November 22, 1788, to January 13, 1789. The rest of January was mild
with showers. February rainy, with snow showers and heavy gales of
wind. The first thirteen days of March hard frost, with snow, and then
till April 18, heavy rain, with frost, snow, and sleet. This winter was
very severe also on the Continent.
The winter of 1789-90 was as mild as that of 1788-89 had been severe.
The record runs thus:--'November to 17th, heavy rains with violent
gales of wind. To December 18, mild dry weather with a few showers.
To the end of the year rain and wind. To January 16, 1790, mild foggy
weather, with occasional rains. To January 21' (five days only) 'frost.
To January 28, dark, with driving rains. To February 14, mild dry
weather. To February 22' (eight days) 'hard frost.' To April 5 bright
cold weather with a few showers.
In November, 1790, mild autumnal weather prevailed till the 26th, after
which there were five days of hard frost. Thence to the end of the
year, rain and snow, with a few days of frost. The whole of January,
1791, was mild with heavy rains; February windy, with much rain and
snow. Then to the end of April dry, but 'rather cold and frosty.'
November, 1791, was very wet and stormy, December frosty. There was
some hard frost in January, 1792, but the weather mostly wet and mild.
In February also there was some hard frost and a little snow. March was
wet and cold.
The record ends with the year 1792, the last three months of which
are thus described: 'October showery and mild. November dry and fine.
December mild.'
Certainly the account of the 23 years between 1768 and 1792 does not
suggest that there is any material difference between the winter
weather now common and the average winter weather a century ago. Still
it may be necessary to show, that when men spoke of mild weather in old
times, they meant what we should understand by the same expression.
A reference to rain or showery weather shows sufficiently that a
temperature above the freezing point existed while such weather
prevailed. But it might be that what White speaks of as mild weather,
is such as we should consider severe. In order to show that this is
not the case, it will suffice to examine his statement respecting the
actual temperature in particular winters, considering them always with
due reference to what he says as to their exceptional character.
Take for instance his account of the frost in January, 1768. He says
that, for the short time it lasted, this frost 'was the most severe
that we had then known for many years, and was remarkably injurious to
evergreens.' 'The coincidents attending this short but intense frost,'
he proceeds, after describing his vegetable losses, 'were, that the
horses fell sick with an epidemic distemper, which injured the winds
of many and killed some; that colds and coughs were general among the
human species; that it froze under people's beds for several nights;
that meat was so hard frozen that it could not be spitted, and could
not be secured but in cellars, &c.' On the 3rd of January a thermometer
within doors, in a close parlour, where there was no fire, fell in the
night to 20; on the 4th to 18; and on the 7th to 17-1/2 degrees, 'a
degree of cold which the owner never since saw in the same situation.'
The evidence from the thermometer is unsatisfactory, because we do not
know how the parlour was situated. But there is reason for supposing
that in the bitterest winters known during the last thirty or forty
years, a greater degree of cold than that of January, 1768, has been
experienced in England.
The frost of January, 1776, was also regarded as remarkable, and an
account of it will therefore enable us to judge what was the ordinary
winter weather of the last century.
In the first place, White notices that 'the first week of January,
1776, was very wet, and drowned with vast rains from every quarter;
from whence may be inferred, as there is great reason to believe is
the case, that intense frosts seldom take place till the earth is
perfectly glutted and chilled with water; and hence dry autumns are
seldom followed by rigorous winters.' On the 14th, after a week of
frost, sleet, and snow, which after the 12th 'overwhelmed all the
works of men, drifting over the tops of gates, and filling the hollow
lanes,' White had occasion to be much abroad. He thought he had never
before or since encountered such rugged Siberian weather. 'Many of the
narrow roads were now filled above the tops of the hedges, through
which the snow was driven into most romantic and grotesque shapes,
so striking to the imagination as not to be seen without wonder
and pleasure. The poultry dared not to stir out of their roosting
places: for cocks and hens are so dazzled and confounded by the glare
of snow, that they would soon perish without assistance. The hares
also lay sullenly in their seats, and would not move till compelled
by hunger: being conscious, poor animals, that the drifts and heaps
treacherously betray their footsteps and prove fatal to many of them.'
