Shelley, however, earned Byron’s respect for his poetry, his wit, and his iconoclastic attitudes. Even though Shelley’s poems were little known among the general English public, Byron knew “Queen Mab” (which Shelley had sent to him), and thought it quite good. The two men found common ground both in their art and their disdain for bourgeois society. And in the summer of 1816, few places in Europe seemed more conventional than Geneva, partly because of the vestigial Calvinism that lingered in the city (it had a well-deserved reputation as the most morally conservative city on the continent), but also because it was overrun with wealthy English tourists, whom one observer claimed had “turned Geneva into an English watering-place.”
Most of his fellow countrymen received Byron quite coldly. “The English in general are very harsh towards him,” noted one of Byron’s few admirers in Geneva. “They are thrilled to have an excuse to treat with an air of superiority a man who so clearly towers above them all.” For his part, Byron returned the contempt of his Swiss hosts and their English guests. “Switzerland is a curst, selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world,” he wrote. “I never could bear the inhabitants, and still less their English visitors.… I know of no other situation except Hell which I should feel inclined to participate with them.”
Mary Godwin had met Byron earlier that spring, in England, and the two appear to have hit it off well. Certainly Byron admired Mary’s father for his radical writings. But Shelley’s obvious preference for Byron’s company rather than her own caused Mary considerable dismay, particularly since she was perfectly capable of holding her own in their literary conversations. The situation was complicated by Polidori’s jealousy of Shelley, who was monopolizing the attentions of his idol, Lord Byron, and the presence of Claire Clairmont, who was pregnant with Byron’s child (she had thrown herself at Byron shortly before he left England) and desperate to rekindle the sexual spark between them.
Tensions rose; so did the frequency of the storms that swept across Lake Geneva. “We watch them as they approach from the opposite side of the lake,” wrote Mary, “observing the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heavens, and dart in jagged figures upon the piny heights of Jura, dark with the shadow of the overhanging clouds.” Forced to abandon their excursions on the lake, the group gathered at Byron’s rented villa. Often they discussed “the nature of the principle of life,” as Mary explained, “and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated.” Galvanism—the use of electrical shocks to jolt an inanimate being into life—was a popular topic in Europe and the United States at the time, as was the topic of atmospheric electricity, including lightning and the interplay of electrical currents between earth and sky. Certainly Polidori, Shelley, and Mary were well acquainted with recent scientific experiments in the field of galvanism. Perhaps, thought Mary, a corpse could be reanimated, or “the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.”
On other occasions the conversations were less intellectual. “The season was cold and rainy,” Mary later recalled, “and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands.” On the evening of June 16, Byron decided to regale his friends with several stories from a collection of German horror stories entitled Phantasmagoriana, or Collection of the Histories of Apparitions, Spectres, Ghosts, etc. One of these concerned “the story of a husband who kisses his new bride on their wedding night, only to find, to his horror, that she has been transformed into the corpse of the woman he once loved.” An interesting choice, considering Byron’s reticence on his own wedding night.
“These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation,” noted Shelley, and so he, Byron, and Mary agreed to each write a story “founded on some supernatural occurrence.” When the group gathered again on the evening of June 18, they resumed their talk of ghosts and horror, each trying to outdo the other. Shortly after midnight, Byron read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “Christabel,” with its lines about a mysterious stranger (perhaps a witch) who had been abducted in her youth:
Then drawing in her breath aloud,
Like one that shudder’d, she unbound
The cincture from beneath her breast:
Her silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold! her bosom and half her side—
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!
For a moment everyone remained silent. Then Shelley suddenly shrieked, put his hands to his head, and ran out of the room. Polidori followed and threw cold water in Shelley’s face, then administered a dose of ether. Staring at Mary, Shelley said that he had “suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, when taking hold of his mind, horrified him.”
That evening, in her bedroom with its dark parquet floors, and moonlight struggling to penetrate the closed shutters, Mary thought of a creature, “manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.” Gradually, over the remaining months of 1816, Mary Godwin’s creature would emerge in a form far more famous than any character created by either Shelley or Byron.
5.
DAY AFTER DAY
“This end of the World Weather is sadly against me…”
AT THE INDEPENDENCE Day celebration in Boston, John Adams glanced around at the assembly of four hundred guests in the main hall of the State House, and discovered that he was the only signer of the Declaration of Independence present. For that matter, few members of the Revolutionary generation remained alive in New England. “Death is sweeping his scythe all around us,” the eighty-one-year-old Adams wrote that summer, “cutting down our old friends and brandishing it over us.”
Adams spent much of his time reading, especially history. He recently had finished (for the second time) Mary Wollstonecraft’s sympathetic chronicle of the French Revolution, scribbling his dissenting opinions—often at voluminous length—in the margins of his book. It would be all very well, he argued at one point, if the “empire of superstition and hypocrisy should be overthrown; but if all religion and all morality should be over-thrown with it, what advantage will be gained?” Clearly optimistic about his own future—a reporter on July 4 noted that the former president “still retains the appearance of health and cheerfulness”—Adams embarked upon a new reading project: a sixteen-volume history of France.
Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was feeling the effects of time. “Here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring will give way,” Jefferson grumbled in a note to Adams. He could no longer walk very far, although he tried to ride two or three hours a day. He needed glasses to read at night (and during the day for small print) and, Jefferson admitted, “my hearing is not quite so sensible as it used to be.” Having recently sold his personal library to Congress to replace the books burned or purloined by British troops when they sacked Washington in 1814, Jefferson was trying to rebuild his literary collection at Monticello, just outside Charlottesville. In the meantime, he had his hands full supervising the care of his gardens. Although his plants had survived the June cold wave, the persistent drought threatened to destroy everything. “In June, instead of 33⁄4 inches, our average of rain for that month,” Jefferson informed a friend, “we only had 1⁄3 of an inch.”
