Chapter 5 STORMS AND TORRENTS

I

But the weather is a distinctively human-centered discursive topic for the human imagination. Well beyond and long predating “A City Shower” and The Storm, the representation of the weather has been used as a tool to shape, manage, and understand human being, consistently invoking a premise of human priority.³ From the classical period onward, and even to the present day, accounts of climate have focused on the equation of human ailments or character traits with climatic events.⁴ For Swift,

A coming Show’r your shooting Corns presage,

Old Aches throb, your hollow Tooth will rage. (ll. 9–10)

This association of human “Aches” with changes in the weather is a long-standing trope. For Joseph Addison in Spectator 440 (1712), for example, “another of the Company … knew by a Pain in his Shoulder that we should have some Rain.”⁵ And human character traits are also conventionally attributed to climate. Addison attributes the human trait of jealousy to the tropics in Spectator 170 (1711):

Jealousy is no Northern Passion, but rages most in those Nations that lie nearest to the Influence of the Sun.… Between the Tropicks … lie the hottest Regions of jealousy, which as you come Northward cools all along with the Climate, till you scarce meet with any thing like it in the Polar Circle. Our own Nation is very temperately situated in this Respect, and if we meet with some few disordered with the Violence of this Passion, they are not the proper Growth of our Country.⁶

And more systematically in Remarks on the Influence of Climate … [on] Mankind (1781), the physician William Falconer offers an exhaustive treatise on the role of climate in shaping—according to his table of contents—human disposition, manners, morals, intellectual faculties, laws, government, and religion. In the chapter on the “general state of morals in different climates,” for instance, Falconer lays out the generally “agreed” assumption:

In point of morality in general, it is … agreed, that the manners of cold climates far exceed those of warm; in the latter, the passions are naturally very strong, and likewise kept in a perpetual state of irritation from the high degree of sensibility that prevails, which causes a great multiplication of crimes, by multiplying the objects of temptation.… In cold climates the desires are but few, in comparison, and not often a very immoral kind; and those repressed with less difficulty, as they are seldom very violent. In temperate climates, the passions are in a middle state, and generally inconstant in their nature; sufficiently strong, however, to furnish motives for action, though not so powerful as to admit of no restraint from considerations of prudence, justice, or religion.⁷

David Hume in “Of National Characters” (1753) cites the pervasiveness of this “suppos’d” shaping effect of climate on human character while ultimately seeking to discredit it: “By physical causes I mean those qualities of the air and climate, which are suppos’d to work insensibly on the temper, by altering the tone and habit of the body, and giving a particular complexion, which tho’ reflection and reason may sometimes overcome, will yet prevail among the generality of mankind, and have an influence on their manners.”⁸ The effect of these assumptions about the connection of weather with human character is to frame the representation of the environment around the human, often limiting the depiction of weather in the text to a simple equation with a human condition.

Meanwhile, other aspects of eighteenth-century literary history highlight the depiction of the environment in poetic form. The representation of “nature” is subject to significant change in the course of this period, as the aesthetic intensity of the romantic movement generates an association between the realm of the environment and the distinctive genius of the poet. Literary representations of storms dramatize this shift. In a survey of poetical storms, Christopher Thacker documents the “revolution in attitudes [in the course of the eighteenth century] which had until then been virtually unchanged since the beginnings of literature.” As Thacker demonstrates, storms before the eighteenth century typically offer an aesthetic experience that “repels the observer in every way.” But with the rise of the romantic movement, “the absolute of rejection has changed to an enthusiasm every bit as absolute”: “whereas, at the time of Bishop Burnet, the storm was evidence of evil, of man’s sin and the Creator’s anger, by the time of the romantics it was the opposite, the crowning evidence of the sublimity of nature and a symbol of man’s most rarefied poetic aspiration. It had become that part of nature with which the poet would most eagerly be united, and into which he would have himself dissolved.”⁹

In keeping with this eagerness, James Thomson’s widely read georgic poem The Seasons (1726–30) supplies a transitional illustration. The second two couplets of the first edition of “Winter” explicitly “welcome” these literary storms:

Vapours, and Clouds, and Storms: Be these my theme,

These, that exalt the Soul to solemn Thought,

And heavenly musing. Welcome kindred Glooms!