From the 14th the snow continued to increase, and began to stop the
road-wagons and coaches, which could no longer keep their regular
stages; and especially on the Western roads. 'The company at Bath that
wanted to attend the Queen's birthday were strangely incommoded; many
carriages of persons who got on their way to town from Bath, as far as
Marlborough, after strange embarrassments, here met with a _ne plus
ultra_. The ladies fretted, and offered large rewards to labourers, if
they would shovel them a road to London; but the relentless heaps of
snow were too bulky to be removed; and so the 18th passed over, leaving
the company in very uncomfortable circumstances, at the Castle and
other inns.'
Yet all this time and till the 21st the cold was not so intense as it
was in December 1878. On the 21st the thermometer showed 20 degrees,
and had it not been for the deep snows, the winter would not have been
very severely felt. On the 22nd, the author had occasion to go to
London 'through a sort of Laplandian scene, very wild and grotesque
indeed.' But London exhibited an even stranger appearance than the
country. 'Being bedded deep in snow, the pavement of the streets could
not be touched by the wheels or the horses' feet, so that the carriages
ran almost without the least noise.' 'Such an exemption from din and
clatter,' says White, 'was strange but not pleasant; it seemed to
convey an uncomfortable idea of desolation:
_Ipsa silentia terrent._
'The worst had not yet, however, been reached. On the 27th much snow
fell all day, and in the evening the frost became very intense. At
South Lambeth, for the four following nights, the thermometer fell to
eleven, seven, six, six; and at Selborne to seven, six, ten; and on the
31st, just before sunrise, with rime on the trees and on the tube of
the glass, the quicksilver sank exactly to zero--_a most unusual degree
of cold this for the South of England_.' During these four nights, the
cold was so penetrating that ice formed under beds; and in the day the
wind was so keen, that persons of robust constitutions could hardly
endure to face it. 'The Thames was at once frozen over, both above and
below bridge, that crowds ran about on the ice. The streets were now
strangely encumbered with snow, which crumbled and trod dusty; and
turning gray, resembled bay salt; what had fallen on the roofs was so
perfectly dry that from first to last it lay twenty-six days on the
houses in the city; _a longer time than had been remembered by the
oldest housekeepers living_.'
According to all appearances rigorous weather might now have been
expected for weeks to come, since every night increased in severity.
'But behold,' says White, 'without any apparent cause, on February 1,
a thaw took place, and some rain followed before night, making good
the observation that frosts often go off as it were at once without
any gradual declension of cold. On February 2 the thaw persisted, and
on the 3rd swarms of little insects were frisking and sporting in a
court-yard at South Lambeth, as if they had felt no frost. Why the
juices in the small bodies and smaller limbs of such minute beings are
not frozen, is a matter of curious inquiry.'
Although it is manifest that the weather of January, 1776, was severe,
yet the remarks italicised show that such weather was regarded a
century ago as altogether exceptional. Again, the cold lasted only
about three weeks. And it may be doubted whether in actual intensity
it even equalled that which was experienced in London and the south of
England generally during the first week of 1855. Certainly the evidence
afforded by such remarks as I have italicised in the above-quoted
passage tends more to prove that winter weather in England a hundred
years hence was on the average much like winter at present, than the
unusual severity of the weather during about twenty-four days in
January, 1776, tends to suggest that a marked change has taken place.
Similar evidence is afforded by White's remarks respecting the severe
cold of December, 1784.
As in January, 1776, so in December, 1784--a week of very wet weather
heralded the approach of severe cold. 'The first week of December,'
says White, 'was very wet, with the barometer very low. On the 7th,
with the barometer at 28.5, came on a vast snow, which continued all
that day and the next, and most part of the following night: so that
by the morning of the 9th the works of men were quite overwhelmed'
(there is something quite Homeric in White's use of this favourite
expression), 'the lanes filled so as to be impassable, and the ground
covered twelve or fifteen inches without any drifting. In the evening
of the 9th the air began to be so very sharp that we thought it would
be curious to attend to the motions of a thermometer; we therefore hung
out two, one made by Martin and one by Dolland' (probably Dollond),
'which soon began to show us what we were to expect; for by ten o'clock
they fell to twenty-one, and at eleven to four, when we went to bed.
