Charles Dickens would have approved, I think, of Weather Eye This can be inferred from the fact that a daily column like this was one of the first regular features in the Daily News, the Liberal newspaper that Dickens founded, and edited for a time, in 1846. The column was by James Glaisher and it was the first of its kind in a daily newspaper.
James Glaisher was one of the great eccentrics of 19th-century meteorology, and he had three narrow escapes in his career. The first was when he came to this country in 1830, aged 21, to take part in the Trigonometrical Survey of Ireland; the climate disagreed with him - or so he said - and he became so ill he was obliged to return forthwith to his native England.
The third, if I may take them out of order, was more than 30 years later, by which time Glaisher had become, as many ageing meteorologists do, intolerant, arrogant and argumentative, and acutely conscious of his high social position as Superintendent of the Magnetical and Meteorological Department of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.
It was not uncommon in those days for meteorologists to carry their instruments aloft personally in hot air balloons to find out more about the thermal and barometric structure of the upper atmosphere. On one such occasion in 1862, Glaisher lost consciousness for lack of oxygen at a height estimated to have been about 37,000 ft, and only quick action by his almost equally debilitated companion to curb the still rising balloon saved the reckless pair from certain death.
But the second narrow squeak was the one of relevance to Weather Eye. In the early 1840s, Glaisher agreed with a friend called Hunt, a sub-editor with the London Illustrated News, that he would write an account of his work at Greenwich for the paper. The contribution duly appeared on March 16th, 1844, with Glaisher's by-line, but his boss, the Astronomer Royal, was aghast; it was the latter's view that Glaisher's account should have appeared, if at all, written anonymously with the simple addendum "Published by the kind permission of the Astronomer Royal". It was a close-run thing that Glaisher kept his job.
But either the Astronomer Royal changed, or the existing incumbent grew a little mellower. In any event, when two years later Dickens started the Daily News, he selected Hunt as his assistant editor. Hunt immediately commissioned Glaisher to write a signed daily weather column for the paper - which he did, but I doubt if he continued it as long as Weather Eye.