Changeable Conditions: British Writing About the Weather in Canada, 1700-1775 by Morgan Erin Vanek A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Morgan Erin Vanek 2016 Changeable Conditions: British Writing About the Weather in Canada, 1700-1775 Morgan Erin Vanek Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2016 Abstract This dissertation investigates the politics of the weather in eighteenth-century British literature. From Swift’s “City Shower” to Smollett’s complaints about Bath’s “perpetual rain,” eighteenth-century literature is saturated with the rhetoric of meteorological science – so much so that, like Samuel Johnson, we have come to assume that “when two Englishmen meet” to talk “of the weather, they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know.” Changeable Conditions argues we know only half the story – and explains how, in the midst of the technological and epistemological changes reconceiving the weather as a “natural fact,” eighteenth-century anxiety about environmental influence also turned the weather into a prominent and productive term in public debate about Britain’s imperial obligations. Prior to the 1759 turn in British fortunes during the Seven Years War, British writers treated inclement weather as a levelling condition, a check on human hubris, or, as in Johnson’s Rasselas, a metaphor for all that seemed too far away to verify and too “changeable” to control about the diverse environments of empire. As British imperial interests turned away from territory and towards trade and settlement, however, a new pattern emerged: vivid descriptions of bad weather continued to cast the risk of being overwhelmed ii as inevitable and dire, but now, “weather-beaten” bodies – like those that litter Smollett’s Humphry Clinker – appeared not to mark the limits of human agency, but rather to call the reader to action, the sure sign of a place and people that could be managed more effectively. How, in so little time, did weather turn from a force that governs the mind and marks the body into a force that could be mitigated by more forward-thinking governance? To answer this question, the case studies in Changeable Conditions propose that eighteenth-century writers amplified the threat of environmental influence to justify a British right to govern all over the world, and demonstrate how this the process helped to entrench the limited view of human agency and narrow sense of responsibility for change in the weather that continue to drive debate about the anthropogenic origins of the present climate crisis. iii Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, both for the generous Canada Graduate Scholarship that funded the first three years of my doctoral program and for the Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement that offered me the opportunity to spend three months in the archives at Yale University’s Lewis Walpole Library. I am also very grateful for the material support I have received from the Northrop Frye Centre at Victoria College, the University of Toronto Women’s Association, and the University of Toronto’s Department of English. With this funding, I have been able to travel to the annual conferences of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, where I have found an invaluable source of constructive criticism and collegial support. Many thanks to the staff of the Lewis Walpole Library and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, who helped me to uncover the archival sources in which some of the surprising meteorological histories of the British empire have been written, including those illustrated in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. I am also grateful to audiences at the Toronto Eighteenth-Century Group and the Northrop Frye Centre at Victoria College, who permitted me to try out early versions of the arguments that now appear in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. Portions of this dissertation have appeared elsewhere in print, and I am grateful to these publishers for permission to reprint sections of these essays here. Chapter 2 expands “The politics of the weather: The Hudson’s Bay Company and the Dobbs affair,” which appeared in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38.3 (2015): 395-411. Parts of Chapter 3 have been accepted for publication as “‘Set the winter at defiance’: Emily Montague’s weather reports and political sensibility,” forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (April 2016). I thank the editorial staff at each of these journals for their responsiveness to my permissions requests, and my anonymous readers at the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies and Eighteenth-Century Fiction for their helpful comments. iv I am also very grateful to the administrative staff in the Department of English at the University of Toronto for all of the timely advice and words of encouragement they have shared to help me navigate the Ph.D. program. Over the years I have spent on this study of the weather, I have been lucky enough to learn from many wonderful teachers, colleagues, mentors, and friends – and though the list of those who have supported my work on this dissertation is too long to include in its entirety here, I hope what follows will stand as a partial acknowledgement of my debt and gratitude. As my supervisor, Alan Bewell has taught me how to ask thoughtful questions, to choose my words carefully, and to carry my commitments to citizenship and collegiality into my scholarly work. From the day he accepted the role of thesis supervisor late in my fourth year of the Ph.D. program, Alan has also been a generous mentor and advocate, and I feel especially fortunate to have completed my dissertation under the direction of an advisor who shares my commitment to academic service and political engagement on and off the page. As members of my thesis committee, Heather Murray and Tom Keymer have helped me to interrogate and balance my occasionally rambling research interests in early Canadian and eighteenth-century British literature, and I am very grateful for the challenging questions, keen attention, and encouraging words they have offered me in equal measure. My external appraiser, Jayne Lewis, has shared with me both an incredibly generous assessment of the dissertation and a fruitful list of new archives and future avenues of inquiry, and I am indebted to her for the warmth she has shown me both as a member of my final oral examination committee and as a correspondent over the last three years. As my internal appraiser, Alex Hernandez has helped me to refine this dissertation’s key terms, and I thank him for the good humour, perspective, and advice he has shared throughout the job search that shaped the last two years of work on this project. As my first faculty advisor, Sara Salih taught me to articulate the research questions that set this project in motion, and I continue to appreciate the patience and compassion she extended to me during an especially challenging period of my graduate career. In addition to these debts to my supervisors and the thoughtful readers of my dissertation’s final drafts, I am endlessly grateful to the many professional mentors and first readers who have helped me draw this project from air into matter. Many thanks to my teaching v supervisors, Nick Mount, Robert McGill, and Jeremy Lopez, who showed me how to use the curiosity that drives our sometimes solitary research to capture the attention and imagination of even very large classes. I am especially grateful to Alison Conway, who has been both a wonderful ally and model for the kind of writer, teacher, and colleague I also hope to be, and who has taught me how to build the kind of scholarly community I will need to meet those goals. I am indebted to Paula Backscheider for her invaluable comments on what is now Chapter 3; to Katie Trumpener for her help directing a summer of archival research towards what would eventually become Chapter 1; and to Terry Robinson, Susan Glover, Tobias Menely, and David Taylor for many conversations surrounding our shared conference panels and presentations. In Josh Gang, I found both a friend and a mentor, and I am grateful to him both for the long weekends of writing that got my first drafts finished and for the surprising questions that have made this dissertation’s final draft better in so many ways. From the first days of the Ph.D. program to the days after my defense, I have also felt very grateful for the camaraderie and intellectual community I have found in my graduate cohort. In particular, I thank Brittany Pladek, who has shown me, over our years of writing elbow-to-elbow, how to balance rigorous inquiry with compassion; Abi Dennis, Letitia Henville, and Dara Greaves, who helped me talk through and eventually find the words to write both Chapter 2 and Chapter 4; and Jay Rajiva, Andrea Day, and Miriam Novick, who remind me every day that we can create the communities we need. I also thank the colleagues and friends I have found through CUPE 3902, the Teaching Assistants’ Training Program, Trinity College, and the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities. Finally, I am incredibly thankful for the patience and encouragement of my friends, especially Adam Morrison, Rachel Percy, Julia Chanter, Laura Goodman, Daniella Moss, Daniel Del Gobbo, and Lainie Rutland. Somehow, I have also been fantastically lucky enough to find my brilliant partner, Alex Howard, among these friends – and without Alex, I know that this dissertation could not have been written at all.