Wish’d, wint’ry, Horrors, hail!¹⁰

But The Seasons also depicts the storm in terms of human loss, destruction, and death. In a crucial scene from “Autumn,” the “potent blast … further swells, / and in one mighty stream, invisible / … Impetuous rushes o’er the sounding world.” This storm—using the same tropes of enumeration and of confluence that we will identify in Defoe’s Storm and Swift’s “City Shower”—takes innumerable “herds” and “harvests” down a “rushing tide”:

Still over head

The mingling tempest weaves its gloom, and still

The deluge deepens; till the fields around

Lie sunk and flatted in the sordid wave.

Sudden the ditches swell; the meadows swim.

Red from the hills innumerable streams

Tumultuous roar, and high above its banks

The river lift—before whose rushing tide

Herds, flocks, and harvests, cottages and swains

Roll mingled down.¹¹

The Seasons looks toward the enthusiastic merger of poet and tempest of the romantic movement but participates also in the powerful tropes connecting the storm with the depiction of human disaster.¹²

Storms reflect an ongoing opportunity for the representation of human authority over or intensity toward or explanation of “nature.” This chapter seeks to steer the storm past these dimensions of the human cultural imaginary. The two literary storms examined here—the “City Shower” and The Storm—as we shall see, exceed such a framing, replacing these limitations on the representation of the environmental realm and these assertions of human authority over or appropriation of that representation with confusion, impossibility, excess, and even moments of other-than-human force or vitality or “voice.”

II

When Swift’s “Description of a City Shower” was first published in Richard Steele’s Tatler on October 17, 1710, it was introduced in the context of the great storms of Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid.¹³ Swift’s poem clearly evokes the venerable scenario of the Aeneid’s momentous storm, which in that poem leads directly to the consummation of Aeneas and Dido’s love. Here is Dryden’s translation:

Mean time, the gath’ring Clouds obscure the Skies;

From Pole to Pole the forky Lightning flies;

The ratling Thunders rowl; and Juno pours

A wintry Deluge down; and sounding Show’rs.

.….….….….….….….….…. .

The rapid Rains, descending from the Hills,

To rolling Torrents raise the creeping Rills.

The Queen and Prince, as Love or Fortune guides,

One common Cavern in her Bosom hides.¹⁴

Swift’s poem recollects this passage, echoing the “torrents” as well as the “rattling” or “clattering” sound effects of Virgil/Dryden’s storm and then directly evokes the Aeneid’s trademark account of the Trojan horse:

Box’d in a Chair the Beau impatient sits,

While Spouts run clatt’ring o’er the Roof by Fits;

And ever and anon with frightful Din

The Leather sounds, he trembles from within.

So when Troy Chair-men bore the Wooden Steed,

Pregnant with Greeks, impatient to be freed,

.….….….….….….….….…

Laoco’n struck the Outside with his Spear,

And each imprison’d Hero quak’d for Fear. (ll. 43–52)

“A City Shower” thus brings the classical storm to present-day London, replacing the heroic Virgilian protagonists with damp contemporary Londoners, using this ironic juxtaposition with the classical original—in the same destabilizing manner as the “pensive cat”—to undermine the assertion of orderly confidence and control in the representation of climate.¹⁵

In contrast to the lyric form of “A City Shower,” The Storm is one of the period’s most extended narrative engagements with a specific environmental experience. As Defoe’s first sustained narrative work, The Storm establishes some of the fundamental aspects of the innovative representation of temporality and immediacy distinctive of Defoe’s subsequent novels.¹⁶ The Storm arrived in literary history as an almost direct effect of what meteorological history now understands to have been an extratropical cyclone, which moved across England and Wales in the hours between midnight and six o’clock in the morning on November 26 and 27, 1703. The force of the wind, which reached 110 miles per hour, resulted in extensive losses of structures on land and vessels on the sea and caused the deaths of more than eight thousand human beings and many more thousands of other-than-human beings—fish, birds, livestock, and other animals.¹⁷

Immediately and directly, Defoe took up the human experience of this event through his developing expertise as a journalist. Within a week of the storm, he had placed notices in the Daily Courant and the London Gazette requesting of

all Gentlemen of the Clergy, or others, who have made any observations of this Calamity, that they would transmit as distinct an Account as possible, of what they have observed.… All Gentlemen that are pleas’d to send any such Accounts, are desired to write no Particulars but that they are well satisfied to be true, and to set their Names to the Observations they send, which the Undertakers of this Work [an exact and faithful Collection] promise shall be faithfully Recorded.¹⁸

