The Year With No Summer
The Year With No Summer
16.08.06 11:30
"I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went - and came, and brought no day..."
These are the opening lines of Lord Byron's poem "Darkness". But what could have prompted such a bleak vision? Fever? Too much absinthe? No. It is more likely that the infamous "year with no summer" of 1816 was the inspiration.
In 1815 a massive eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia disgorged millions of tonnes of dust, ash and gas into the atmosphere: an estimated 100-150 cubic kilometres of the stuff. This was the biggest volcanic eruption ever recorded - much bigger even than Krakatoa - and was heard 1000 kilometres away. As a comparison, the huge explosion of Mount Saint Helens in 1980 ejected a "mere" one or two cubic kilometres of debris.
That mass of particles floating around in the atmosphere is bound to have an effect but it didn't become apparent until the following year when dust and sulphur dioxide had spread across much of the northern hemisphere's sky. It is well documented that global temperatures can be affected in the aftermath of an eruption but 1816 stands out. Worst affected were the north-eastern USA and eastern Canada, where crops failed due to frosts in May and even snowstorms in June, falling to a depth of 25 centimetres in New England. Lakes and rivers froze as far south as Pennsylvania during July and August.
Meanwhile in northern Europe the cold, gloom, frosts and abnormal rainfall also led to food shortages, with food riots breaking out in France and Britain. France's grape harvest was almost non-existent; brown, red and yellow snow fell in eastern Europe; across Ireland, rain fell on 142 days through the summer, leading to famine and typhoid; starving Germans baked straw and sawdust into loaves of "bread"; and in Switzerland desperate people started eating moss.
Terrible as these events were, the pampered writers sequestered on holiday at Lord Byron's summer rental, "Villa Diodati", near Lake Geneva, made the most of them. Among the visitors were Percy Bysshe Shelley and his betrothed, Mary. Byron's poem sprung forth as a result, and the "wet, ungenial summer", as Mary Shelley described it in her diary, drove the wordsmiths indoors. There they entertained one another with ghost stories, and the stygian atmosphere inspired Mary Shelley to pen "Frankenstein". Less well known is the work of another guest that summer, John Polidori - understandably, perhaps, as he was Byron's personal physician rather than a novelist. He wrote "The Vampyre", which was expanded from a fragmentary play by Byron. Although clearly making little impact on the annals of literature itself, this tome did provide the stimulus for Bram Stoker's later work "Dracula".
Back in England the atmospheric ash caused spectacular sunsets, famously incorporated by J.M.W. Turner into many of his Impressionist paintings. Meanwhile, the German aristocrat Karl Freiherr von Drais was being more pragmatic; with a shortage of oats he got down to inventing his own horseless transportation, the "Draisine" - also known as the velocipede, which, of course, evolved into the bicycle. Necessity truly is the mother of invention.