On the 10th in the morning the quicksilver of Dolland's glass was down
to half a degree below zero and that of Martin's, which was absurdly
graduated only to four degrees above zero, sunk quite into the brass
guard of the ball, so that, when the weather became most interesting,
this was useless. On the 10th, at eleven at night, though the air was
perfectly still, Dolland's glass went down to one degree below zero!
This strange severity of the weather made me very desirous to know what
degree of cold there might be in such an exalted and near situation as
Newton. We had, therefore, on the morning of the 10th, written to Mr.
----, and entreated him to hang out his thermometer, made by Adams, and
to pay some attention to it, morning and evening, expecting wonderful
phenomena in so elevated a region, at two hundred feet or more above
my house. But, behold! on the 10th, at eleven at night, it was down
only to seventeen, and the next morning at twenty-two, when mine was
at ten! We were so disturbed at this unexpected reverse of comparative
cold that we sent one of my glasses up, thinking that of Mr. ----
must somehow be wrongly constructed. But when the instruments came to
be confronted they went exactly together, so that for one night at
least the cold at Newton was eighteen degrees less than at Selborne,
and through the whole frost ten or twelve degrees; and indeed, when
we came to observe consequences, we could readily credit this, for
all my laurustines, bays, ilexes, arbutuses, cypresses, and even my
Portugal laurels--and, which occasions more regret, my fine sloping
laurel hedge--were scorched up, while at Newton the same trees have not
lost a leaf....' One circumstance noted by White, though not bearing
specially on the degree of cold which prevailed on this occasion, is
very interesting. 'I must not omit to tell you,' says White, 'that
during those two Siberian days my parlour cat was so electric that had
a person stroked her and been properly insulated, the shock might have
been given to a whole circle of people.'
White's account of this severe frost bears very significantly on the
theory that our winter weather has undergone a great change. It is
obvious, in the first place, that the situation of his thermometers
was such that they were likely to show a low temperature as compared
with the indications in other places. It is also clear that the
thermometer he used was trustworthy. If it were one of Dollond's it
would presumably be a good one, and I do not think that in White's time
the trick of marking inferior instruments with the name Dolland had
come into vogue. But in any case Adams's scientific instruments were
excellent; and, as the account shows, the thermometer used by White
indicated the same temperature as Adams's. Now, the lowest temperature
recorded was only one degree below zero; and that this was altogether
exceptional is shown not only by what White says in the passage I have
quoted, but also by his remarking a little later that this frost 'may
be allowed, from its effects, to have exceeded any since 1739-40.'
Even this is not all. It would certainly prove beyond dispute that our
winters were not milder than those of a century ago; for a greater
degree of cold than that recorded by White in December, 1784, has been
more than once experienced in the same part of England during the last
forty years. But it seems from a statement in Miller's 'Gardener's
Dictionary,' that the Portugal laurels were untouched in the great
frost of 1739-40, which would show that the frost of 1784 was more
severe and destructive than that of 1739-40. If this were really so,
the frost of 1784 was the severest (though owing to its short duration
it did not produce the most remarkable effects in the country at large)
of any during the periods noted between the years 1709 and 1788. On the
Continent, the frost of December, 1788, was more severe in some places,
though rather less severe at Paris, than that of 1709; but I do not
know of any records which would enable us to make a direct comparison
between the cold in 1709, 1784, and 1788, at any given place in Great
Britain.
It will be well now to take a wider survey and consider some of the
most severe winters experienced in Europe generally.
The winter of 1544 was remarkably severe all over Europe. In Flanders,
according to Mézerai, wine froze in casks, and was sold in blocks by
the pound weight. The winter of 1608 was also very severe. In the
winter of 1709 the thermometer at the Paris Observatory recorded a
cold of nearly ten degrees below zero.
