment, weather was a force routinely associated with the supernatural. The common point of view was that God created normal variations in weather to enable man to grow crops and take pleasure in the seasons, but he sent extremes of weather as punishment or a reminder of the power of the divine.

One example of this sort of extreme was the “Great Storm” of November 1703, which left such damage in its wake that London was said to look as it had after the Great Fire of 1666, less than forty years earlier. The 1703 storm included the Bishop of Bath and Wells among its victims, but the greatest toll was at sea, where thousands died. The Great Storm was so catastrophic that it held a primary position in national lore until the devastation of the October 1987 hurricane that roared through southern England without warning.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, the search for natural order and scientific foundations for natural phenomena had changed the way the average Briton thought about weather. He became more aware of its effects upon his physical condition and vigor, and he also began to recognize that Great Britain had weather patterns that were peculiarly British, a recognition that added to the growth of a national identity. Each type of weather was identified with certain national benefits, so that cold winds were considered bracing, the damp was considered healthy for Britons, and sudden changes in weather were known to provide healthy stimulation akin to physical exercise.

By working to amass a thorough collection of weather data for the British Isles and their colonial territories, the natural philosophers of the Enlightenment aimed to increase knowledge about their climate and its relationship to the earth and themselves. Religion was not entirely omitted, however, since increased understanding would surely demonstrate that man continued to progress, as well as providing evidence that Providence favored the British with the choicest and most productive of weather.

The Enlightenment's advances in scientific instruments played an important role, not only in the acquisition of information by those who took their explorations of the natural world seriously but also in the popularization of such information. Members of the “enlightened” and well-heeled middle classes acquired barometers and thermometers as status symbols but often had no idea how these instruments worked or even how to interpret their readings. Still, possession of the latest weather instruments was a sign that the owner enjoyed the increased acuity so fashionable at the time and was undoubtedly sensitive, as well, to the ways in which health and well-being were influenced by the climate, so much so that some worried about excessive sensitivity to climate as a sign of moral decline in the nation.

The less well informed remained subject to backsliding in their enlightenment, however. For several weeks during the summer of 1783, the British Isles were enveloped by an odd and frightening haze that was accompanied by oppressive heat and a bloodred sun. In the twentieth century, scientists were able to determine that the haze of 1783 was created by a volcanic eruption in Iceland, but at the time the haze descended upon Britain, weather diarists and men of scientific interests were anxious that any weather event outside the expected was likely to lead to the resurgence of superstitions of country folk, so they took careful note of any talk of prophecies, portents, or the supernatural. The aim of these Enlightenment weather watchers was to document regularity and natural order, focusing upon patterns rather than exceptions, and any reappearance of the old habits of predicting the weather using folk wisdom was to be discouraged as an intellectual setback.

Golinski points out that he was in the final stages of writing British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment at the time Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. The prevalence of warnings in news reports that human abuses, sins, or squandering of natural resources somehow created the disaster demonstrates, Golinski argues, that man's relationship with the natural world remains imperfectly understood. With an exhaustive bibliography of archival, primary (before 1900), and secondary sources, Golinski's riveting and entertaining work is a valuable and revealing addition to the histories of culture and science.