{"id":2657,"date":"2019-10-07T07:37:09","date_gmt":"2019-10-07T07:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2657"},"modified":"2019-10-07T07:37:09","modified_gmt":"2019-10-07T07:37:09","slug":"romantic-reimaginings-luke-howard-namer-of-clouds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2657","title":{"rendered":"Romantic Reimaginings: Luke Howard, Namer of Clouds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Romantic Reimaginings is a BARS blog series which seeks to explore the ways in which texts of the Romantic era continue to resonate. The blog is curated by Eleanor Bryan. If you would like to publish an article in the series, please email ebryan@lincoln.ac.uk.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today on the blog, Tess Somervell explores the resonance of Luke Howard’s writings on clouds.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A contender for the best English Heritage blue plaque in London is that commemorating the chemist and meteorologist Luke Howard (1772-1864), at 7 Bruce Grove, Tottenham. Howard is listed simply as \u2018Namer of Clouds\u2019.<\/p>\n

In December 1802, Howard gave a lecture to the Askesian Society called the \u2018Essay on Clouds\u2019, published the following year as an essay \u2018On the Modification of Clouds\u2019. Previously most meteorologists had held that clouds were too transient and variable to classify. But Howard argued that clouds shifted between a limited number of fundamental forms or \u2018modifications\u2019, for which he proposed the Latin nomenclature that we still use today: cumulus, cirrus, stratus, nimbus, and their various combinations.<\/p>\n

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Luke Howard blue plaque. Photo by Acabashi.<\/p><\/div>\n

Howard\u2019s theory of cloud formation immediately caught the imaginations of Romantic poets and artists: its influence can be seen in Percy Shelley\u2019s 1820 poem \u2018The Cloud\u2019 and in the landscape paintings of John Constable. Howard\u2019s cloud terminology has become so familiar that most people who are familiar with the cloud names aren\u2019t aware that they are Romantic inventions. Over the last century, as well as providing titles for paintings, sculptures, and musical and literary compositions, Howard\u2019s cloud names have been repurposed in product branding: you can buy Cumulus and Nimbus running shoes, or a Cirrus Ironing Board.<\/p>\n

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Portrait of Howard by John Opie<\/p><\/div>\n

Howard\u2019s essay on clouds, then, is a Romantic text that has been reimagined in varied ways. But from the first, readers were intrigued as much by the figure of Howard himself as by his work. In 1815, Goethe read a German translation of \u2018On the Modification of Clouds\u2019 and was stirred by Howard\u2019s method of giving form and order to formless, boundless nature. He wrote a poem \u2018In Honour of Howard\u2019 which, before describing the cloud types themselves, begins with lines celebrating the namer of clouds: \u2018Howard gives us with his clearer mind \/ The gain of lessons new to all mankind\u2026 As clouds ascend, are folded, scatter, fall, \/ Let the world think of thee who taught it all.\u2019 (trans. George Soane and Sir John Bowring). Goethe wanted to know more about the man behind the science. He wrote to the British Foreign Office, requesting \u2018even the barest outline of Howard\u2019s life\u2026 Thus I could see how such a mind took form, and how it was led to view nature in a natural way, give itself over to her, recognize her laws\u2026\u2019 (trans. Douglas Miller) He was delighted when this request was met with a letter from Howard himself, containing a brief autobiography, which Goethe then translated into German and had published.<\/p>\n

In recent decades, artists and writers have continued to reimagine Howard as a figure and a personality. Many are just as if not more romanticising in their depiction of Howard as is Goethe\u2019s poem. In his excellent book, Clouds: Nature and Culture, Richard Hamblyn (also Howard\u2019s biographer) lists several works of art that have taken Howard the man, rather than the clouds-as-understood-by-Howard, for their theme. These include Lavinia Greenlaw\u2019s poem \u2018What We Can See of the Sky Has Fallen\u2019 (from A World Where News Travelled Slowly) and Carol Ann Duffy\u2019s poem \u2018Luke Howard, Namer of Clouds\u2019 (from The Bees). It is telling that both Greenlaw\u2019s and Duffy\u2019s poems draw more from Howard\u2019s memoir letter to Goethe (and also, in Greenlaw\u2019s case, an account of him written by his granddaughter), than from the essay on clouds. In his letter, Howard recalls watching the weather from his bedroom at school, especially the strange weather of 1783 and a dramatic meteor: \u2018We were roused from our beds by the intense light it afforded\u2019. Greenlaw echoes but reworks this as \u2018A childhood of freak weather \u2013 roused from your bed \/ To see the night lit by a meteor\u2019. Duffy\u2019s account is even more Romantic: \u2018Smitten \/ he stared up evermore; saw \/ a meteor\u2019s fiery spurt\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>One of the most recent reimaginings of Howard is \u2018Namer of Clouds\u2019, the title song of the debut album by folk singer-songwriter Kitty Macfarlane. The song begins with that same image of Howard as a child: \u2018A small boy stands \/ Face pressed to the glass\u2026\u2019 The first half of \u2018Namer of Clouds\u2019 celebrates, as did Goethe, Howard\u2019s ability to name and give meaning to an elusive sky. However, in the second half, a note of disturbance enters. \u2018How did we become so bold,\u2019 Macfarlane asks, to \u2018seize the heavens, claim control\u2019? These lines reverberate to the song\u2019s close, so that the refrain \u2018namer of clouds\u2019 assumes an ambivalence. Is naming an act of inspired imagination, as for Goethe, an expression of love, as for Duffy, or is it, as Macfarlane suggests, a way of claiming ownership that may be arrogant, even violent?<\/p>\n

It is amusing that Howard has been reimagined so often as a Romantic lone visionary, more closely resembling Wordsworth\u2019s image of Newton as \u2018a mind forever \/ Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone\u2019 than Howard\u2019s portrait of himself in the letter to Goethe: \u2018a man of domestic habits and very happy in my family and a few friends\u2019. But romanticising Howard at least reminds us of the human creativity, and the emotional and cultural currents, that underlie seemingly objective scientific theories and terms, in the Romantic period and in any age. Imagining and reimagining the \u2018Namer of Clouds\u2019 is a way into thinking about the ethics of observing, analysing, and labelling the natural world.<\/p>\n

Works Cited:
\n– Duffy, Carol Ann. The Bees. Picador, 2011.
\n– Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Scientific Studies. Ed. and trans. Douglas Miller. Vol. 12 of Collected Works. Princeton University Press, 1996.
\n– Greenlaw, Lavinia. A World Where News Travelled Slowly. Faber and Faber, 1997.
\n– Hamblyn, Richard. Clouds: Nature and Culture. Reaktion Books, 2017.
\n– Macfarlane, Kitty. Namer of Clouds. Navigator Records, 2018.
\n– Scott, Douglas. Luke Howard (1772-1864): His Correspondence with Goethe and His Continental Journey of 1816. William Sessions Ltd, 1976.<\/p>\n

Tess Somervell is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds. Her current project is titled \u2018Georgic Climates: Writing the Weather in Eighteenth-Century Poetry\u2019.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Romantic Reimaginings is a BARS blog series which seeks to explore the ways in which texts of the Romantic era continue to resonate. The blog is curated by Eleanor Bryan…. Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2657"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2657"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2662,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2657\/revisions\/2662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}