Passing over the winter of 1776, of whose effects in England we have
learned enough to enable us to judge how severely it must have been
felt in those continental countries where the winter is always more
severe than with us, we come to the severe winter of 1788-89.
We have seen that in England hard frost began on November 22 and
continued till January 13. In France (or rather at Paris) the frost
began three days later, but the thaw began on the same day, January
13. There was no intermission except on Christmas Day, when it did not
freeze. In the great canal at Versailles the ice was two feet thick.
'The water also froze,' says Flammarion, 'in several very deep wells,
and wine became congealed in cellars. The Seine began to freeze as
early as November 26, and for several days its course was impeded, the
breaking up of the ice not taking place until January 20 (1789). The
lowest temperature observed at Paris was seven degrees below zero, on
December 31. The frost was equally severe in other parts of France
and throughout Europe. The Rhone was quite frozen over at Lyons, the
Garonne at Toulouse, and at Marseilles the sides of the docks were
covered with ice. Upon the shores of the Atlantic the sea was frozen to
a distance of several leagues. The ice upon the Rhine was so thick that
loaded wagons were able to cross it. The Elbe was covered with ice, and
also bore up heavy carts. The harbour at Ostend was frozen so hard that
people could cross it on horseback; the sea was congealed to a distance
of four leagues from the exterior fortifications, and no vessel could
approach the harbour.'
It was during the frost of 1788-89 that a fair was held on the Thames.
The river was frozen as low as Gravesend; but it was only in London
that booths were set up. The Thames fair lasted during the Christmas
holidays and the first twelve days of January.
At Strasburg, on December 31, a temperature of fifteen degrees below
zero was shown. At Berlin on the 20th, and St. Petersburg on the 12th,
temperatures of twenty and twenty-three degrees below zero respectively
were noted. But in Poland and parts of Germany an even greater degree
of cold was recorded. For instance, at Warsaw, 26-1/2 degrees below
zero; and at Bremen thirty-two degrees. At Basle, on December 18, the
thermometer indicated nearly thirty-six degrees below zero. In the
district around Toulouse bread was frozen so hard that it could not be
cut till it had been laid before the fire. Many travellers perished in
the snow. At Lemburg, in Galicia, thirty-seven persons were found dead
in three days towards the end of December. The ice froze so thick in
ponds that in most of them all the fish were killed.
The winter of 1794-95 was remarkable in this country as giving the
lowest average temperature for a month ever recorded in England. The
mean temperature for January, 1795, was only 26.5 degrees; or more
than three degrees lower than that of last January. January 25, 1795,
is commonly supposed to have been the coldest day ever known. The
thermometer in London stood at eight degrees below zero during part of
that bitter day; and in Paris, where also there were six consecutive
weeks of frost, at 10-3/7 degrees below zero. The Thames was frozen
over at Whitehall in the beginning of January. The Marne, the Scheldt,
the Rhine, and the Seine were so frozen over that army corps and heavy
carriages crossed over them. Perhaps the strangest of all the recorded
results of cold weather occurred during the same month. The French
General Pichegru, who was then operating in the North of Holland, sent
detachments of cavalry and infantry about January 20, with orders to
the former to cross the Texel and to capture the enemy's vessels, which
were 'imprisoned by the ice.' 'The French horsemen crossed the plains
of ice at full gallop,' we are told, 'approached the vessels, called on
them to surrender, captured them without a struggle, and took the crews
prisoners:' probably the only occasion in history when effective use
could have been made of a corps of horse-marines.
The winter of 1798-99 was very cold, but not so exceptionally cold
in England as on the Continent. The Seine was completely frozen over
from the 29th of December to the 19th of January, from the Pont de la
Tournelle to the Pont Royal. Farther east the cold was much greater.
The Meuse was frozen over so thickly that carriages could cross it, and
at the Hague and at Rotterdam fairs were held on the river. A regiment
of dragoons starting from Mayence, crossed the Rhine upon the ice.