Defoe received around sixty eyewitness accounts, and he edited, rewrote, and quoted these to produce The Storm. Richard Hamblyn in his introduction to the Penguin edition posits that there is at some points a “high level of fabrication” even within the quoted materials; The Storm is a pioneering work of modern journalism, both in the promotion of reportage itself and in its manipulation.¹⁹

In The Storm’s engagement with the experience of this climatic event, it instantiates the immediate and pragmatic attention to the weather that arises as a facet of the development of the empirical practices associated with the new science. Robert Markeley outlines this range of practices for the study of the weather, especially relevant to members of the Royal Society but also practiced by ordinary citizens in proto-Enlightenment London. These included the recording and publishing of weather diaries, barometric and rainfall records, lists of death tolls resulting from inclement weather, bills for property damage, accounts of chemical reactions in the atmosphere, theories of “Subterraneall Storms,” and, in general, the growing usage “in the eighteenth century [of] tables, graphs, and charts to buttress … discursive descriptions of the natural world.”²⁰ Collectively, these discursive and empirical accounts initiate and then constitute the new modern science of weather—or meteorology—promoted and theorized by the Royal Society.²¹

In The Storm’s first long section, titled “The Storm,” the narrative reproduces a set of secondhand summaries, including accounts of the “Originals of Winds,” of the “Opinion of the ancients” regarding storms in Britain, and of the “Extent of this Storm, and from what Parts it was suppos’d to come; with some Circumstances as to the Time of it.” But even in this historical and contextual section, chapter 3—“Of the Storm in General”—which occupies the center portion of this section, despite its impersonal title, is structured around an ongoing direct and personal account of the narrator’s particular experiences in London on the night of the storm:

The Collector of these Sheets narrowly escap’d the Mischief of a Part of the House, which fell on the Evening of that Day by the Violence of the Wind.… The author of this Relation was in a well-built brick House in the skirts of the City; and a Stack of Chimneys falling in upon the next Houses gave the House such a Shock, that they thought it was just coming down upon their Heads: but opening the Door to attempt an Escape into a Garden, the Danger was so apparent, that they all thought fit to surrender to the Disposal of Almighty Providence, and expect their Graves in the Ruins of the House, rather than to meet most certain Destruction in the Open Garden … for the force of the Wind blew the Tiles point-blank.… The Author of this has seen Tiles blown from a House above thirty or forty Yards, and stuck from five to eight Inches into the solid Earth. (26, 30–31)

The second long section of The Storm, “Of the Effects of the Storm,” is largely made up of the reported accounts that Defoe had gathered, subtitled according to locations, sorts of “Damages,” and varieties of “remarkable Deliverances.” But even here, again, Defoe inserts his own direct experience alongside these reports by other eyewitnesses. His personal account takes up the responsibility and authority of the direct observer:

The Author of this Collection had the curiosity the next day to view the place [the “Reaches of the River” where the “Wind had driven” the ships into one another “and laid them so upon one another as it were in heaps”] and to observe the posture they lay in, which nevertheless ’tis impossible to describe; there lay, by the best Account he could take, few less than 700 sail of Ships, some very great ones between Shadwel and Limehouse inclusive, the posture is not to be imagined, but by them that saw it. (137)

The result of this sort of insertion is a dispersed, repetitious mingling of modes of discourse, variously evoking an encyclopedic representation of an environmental event layered across raw and edited eyewitness reportage, firsthand accounts, historical summary, proto-meteorology, and data.

III

But in The Storm, even in the context of historical, personal, journalistic, or proto-meteorological discourse, the attempt to represent the experience of the environmental event constantly veers toward the indescribable. As we have seen in the narrator’s account of the seven hundred ships wrecked in the river, despite this immediate and direct context, the sight is “nevertheless … impossible to describe.” This impossibility is introduced at the very outset of the narrative, in the preface, when the speaker offers a “confession”: “I confess here is room for abundance of Romance.…. When Nature was put into so much Confusion, and the Surface of the Earth and Sea felt such extraordinary a Disorder, innumerable Accidents would fall out that till the like Occasion happen may never more be seen, and unless a like Occasion had happen’d could never before been heard of” (6).

