Luke Howard - Legacy

Legacy

Howard's cloud classification had a major influence on the arts as well as on science. His classification of clouds was later adopted by Ralph Abercromby and Hugo Hildebrand Hildebrandsson, who developed and popularised the system laid out by Howard. Abercromby noted in a paper on the naming of clouds that to the Quaker Howard "any name connected with heathen mythology was specially distasteful". Howard corresponded with Goethe, who wrote a series of poems in gratitude to him, including the lines:

But Howard gives us with his clear mind

The gain of lessons new to all mankind;

That which no hand can reach, no hand can clasp

He first has gained, first held with mental grasp.

Howard also inspired Shelley's poem "The Cloud" and informed John Constable's paintings and studies of skies and the writings and art of John Ruskin, who used Howard's cloud classification in his criticisms of landscape paintings in Modern Painters.

Howard appears in a novel by French writer Stéphane Audeguy titled, La théorie des nuages, winner of the 2005 Prix de l'Académie. Published in the US by Harcourt in 2007 as The Theory of Clouds.

Bruce Castle Museum currently houses an exhibition of Howard's work.. There is an English Heritage blue plaque to Howard at 7 Bruce Grove, Tottenham (the house in which he died, aged 91), on which he is described simply as "Namer of Clouds". The church in Tottenham that he had much involvement with (alongside his son, John Eliot Howard), Brooks Street Meeting House (now Brook Street Chapel) can still be found close to the house, on Tottenham High Road.

His daughter Rachel founded a school in Ackworth, which also contains a Plymouth Brethren burial ground.