The winter of 1812-13 was exceeding cold in November, December and
January. It was this unusually early and bitter winter which occasioned
the destruction of Napoleon's army in Russia, and the eventual
overthrow of his power. (For no one who considers his achievements
during the campaigns of 1813 and 1814 can doubt that, had the army
with which he invaded Russia been at his command, he would have foiled
all the efforts of combined Europe against him.) The cold became
very intense in Russia after the 7th of November. On the 17th the
thermometer fell to 15 degrees below zero, according to Larrey, who
carried a thermometer suspended from his button hole. The retreat from
Moscow began on the 18th, Napoleon leaving the still burning city on
the 19th, and the evacuation being complete on the 23rd. Everything
seemed to conspire against Napoleon and his army. During the march
to Smolensk snow fell almost incessantly. Even the only intermission
of the cold during the retreat caused additional disaster. On the
18th of November, Russian troops had crossed the frozen Dwina with
their artillery. A thaw begun on the 24th, but continued only for a
short time; 'so that from the 26th to the 29th the Beresina contained
numerous blocks of ice, but yet was not so frozen over as to afford a
passage to the French troops.' It was to this circumstance that the
terribly disastrous nature of the passage of the Beresina must mainly
be attributed.
The winter of 1813-14 was colder in England than on the Continent--I
mean, the winter here was colder for England than the winter in any
region of continental Europe was for that region. The frost lasted from
December 26 to March 21, and the mean temperature of January was only
26.8 degrees. The Thames was frozen over very thickly, and a fair was
held on the frozen river.
The winter of 1819-20 was bitter throughout Europe. Mr. Thomas Plant,
in an interesting letter to the _Times_ of February 4, says that this
winter was one long spell of intense frost from November to March,
and was almost as severe as that of 1813-14. In Paris there were
forty-seven days of frost, nineteen of which were consecutive, from
December 30, 1818, to January 17. 'In France,' says Flammarion, 'the
intensity of the cold was heralded by the passage along the coast of
the Pas de Calais of a great number of birds coming from the farthest
regions of the north by wild swans and ducks of variegated plumage.
Several travellers perished of cold; amongst others a farmer near
Arras, a gamekeeper near Nogent (Haute Marne) a man and woman in
the Côte d'Or, two travellers at Breuil, on the Meuse, a woman and
a child on the road from Etain to Verdun, six persons near Château
Salins (Meurthe), and two little Savoyards on the road from Clermont
to Chalons-sur-Saône. In the experiments made at the Metz School of
Artillery, on the 10th of January, to ascertain how iron resisted low
temperatures, several soldiers had their hands or their ears frozen.'
During this winter the Thames, the Seine, the Rhône, the Rhine, the
Danube, the Garonne, the lagoons of Venice, and the Sound, were so far
frozen that it was possible to walk across them on the ice.
The winter of 1829-30 was remarkable as the longest winter of the first
half of the present century. The cold was not exceptionally intense,
but the long continuance of bitter weather occasioned more mischief in
the long run than has attended short spells of severer cold. The river
Seine was frozen at Paris first for twenty-nine days, from December
28th to January 26th, and then for five days from February 5th to
February 10th. The river had not been so many days frost-bound in any
winter since 1763. Even at Havre the Seine was frozen over; and at
Rouen a fair was held upon the river on January 18th. On January 25,
after a thaw of six days, the ice from Corbeil and Melun blocked up the
bridge at Choisy, forming a wall 16-1/2 feet high.
The winter of 1837-38 was remarkable for the long frost of January
and February, 1838. It lasted eight weeks. Mr. Plant mentions that
'the lowest point of the thermometer during this long and severe frost
occurred on January 20, when the readings were from 5 degrees below
zero, in this district' (Moseley, near Birmingham), 'to 8 and 10
degrees below zero in more exposed aspects.' 'On the 13th of January,
the old Royal Exchange, London, was destroyed by fire; and the frost
was so great that, when the fire brigade had ceased playing on one
portion of the burning pile, the water in a short time became icicles
of such large dimensions, that the effect has been described as grand
in the extreme.'