This premise of impossibility is ubiquitous in this text. In the chapter titled “Of the Storm in General,” which we have already seen—despite its title—to follow the speaker’s personal experiences on the night of the storm, human expression is explicitly conceded to be impossible: “In short, Horror and Confusion seiz’d upon all, whether on Shore or at Sea: No Pen can describe it, no Tongue can express it” (53). And the narrator highlights this concession to impossibility even after the witnesses’ immediate “Fears were … abated”:

About Eight a Clock in the Morning it ceased so much, that our Fears were also abated, and People began to peep out of Doors; but ’tis impossible to express the Concern that appear’d in every Place.… The next Day or Two was almost entirely spent in the Curiosity of the People, in viewing the Havock the Storm had made, which was so universal in London, and especially in the Out-Parts, that nothing can be said sufficient to describe it. (34)

Later, in the second section, “The Effects of the Storm,” at the end of the compilation of letters titled “Of the Damages to the City of London, and parts adjacent,” the narrator-journalist admits that, even after the exhaustive reportage that he has presented, “It has been impossible to give an exact relation.” And he goes on here to repeat, “’Tis impossible to describe the general Calamity, and the most we can do is, to lead our Reader to supply by his Immagination what we omit” (105–9). If the journalist-narrator—and all the “People” of London—cannot describe the scene of the storm, this suggestion that the reader’s “Immagination” might reach that end is, almost explicitly, unconvincing. But this “Calamity”—inaccessible to the human imagination—emerges from The Storm in the “omissions” of the counterhuman imaginary.

The most conventional rationale for this evocation of impossibility is in the doctrinal citation of divine power—the explicit disavowal of human understanding in favor of the invisible rationale of God. In the narrator’s account of the “causes and original of winds,” for instance, he concedes human authority to another “Author”: “Nature plainly refers us beyond her Self, to the Mighty Hand of Infinite Power, the Author of Nature, and Original of all Causes” (11). And indeed, the citation of divine power in relation to environmental or geologic events is a conventional recourse in this period. In Markeley’s analysis of the representation of climatic instability in The Storm, he describes the ways in which divine inscrutability became compatible with empirical investigation and scientific speculation. For voluntarist theology, the “casualties and disasters” of the storm both prove divine omnipotence and at the same time inspire the study of the natural world as a means of appreciating those operations of the divine will.²² Even in Newton’s view, as Markeley elsewhere shows, “God’s interventions both revealed the mysterious workings of grace and directed the practitioners of ‘physico-theology’ to study the natural world in order to understand, as far as possible, the second causes through which the divine will operated.”²³ For The Storm, however, the “study” that would bring the experience of this climatic event within human understanding and authority is a distant and unrealized prospect whose evocation only highlights this narrative’s contrapuntal scenario of impossibility.

In fact, that repeated phrase—“impossible to describe”—could be seen as the term of art for the representation of storms and environmental events in this period of literary history. The Storm exemplifies this impossibility with a special discursive pervasiveness: “impossible to describe” constitutes a counterexplanatory scenario that extends across this complex work’s whole range of discourses and modes of representation.

IV

The accompaniment to “impossible to describe” is the contrapuntal theme of counterhuman interrelationality—processes of assemblage that juxtapose, entangle, combine, and replicate other-than-human objects, beings, events, fluids, vapors, and “filths.” “A City Shower” ultimately labels the cumulative experience of this interrelationality as a “huge Confluent” or, ultimately and more graphically, as a “Torrent” or a “tumbling”:

They [Filths of all Hues and Odours], as each Torrent drives, with rapid Force,

From Smithfield, or St. Pulchre’s shape their Course,

And in huge Confluent joined at Snow-Hill Ridge,

Fall from the Conduit prone to Holborn-Bridge.

Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,

Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud,

Dead Cats, and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood. (ll. 57–63)

The random assemblage of the poem’s last couplet—dung, guts, blood, puppies, fish, cats, turnips—entangles without connecting and proposes a relationality that cannot be defined. In fact, first, before the “tumbling” or interrelational turbulence of this passage, human beings themselves are impelled into a random relationality by the storm. Various human beings—the “daggled Females,” the “Templar spruce,” and the “tuck’d-up Sempstress,” as well as the “triumphant Tories and desponding Whigs”—cross paths and share space and “commence Acquaintance” (ll. 35–42). And even before human beings join this “torrent,” the indistinguishable components of the geo-environmental realm—“Dust and Rain”—find their own unconventional interrelation on the poet’s coat:

Not yet, the Dust had shun’d th’ unequal Strife,

But, aided by the Wind, fought still for Life;

And wafted with its Foe by violent Gust,

’Twas doubtful which was Rain, and which was Dust. (ll. 23–26)

In The Storm, the same counterhuman interrelationality—among water, fish, birds, trees, and human beings—accompanies the same “huge Confluent.” In chapter 4, “Of the Extent of this Storm,”

The Water in the River of Thames, and other Places, was in a very strange manner blown up into the Air: Yea, in the new Pond in James’s Park, the Fish to the Number of at least two Hundred, were blown out and lay by the Bank-side, whereof many were Eye-witnesses.

