Welcome, you’re listening to an episode of the Crisis and Catharsis podcast, where we explore stories of how people have found relief in times of crisis, focusing on artistic expression, like literature, music and art, but also expression in daily life, like cuisine and oral histories. This episode focuses on the summer of 1816 also known as the year without summer and the inventions and art that grew out of that environmental crisis. My name is Fernie, I’m a PhD student at Stony Brook University where I study Mexican migration history. I’m here with Bonnie Soper, a PhD student at Stony Brook University who studies religious and political dissidence in early modern Scotland.
Keep listening if you would like to learn about volcanic eruptions, the invention of the bicycle, and the creation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein…
Fernie: There is an island in Indonesia called Sumbawa, and on Sumbawa is Mount Tambora, which is a volcano. The name of the mountain translates to “gone” because of the number of people who have died trying to climb up its slopes. The locals lived in villages near the volcano, and most were farmers growing rice, coffee, and pepper. On April 5, 1815, the volcano began to rumble. The sounds traveled so far that soldiers that were hundreds of miles away on the island of Java thought it was cannon fire so they actually ran out to prepare for a fight. But a few hours later the rumbling stopped.
Then on April 10, three beams of lava came shooting up from Mount Tambora. The force of this eruption created winds that uprooted trees and ash came raining down more than 100 miles an hour, burning everything within a 25 mile radius. So much volcanic material fell from the sky that buildings collapsed and the ocean was covered with several feet of floating ash. Apparently, ships were stuck because of all the ash. And it was completely dark; no sunlight could come through all the pollution that filled the sky. To make matters worse, these eruptions lasted for the next four months.
About 10,000 people died from the volcanic blasts and between 1815 and 1816 many more around the world died from the starvation that followed. Volcanic particles entered the atmosphere and created crazy climate conditions, particularly in Europe and North America. There was much more rain and snow than before, and a temperature drop of three degrees celcius.
And this ruined crops in many places. We know that in the US, Thomas Jefferson had such a terrible corn harvest that he had to apply for a loan. More Americans than previous years moved west of the Ohio River searching for better climate as well. In Europe, potato, corn, and wheat crops failed leading to a famine and then to make matters worse, typhus broke out in the British Isles. In New England, they referred to the year 1816 and “eighteen hundred and froze to death” And in Germany they call it the year of the beggar. In Switzerland, starving mobs stormed into stores and bakeries to gather anything they could. There is little evidence that the Southern Hemisphere was affected like the Northern Hemisphere. And the telegraph hadn’t been invented yet, so people around the world did not know what was going on.
This was such a devastating, longreaching environmental catastrophe that they called it the “Year without Summer,” and it was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history up to that point.
But during this time, we see a couple instances of creativity and ingenuity.
First, I want to bring up an interesting theory on how the eruption led to the invention of bicycles. Historians agree that a German Baron named Karl Von Drais who lived in what is now southwestern Germany, designed and built the first modern bicycle in 1817. Von Drais was an inventor of sorts who also created an early version of the typewriter. The theory goes that his inspiration for creating the bicycle actually stems from Mount Tambora’s eruption. The volcanic eruption led to crop failure meaning no food for humans OR animals. And at this time, animals, particularly horses, were the main mode of transportation. So in 1816 Von Drais saw that all the horses were dying and began thinking of an alternative mode of transportation. The next year he came up with the bicycle. In his version of the bicycle, it has a front and back wheel that are lined up, and the front wheel is used to steer, but there is no pedal to move the back wheel so the rider has to push the bicycle, Flintstones style. He called it the “dandy horse” or the Draisienne or the laufmaschine.
Bonnie: Wow, I didn’t know the bicycle was that old but it makes sense it would be invented as a response to the loss of horses. I do know about how Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein that same summer.
It was in June of 1816 that eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley found herself at the Villa Diodati, attempting to weather the year without a summer with the company of her writer friends, many of which who were associated with scandal and licentious behavior. The group of romantic writers who were sequestered away on the shores of Lake Geneva included not only Mary Shelley and her partner Percy, but also Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont. Lord Byron rented the villa for himself and Polidori, while the Shelleys were staying at a cottage nearby. As the story goes, the group grew bored staying inside due to the terrible weather. One evening, Lord Byron proposed they all engage in competition to see who could write the most intriguing scary story. The summer would be a fruitful one for these writers and would be credited later by historians later as creating not only the genre of vampire horror in Polidori’s short story, “The Vampyre,” but also what many call the first science fiction novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus.
Fernie: Did anyone else write anything good that weekend?
Bonnie: Lord Byron rented the Villa they all stayed in. Byron that year had gone through a lot of scandal because he was known for being a rake or a womanizer, he had a few months earlier left his wife and it was rumored he slept with his half-sister.
His work from the challenge he proposed to write a scary story did not become influential or well-known, but he is known for his poetry written in other times such as Don Juan.
Clair Clairmont during this time was actually in a relationship with Byron, it seems during their time together in the year without a summer that Clairmont became pregnant with their daughter, Allegra.
Percy Shelley is probably best known for his poem ‘Ozymandias,’ published two years later, but it was really Mary Shelley and Polidori who wrote the famous works from their scary story competition that summer.
