The bleakest winter ever
QUESTION Christina Rossetti’s poem In The Bleak Midwinter, which inspired the carol, was written in 1870-71. Was there a particularly harsh winter at the time, when ‘Earth stood hard as iron,/Water like a stone’? RoMaNTIC poet Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) would have experienced many harsh winters.
her lifetime coincided with the end of what is known as the little Ice age, between 1300 and 1870, during which europe was subjected to much colder winters than we commonly know.
In the first half of the 19th century, there were particularly harsh winters when on occasion the Thames froze.
It’s clear Dickens regarded snow and cold as endemic to Christmas. Many of his works reference this: the beginning of a Christmas Carol (1843) has: ‘It was cold, bleak, biting weather; foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them.’
The second half of the 19th century saw a gradual end to the little Ice age, though winters were still far harsher than they are today.
The reason why 1870 is regarded as its end point is because that winter was particularly harsh all across Western europe. Its effects were recorded i n the events surrounding the Franco-Prussian War. During the siege of Paris, the seine froze solid for three weeks and the citizens couldn’t communicate with the outside world as it was too cold for the pigeons to fly.
Using the Central england Temperature (CeT) record, the overall average temperature here for the three winter months of December, January and February was just 2.4c. In contrast, the average for 1981 to 2010 was 10c.
J. B. Moss, Linton, Kent. QUESTION On holiday in the Canary Islands, I noticed that my whisky measure was considerably more generous than served in pubs at home. What are the measures used? FURTheR to the earlier answer, many tourists have discovered to their surprise that spirits and liqueurs are not measured out in spain. Conversely, spaniards visiting Britain with me always grin, or grimace, at what they call ‘the thimble’.
I live on the Costa Blanca and when one of my British visitors ordered whisky gateau at a local restaurant, the waiter poured whisky from the bottle onto the cake. This was all included in the standard price menu, the menu del dia.
B. eadon, Alicante.