At Moreclack in Surry, the Birds, as they attempted to fly, were beaten down to the Ground by the Violence of the Wind.

At Epping in the County of Essex, a very great Oak was blown down, which of it self was raised again, and doth grow firmly at this Day.

At Taunton, a great Tree was blown down, the upper Part wherof rested upon a Brick or Stone-wall, and after a little time, by the force of the Wind, the lower part of the Tree was blown quite over the Wall.

In the City of Hereford, several persons were, by the Violence of the Wind, borne up from the Ground; one Man (as it is credibly reported) at least six Yards. (46)

This ongoing juxtaposition of oak tree and other-than-human and human beings projects the same indistinguishability as the “Confluent” of “A City Shower”—one item after another or all items together in a descriptive “torrent”—in a scenario beyond or irrelevant to human agency or to the human authority of the narrator-journalist to propose a hierarchic or anthropocentric pattern. As we shall see, this passage, like the final couplet of “A City Shower,” could stand in for the discursive experience of The Storm as a whole—its ongoing repetitions, enumerations, lists, and series of events, locations, objects, and beings.

The multiplicity and turbulence that emerge in both of these representations of undefined, other-than-human “force” are a distinctive effect that is illuminated by recent perspectives on discontinuity in modern scientific and philosophic thought, as we have seen in our earlier analysis of the counterhuman impossibility that emerges in Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad and in the poetry of the Lisbon earthquake. Michel Serres in his account of “the birth of physics” describes the persistence of notions of “discontinuity, multiplicity and contingency” from ancient atomism to modern quantum physics and helps us understand how human representation might exceed linearity and include an uncertainty that goes beyond the human. According to David Webb and William Ross’s summary of Serres’s argument, “The world to which [ancient atomism and modern physics] bears witness … is a place of turbulent flows, of chaos.… There is … no unilinear development and therefore no single frame of reference within which all events may be encompassed. There cannot even be a reliable rule of translation by which one can navigate from one frame or region to another, or between the local and the global.”²⁴

The Storm generates a version of this anti-encompassing counterhuman world in its representation of the “huge confluents” of varied, dispersed, undistinguished items like the list of fish, birds, trees, and persons that we observed earlier. But beyond the dispersed list, the narrative also offers lists of lists—that is, lists of separate lists, each of which represents a group of items or structures or architectural features connected by common features or a common agent of destruction: on the land (windows, stonework, doors, steeples, pews, church spires, pulpits, roof tiles; 43–33); on the water (“Ships of all sorts,” colliers, coasters, store ships, transports, tenders, men of war, “East India Men,” and merchant men; 51–52); in the countryside (barns, fruit trees, oaks, ash, ricks of corn). The list of barns, for example, includes this enumeration:

From Tewksbury it is certified, that an incredible Number of Barns have been blown down in the small Towns and Villages thereabouts. At Twyning, at least eleven Barns are blown down. In Ashchurch Parish seven or eight. At Lee, five. At Norton, a very great Number, three whereof belonging to one Man. The great Abby-Barn also at Tewksbury is blown down.

It is credibly reported, that within a very few Miles Circumference in Worcestershire, about an hundred and forty Barns are blown down. At Finchinfield in Essex, which is but an ordinary Village, about sixteen Barns were blown down. Also in a Town called Wilchamsted in the County of Bedford (a very small Village) fifteen Barns at least are blown down. But especially the Parsonage Barns went to wrack in many Places throughout the Land: In a few Miles Compass in Bedfordshire, and so in Northamptonshire, and other Places, eight, ten, and twelve are blown down; and at Yielding Parsonage in the County of Bedford (out of which was thrust by Oppression and Violence the late Incumbent) all the Barns belonging to it are down. The instances also of this kind are innumerable, which we shall therefore forbear to make further mention of. (44–45)

“Innumerable” in these lists is the equivalent of “impossible to describe,” placing this set of items in a realm beyond the human imagination and explicitly precluding “further mention” of these barns, which thereby and at that point enter the counterhuman realm of impossibility.