This group of romantic writers is known for being proponents of free love and having many affairs, and there is conflicting information about almost every one of them. If you try to research the year without a summer there are some who say Percy loved Claire, Polidori was in love with Mary, Byron is probably the father of Claire’s daughter Allegra but then others say it could have been Percy. And at the same time all of their lives were surrounded by disaster, deaths of siblings, Percy would die a few years later from drowning, the deaths of their children, even Polidori killed himself in 1821. So there is no shortage of melodrama in the retellings of these writer’s lives.
Her full name was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley and grew up the child of two influential academics, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Her mother was a prominent feminist writer and her father a political philosopher. Her parent’s writings have a clear influence on her own work, while at the same time Shelley’s life experiences surrounding the summer of 1816 come through even stronger. While writing Frankenstein, Mary Shelley was nursing her second baby and by the time of completing the novel was likely pregnant with her third child, both of which would unfortunately pass away in a few years following the writer’s summer at Lake Geneva. Historian Jill Lepore argues that the death of Mary Shelley’s first child combined with her complicated pregnancies during this period are a major factor in Shelley’s exploration of both creation and the horror that comes with it in Frankenstein. Lepore refers to this period in Shelley’s life as “the author’s eight years of near-constant pregnancy and loss,” and ties these events to the unfortunate death of Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died after giving birth to her daughter when she contracted an infection from a physician’s unclean hands. While Shelley was writing Frankenstein, Percy Shelley’s wife, whom he was separated from but still married to, killed herself while pregnant with her and Percy’s third child.
Fernie: Shelly lost three children all after giving birth? Did any survive into adulthood?
Bonnie: Mary and Percy had one surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley, who was born in 1819, who lived a full life and inherited the Baronetcy of his father. From what I know of him he lived the life of a minor aristocrat in England.
Alongside Mary Shelley’s tragic experiences of childbirth and pregnancy, Bill Phillips argues that the influence of the volcanic explosion that created the cold, wet summer of 1816 can be found throughout Frankenstein. Not only did the weather force the group of romanticists to hide away inside, inducing the boredom that led to Lord Byron suggesting their writing contest, but Shelley’s use of weather phenomenon such as thunderstorms in Frankenstein echo what she was experiencing throughout that summer. Phillips describes the travels of Frankenstein’s monster through cold and desolate landscapes as mirroring the threats of environmental catastrophe that Shelley herself experienced while writing the novel.
Fernie: Can you give a brief summary of the story itself? Of Frankenstein’s monster?
Bonnie: The book opens with an explorer meeting Victor Frankenstein in the Arctic while he’s hunting for the monster. Then the story goes into flashbacks to Victor’s childhood and how he came to experiment on human bodies while he was attending university. Victor has an obsessive personality, and attempts to defy death itself by creating a living being out of dead body parts, and it is important to the story that he creates a very large being that can inflict a lot of damage on people. After creating his quote ‘monster’, Victor is disturbed by his creation who seems miserable, confused. He is frightened of what he’s done and he leaves it. There is a part in the story where Victor’s brother is murdered and Victor is convinced it was the monster that did it. Time goes by and the Victor finds the monster in the Alps- something interesting about Frankenstein is how much of the scenery is cold and barren, going back to the year without a summer and also the symbolic nature of creation and the state of being barren- so when Victor meets the monster again the monster shows him that he has educated himself by reading novels and works of philosophy and essentially begs Victor to create him a wife. Victor feels guilty and agrees to build him a woman out of dead body parts, but part way through he realizes he will not bring himself to make another creature. This upsets the monster and he kills one of Victor’s friends as punishment for feeling betrayed by his creator. Later on in the story Victor is married and once again, the Monster kills his wife. The way the book ends is how it started, Victor is hunting the monster for revenge in the Arctic and that is where Victor meets his end essentially from exposure and exhaustion from the brutal landscape and his obsessive hunt for the monster. So Frankenstein ends with the Monster in the Arctic who says he will kill himself in the future and with his creator, Victor Frankenstein, dead. It is a tragic story of the pitfalls of creation, knowledge, and alienation.
Historians and writers have attributed many qualities to the influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It has been hailed as the first science fiction novel and a novel that can be considered an allegory for a plethora of historical events such as revolutions and tales of subjugation. Some historians, such as Jill Lepore, argue that Frankenstein’s monster’s journey mirrors that of a slave narrative, and as such holds a unique place in American culture. Others argue that the year without a summer is responsible for Shelley’s investigation of science, technology, and the environment’s effects upon the human psyche. And yet, Mary Shelley would only be 20 years old when Frankenstein was published in 1818. It’s clear that various factors of Shelley’s life all converged upon the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816 and Shelley’s attempts to endure and confront the horrors of her own life led to the creation of one of the most significant novels of all time.
Further Reading:
Jill Lepore, “The Strange and Twisted Life of ‘Frankenstein’,” The New Yorker, February 12, 2018.
Bill Phillips, “Frankenstein and Mary Shelley’s ‘Wet Ungenial Summer,’ Atlantis vol 28, no 2 (2006), 59-68.
Mount Tambora and the Year Without Summer
Mount Tambora, Blast from the Past
Five Minutes with Tony Hadland and Hans-Erhard Lessing
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