1816: The Year Without a Summer–when Frankenstein was written
1816: The Year Without a Summer–when Frankenstein was written
As the coronavirus pandemic is unfolding on almost any territory around the world, and whilst the western world switched to summer counting of time during the month of March, we’re still uncertain whether things are going to stabilize by summer and if life as we know it–not in lockdown cities–will resume to some kind of “normal”. Whatever happens, it’s safe to say, it’s going to be a no ordinary summer, quite different than what you’ve been used to. Which brings us to 1816, a year that has been chronicled–as eerie as it may sound–as the ‘Year Without a Summer’ or also the ‘Poverty Year’ and ‘Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death’.
It is not entirely clear to what led to the happenings of the year 1816, but historians and researchers attribute the events to a weather anomaly that was likely caused by a violent volcanic eruption that occurred a year before that. A super eruption of Mount Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia on 10 and 11 April 1815, at the time part of the Dutch East Indies (and under the French rule during Napoleon’s occupation of the Dutch), could have caused the events that were about to follow the next year, in 1816.
Reportedly, the Mount Tambora eruption rocked the highest value on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (7 out of 7), plummeting an unforeseen amount of volcanic ash and poison into the Earth’s atmosphere. Modern-day scientists would explain Mount Tambora’s eruption in April 1815 as “the world’s greatest ash eruption (so far as is definitely known) since the end of the last Ice Age.”
One more violent eruption was recorded in 1814, when the Mayon Volcano in the Philippines also opened to the skies (VEI=4), at the time under Spanish rule. The two eruptions likely led to a severe climate anomaly that could explain the drop of planetwide average temperatures that followed in 1816, for about 0.4–0.7 °C. The numbers might not look so significant, but they are significant enough to indicate a weather anomaly has occurred on a planetary level.
In 1816, it was the northern hemisphere of Earth to suffer the most. The unusually cold weather due to the disturbed Earth’s atmosphere brought floods and famine. Crops failed and there were major food shortages since a snowfall occurred in June and a killer frost in August. For the 19th-century man, it must have felt like the end of the world, who was already facing turmoils to collect crops and produce enough food due to generally colder weather.
During the 19th-century, Earth was still going through its centuries-long period of global cooling, or what scientists today call the Little Ice Age. The onset of the Little Ice Age was in the 16th-century, perhaps even earlier than that, and lasted until the 19th-century; it could for example also explain phenomena such as to why the River Thames in London was more prone to freeze during winters in the past.
The two volcanic eruptions from 1814 and 1815 are believed to have only aggravated the Little Ice Age, making everything worse. It was most difficult for Western Europe, New England (the northeast region of the U.S.), and Atlantic Canada. The failure of crops and insufficient food production there followed food riots in some countries like the United Kingdom and France.
The ceaseless pouring of the rain did not avoid central Europe, either; floodings were recorded on all major European rivers and countries such as Switzerland declared a state of emergency due to famine. Things were bad enough, to say the least, but these times of need led to a great many inventions and left behind a treasure of cultural artifacts, including great books and great paintings.
From the monstrous weather came fantastic monsters who grip our imagination to this date. In a famous episode from the history of world literature, Mary Godwin, Percey Shelley, Lord Byron, and John William Polidori were all staying at the Villa Diodati, overlooking Lake Geneva. Since the weather was bleak and gloomy during the whole summer of 1816, the little group dared each other in a competition to see who could write the most frightening horror story. This is when Mary Godwin–soon to wed poet Percey Shelley–came up with her fictional character Frankenstein.
There’s a great legacy in Mary Shelly’s fiction work, as her Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus is considered to be a prototype of the science fiction genre. The writer supposedly spent days thinking about her story, until she had a dream of a scientist who was horrified of what he had conceived–and then came a book.
At the same time, Lord Byron wrote A Fragment, a work that eventually influenced Polidori to pen down his short story The Vampyre, which went on to be the first published modern vampire story.
The high concentration of tephra, that is the particulate material unleashed amid a volcanic eruption, for months hovered in the atmosphere and caused parts of the world to observe somewhat more spectacular sunsets than your average. This proved to be a great inspiration to the English landscape painter, J.M.W. Turner, whose omnipresent use of yellow tinge through much of his work is credited to those special volcanic skies from around 1816. Similar-looking sunsets have been recorded following the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, and as of more recently, the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines.
Amid those times of great troubles, humans came up with valuable inventions, too. Famine meant no food to feed horses, so horse carriages had to be abandoned. It’s what prompted German inventor Karl Drais, a civil servant to the Grand Duke of Baden, to devise the draisine or the velocipede–the predecessor of the modern-day bike. The draisine was the first commercially successful two-wheeler and was famously dubbed at the time as the hobby-horse or dandy horse. It was produced in both Germany and France.
The year without a summer had an influence on human culture and invention years after it took place as a major civilizational event. An example is Justus von Liebig, a German chemist who was only a child at the time, but the events of his childhood prompted him to study plant nutrition during his adult life; he eventually developed the use of mineral fertilizers which were to greatly benefit farming.
In terms of social and demographic changes, crop failures in North America led to the shaping of the “American Heartland” or the U.S. states in the Midwest that don’t access an ocean. These territories were rapidly inhabited by families who previously, before 1816, lived in the region of New England where the weather turned out to be extremely inhospitable.
Some 15,000 people abandoned the state of Vermont alone and migrated to the more hospitable parts of the continent, a number that decimated seven years of population growth in this state. These particular migrations from New England contributed to the formation of the state of Indiana at the very end of 1816, and the formation of Illinois which followed in 1818.
It’s noteworthy that those who left Vermont included the family of Joseph Smith, the religious leader and founder of Mormonism; it has been interpreted that the migration of his family led to a chain of events that eventually climaxed with Joseph Smith writing the Book of Mormon. And if it wasn’t for the formation of new religious movements, the great famine in the aftermath of 1816 helped trigger the formation of groups such as the anti-slavery Abolitionist movement, the historic movement that sought to end the Atlantic slave trade and set slaves free.
Whether the novel coronavirus will give us a new popular monster to occupy our imagination for the next 200 years or any new movements that will change the course of society or some countries, we are waiting to see. But hopefully, our summer won’t be as bad as the one in 1816.
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