These lists level humans with all the other lists of items—barns, ships, church steeples, sheep, and forests. Here is the list of human deaths, according to the “Article”—or common agent—of falling roofs or chimneys:

Under the Disaster of this Article [falling stacks of Chimneys], it seems most proper to place the Loss of the Peoples Lives, who fell in this Calamity.…

One Woman was kill’d by the Fall of a Chimney in or near the palace of St. James’s.…

Nine Souldiers were hurt, with the Fall of the Roof of the Guard-house at Whitehall, but none of them died.

A Distiller in Duke-Street, with his Wife, and Maid-servant, were all buried in the Rubbish of a Stack of Chimneys, which forced all the Floors, and broke down to the Bottom of the House.…

One Mr. Dyer, a Plaisterer in Fetter-Lane, finding the Danger he was in by the shaking of the House, jumpt out of Bed to save himself; and had, in all Probability, Time enough to have got out of the House, but staying to strike a Light, a Stack of Chimneys fell in upon him, kill’d him, and wounded his Wife.

Two Boys at one Mr. Purefoy’s, in Cross-Street Hutton-Garden, were both kill’d, and buried in the Rubbish of a Stack of Chimneys; and a third very much wounded.

A Woman in Jewin-Street, and Two Persons more near Aldersgate-Street, were kill’d; the first, as it is reported, by venturing to run out of the House into the Street; and the other Two by the Fall of a House.

In Threadneedle-Street, one Mr. Simpson, a Scrivener, being in Bed and fast a-sleep, heard nothing of the Storm; but the rest of the Family being more sensible of Danger, some of them went up, and wak’d him.… But he too fatally sleepy, and consequently unconcern’d at the Danger, told them, he did not apprehend any Thing; and so … could not be prevailed with to rise: they had not been gone many Minutes out of his Chamber, before the Chimneys fell in, broke through the Roof over him, and kill’d him in his Bed.

A Carpenter in White-Cross-Street was kill’d almost in the same Manner, by a Stack of Chimneys of the Swan Tavern, which fell into his House; it was reported, That his Wife earnestly desir’d him not to go to Bed; … but then finding himself very heavy, he would go to Bed against all his Wife’s Intreaties; after which … [he] was kill’d in his Bed: and his Wife, who would not go to Bed, escap’d. (58–59)

These lists of course fail actually to describe the unrepresentable agency of the storm: the environmental realm is a projection from exhaustive recitations of innumerability and dispersal. Examining Anne Finch’s poem on the same storm of 1703—“Upon the Hurricane” (1713)—Courtney Weiss Smith also describes an extended scenario of dispersal and multiplicity, arguing that Finch represents “the storm as a complex constellation that draws together not only winds, God, and human actions, but a whole range of other relevant agents and forces: the Bible, the past, Kidder [Bishop of Bath who was killed in the storm], oaths of allegiance, chimney stacks, us, our sins, her guesses, death, fallen branches, vapors, and local motion.”²⁵ The “gathering” that Smith describes in “Upon the Hurricane” engages an “active, material” force.²⁶ Like the lists and the turbulences that we have observed in The Storm and the “City Shower,” they project a vitality, but it is a counterhuman vitality that exceeds or eludes human representation and that goes beyond the notion that the poem discovers or promotes a human-centered “richer understanding of the world,” which Smith concludes from Finch’s work.²⁷

V

Innumerability and impossibility pervade “A City Shower” and The Storm, offering an imaginative experience beyond encompassing order and apart from narrative authority. And in both texts, this counterhuman experience of climate holds the announced subject—the “shower” or the “storm”—beyond or apart from human representation: the “shower” or the “storm” rarely makes an appearance that a reader might register as direct or concrete. And the few brief occasions in each text when the environmental event of the title is directly portrayed enhance the counterhuman impact of impossibility by emphasizing, by omission, how rarely or briefly or partially or incommensurately the “shower” or the “storm” is within human view, how consistently the environmental realm exceeds or eludes the human.

In “A City Shower,” the “shower” itself is represented or characterized through a brief evocation of a “force.” The passage that introduces the “huge Confluent” suggests the role of this “force”:

Now from all Parts the swelling Kennels flow,

And bear their Trophies with them as they go:

Filth of all Hues and Odours seem to tell

What Streets they sail’d from, by the Sight and Smell.

They, as each Torrent drives with rapid Force,

From Smithfield, or St. Pulchre’s shape their course,

And in huge Confluent joined at Snow-Hill Ridge,

Fall from the Conduit prone to Holborn-Bridge. (ll. 53–60)

Specifically here, the “Torrent” that “drives” the “Trophies” from their dispersed locations throughout the London sewers to their point of assembly or “Confluent” at “Snow-Hill Ridge” operates by means of a “rapid Force”—an irresistible power that registers a momentum inherent in the storm and that seems to be at one with the agency of “torrent.” This force is both dispersed and vital, resembling the force “inertly strong” of the Mighty Mother Dulness in The Dunciad or the inherent power of matter in Newton’s laws of motion, which we have observed in conjunction with the self-efficacy of matter in Robinson Crusoe. In “A City Shower,” this “force” has some specific characteristics: it is “violent”—“wafted by its foe by violent gust” (25)—and it may be accompanied by certain dramatic sound effects that impinge upon the vulnerable or even captive human figures in the poem:

Boxed in a chair the beau impatient sits,

While spouts run clattering o’er the roof by fits,

And ever and anon with frightful din

The leather sounds; he trembles from within. (ll. 43–46)

We have noted the connection between this poem’s “clattering” and the “rattling” in the Aeneid’s crucial storm. In addition, this “clattering” or “frightful din” briefly supplies the “city shower” with a “voice” of its own. The titular climatic entity of the poem, then, is heard but not seen, is violent without agency and vital without accord with or relation to human or living vitality.

The Storm gives the same, brief, auditory representation of its protagonist. In the chapter “Of the Storm in General,” “Others thought they heard it thunder. ’Tis confess’d, the Wind by its unusual Violence made such a noise in the Air as had a resemblance to Thunder; and ’twas observ’d, the roaring had a Voice as much louder than usual, as the Fury of the Wind was greater than was ever known: the Noise had also something in it more formidable; it sounded aloft, and roar’d not very much unlike remote Thunder” (32). Or in the section “Of the Damages in the Country,” “as to Thunder the Noise the Wind made, was so Terrible, and so Unusual, that I will not say, people might not mistake it for Thunder; but I have not met with any, who will be positive that they heard it Thunder” (109). Here the “Noise” of the storm evokes the same “unusual Violence” that is attributed to the storm of “A City Shower,” again through an indeterminate agency, which in this passage is evoked through the use of the anthropomorphic term “Voice”—a corollary to the audible “clattering” of the storm in “A City Shower.” The “Voice” of the wind in The Storm is so inherently problematic as to generate explicit confusion in the human observers and in the text itself: witnesses “thought they heard” this “Voice”; they cannot seem to agree on what they may have heard; and even the journalist-narrator cannot coherently express his reportage of this experience of the sound of the wind in straightforward, positive terms: “I will not say people might not mistake it.… I have not met with any, who will be positive.” Both “A City Shower” and The Storm are pointing to a counterhuman “force” or “violence” or even perhaps a “Voice” that is mostly offscreen, distanced from and even repudiated by the human witnesses and the reporter, but indirectly endowed with an elusive autonomy and vitality.

As we have seen, these two works of human creativity cite human authority, reflect human awareness, engage ongoing human science and record keeping, and build on historical human discursive and literary traditions. They are powerful assertions of the cultural imaginary of their time as it turns to an engagement with the realm of climate. But they also agitate, undermine, and exceed these human claims, in ways that indicate how the environment escapes from, is separate from, cannot be accommodated to human authority or human representation and in ways that offer a view of a counterhuman imaginative experience, an experience of a vitality beyond the human.

1. 1. Jonathan Swift, “A Description of a City Shower,” in Swift: Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 91–93, ll. 1–8. Subsequent references to this source are cited parenthetically in the text by line number.

2. 2. Daniel Defoe, The Storm, ed. Richard Hamblyn (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 3. Subsequent references to this source are cited parenthetically in the text.

3. 3. On climatic determinism, see Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

4. 4. For a current comment on “climate determinism,” see Simon Donner, “The Ugly History of Climate Determinism Is Still Evident Today,” Scientific American 24 (June 2020), https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-ugly-history-of-climate-determinism-is-still-evident-today/.

5. 5. Joseph Addison, Spectator 440 (July 25, 1712), in The Spectator, vol. 4, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1965), 47.

6. 6. Joseph Addison, Spectator 170 (September 14, 1711), in The Spectator, vol. 2, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1965), 172.

7. 7. William Falconer, Remarks on the Influence of Climate … [on] Mankind (London: C. Dilly, 1781), 25–26.

8. 8. David Hume, “Essay XXIV: Of National Characters,” in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, vol. 1 (London: A. Millar, 1753), 278. See John G. Hayman, “Notions on National Characters in the Eighteenth Century Author(s),” Huntington Library Quarterly 35 (1971): 13.

9. 9. Christopher Thacker, “ ‘Wish’d, Wint’ry, Horrors’: The Storm in the Eighteenth Century,” Comparative Literature 19 (1967): 36, 56–57.

10. 10. James Thomson, “Winter: Text of the First Edition,” in The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson, ed. J. Logie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), 228, ll. 3–6; cited also in Thacker, “Wish’d, Wint’ry, Horrors,” 39.

11. 11. James Thomson, “Autumn,” in Complete Poetical Works, 145, ll. 332–41.

12. 12. Tobias Menely understands Thomson’s representation of destruction as his recognition of a “disequilibrium in nature that could not be fully incorporated within the harmonious universe of Newtonian physicotheology or confident proclamations of national progress.” See Menely, Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 121.

13. 13. Describing accounts of storms and showers, Steele cites Virgil: “Virgil’s Land Shower is likewise the best in its Kind. It is indeed a Shower of Consequence, and contributes to the main Design of the Poem, but cutting off a tedious Ceremonial, and bringing Matters to a speedy Conclusion between Two Potentates of different Sexes.” Richard Steele, Tatler 238 (October 17, 1710), in The Tatler, vol. 3, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1987), 225.

14. 14. John Dryden, Aeneid 4.231–40, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 5, Poems: The Works of Virgil in English, ed. William Frost, textual ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 259–60.

15. 15. On the poem’s references to Virgil and Milton, see John I. Fischer, “Apparent Contraries: A Reading of Swift’s ‘A Description of a City Shower,’ ” Tennessee Studies in Literature 19 (1974): 21–34.

16. 16. See Aino Makikalli, “Between Non-fiction and Fiction: Experiences of Temporality in Defoe’s Writings on the Great Storm of 1703,” in Positioning Defoe’s Non-fiction: Form, Function, Genre, ed. Makikalli and Andreas K. E. Mueller (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 107–22; and Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 86–87.

17. 17. See Richard Hamblyn, introduction to Defoe, Storm, x–xii; Hubert Lamb and Knud Frydendahl, Historic Storms of the North Sea, British Isles and Northwest Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 59–72; and Martin Brayne, The Greatest Storm (Phoenix Mill, UK: Sutton, 2002).

18. 18. Daily Courant 409 (December 2, 1703); London Gazette 3972 (December 2–6, 1703); cited in Hamblyn, introduction to Defoe, Storm, xxiii.

19. 19. Hamblyn, introduction to Defoe, Storm, xxvii.

20. 20. Robert Markeley, “ ‘Casualties and Disasters’: Defoe and the Interpretation of Climatic Instability,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 8 (2008): 114. Markeley cites Frans De Bruyn, “The Classical Silva and the Generic Development of Scientific Writing in Seventeenth-Century England,” New Literary History 32 (2001): 347–73; and De Bruyn, “From Georgic Poetry to Statistics and Graphs: Eighteenth-Century Representations and the ‘State’ of British Society,” Yale Journal of Criticism 17 (2004): 107–39. On “Subterraneall Storms,” Markeley quotes Ralph Bohun, A Discourse Concerning the Origine and Properties of Wind (1671).

21. 21. See also Jan Golinski, “Time, Talk, and the Weather in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Weather, Climate, Culture (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2003), 21.

22. 22. Markeley, “Casualties and Disasters,” 108. Courtney Weiss Smith provides a detailed account of role of God’s will in Anne Finch’s poem on the great storm of 1703. See Smith, “Anne Finch’s Descriptive Turn,” The Eighteenth Century 57 (2016): 251–65, esp. 254–55.

23. 23. Markeley, “Casualties and Disasters,” 104. See also Markeley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 178–256.

24. 24. David Webb and William Ross, introduction to The Birth of Physics, by Michel Serres, trans. Webb and Ross (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 3–7 (originally published 1977).

25. 25. Smith, “Anne Finch’s Descriptive Turn,” 255.

26. 26. “The poet does not project onto blank screens, so much as she ‘gathers’ together and attempts to at least partially understand the complexity that resides in God’s creation—a creation that is in itself active, material, and moral” (Smith, 261).

27. 27. Smith, 263.