Thirty miles away, President Madison hosted an Independence Day banquet for ninety guests at Montpelier, with dishes spread out along a long table on the lawn under an arbor. It was a nearly all-male affair; Dolley and the president’s mother, sister, and niece were the only women present. Dressed in his customary black coat, black breeches with buckles at the knees, and black silk stockings, Madison was determined to enjoy the last few months of his presidency. (In fact, his four-month stay at Montpelier in 1816 remains the longest continuous absence of any pres
ident from Washington.) Madison’s reputation as a gracious host was based partly upon his generosity with his collection of fine wines (especially Madeira, which he imported by the case and stored in the hollow pediment of his front portico), partly upon the vivacious personality of his wife, and partly upon the excellent fare served up by his French cook. “One could not be in a company more amiable, better versed in good manners, and possessing to a higher degree the precious and very rare art of leaving to the persons who pay them a visit, the comfort and freedom they enjoy in their own home,” claimed Attorney General Richard Rush.
Twenty-two years earlier, Jefferson had persuaded Madison to keep a record of the weather at his home, so Jefferson could compare atmospheric temperatures between Monticello and Montpelier. Madison and members of his family had dutifully compiled detailed weather statistics from 1784–1802, but apparently they discontinued the practice shortly after Madison joined Jefferson’s first administration as secretary of state. Jefferson, however, continued his own observations on meteorological events while he was president, including notes on the depth and duration of every snowfall in the nation’s capital.
Scarcely had the dishes been cleared from Madison’s Independence Day repast when a company of four French diplomats, including the recently appointed ambassador, Jean-Guillaume Hyde de Neuville, arrived at Montpelier for a visit. Although de Neuville—who had spent the last few years of Napoléon’s reign in exile on an estate in Brunswick, New Jersey—appreciated Madison’s diplomatic tact in not mentioning Napoléon during their conversations (pretending that “Louis XVIII had just succeeded Louis XVI”), the French minister was outraged to learn that a member of Madison’s cabinet had described the reigning king of France as “an imbecile tyrant” during a July 4 toast in Baltimore. De Neuville insisted the offending official be sacked; Madison demurred. In a private note to Secretary of State Monroe (who was the only Cabinet member spending the summer in Washington), the president wondered if de Neuville “hoped to hide the degradation of the Bourbons under a blustering deportment in a distant country.” Small chance, since the antimonarchical brouhaha in Baltimore was not an isolated incident.
Across the United States, the fortieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence followed a familiar pattern of parades, public readings of the Declaration (often by elderly Continental Army veterans), and patriotic speeches. Along with Thanksgiving, it was one of only two holidays observed in all eighteen states. (Some New England communities refused to celebrate December 25 as a holiday on the grounds that no one knew for sure precisely when Jesus was born.) Fireworks were readily available in most states, although their unfortunate tendency—in the wrong hands—to set afire the roofs of houses led New York City officials to ban all but government-sanctioned public displays.
In the aftermath of the recent war against Britain (the “Second War of Independence”), the day’s themes leaned heavily toward military valor and national unity. Toasts praised President Madison (“A ruler more respected for his merit, than his power, and greater in the simple dignity of his virtues than the proudest monarch on his throne”), and Jefferson (“He gave to this day its celebrity—On this day Freemen will ever remember him as first among the first”). They lauded the Union itself (“With it, there is strength, safety and happiness—dissolve it, discord and civil commotion would soon make us the fit subjects of a despot”), while comparing the United States favorably with the ancient republics of Greece and Rome. Speakers denounced the reactionary monarchs of Europe (“They have warred against liberty, and ‘hunted virtue and valor to the tomb’”) and sympathized with the unfortunate citizens of France (“degraded and abject … May the voice of liberty incite her to action, and lead her to glory”) and Spain (“sinking back into the night of ignorance and the gloom of superstition—ruled by an idiot and a tyrant”) and even England (“grinding her subjects to the earth to bribe other powers”).
Temperatures in New England had rebounded nicely, for the most part, since the snowstorms of June 6 and 9. Waltham and Williamstown in Massachusetts reported highs above 90 degrees in the third week of June, and Salem reached 101 degrees on Sunday, June 23. The cold returned briefly on June 28 and 29, when Professor Dewey reported a light frost. It had been the coldest month of June ever recorded in New Haven, Connecticut, but the Vermont Register and Almanac cheerfully predicted “sultry hot weather” for the start of July.
It missed the mark completely. July 4 was cool across much of New England. In Plymouth, Connecticut, clockmaker Chauncey Jerome noticed a group of men pitching quoits at midday in bright sunshine, wearing thick overcoats; “a body could not feel very patriotic in such weather,” Jerome recalled. Two days later, another cold front swept through from the northwest. Montreal reported snow west of the city—where the growing season already was three weeks behind schedule—and ice about the thickness of a half-dollar on ponds.
On Monday, July 8, frost struck crops from Maine to Virginia. In Franconia, New Hampshire, the cold snap destroyed the bean crop. Along the eastern shore of Lake Erie, where crops had been suffering from a lengthy drought, “the wind was N. West with some snow,” and the day “so cold as to render fires necessary for comfort within, and great coats over woolen clothing” outdoors. In Richmond, frost was clearly visible on the ground. “Our climate is far from having ripened to the Summer heat,” noted the Richmond Enquirer, “the nights and mornings are yet surprisingly cool.” The morning of July 9 brought even colder temperatures and hard frosts across New Hampshire, much of Vermont, and western Massachusetts. One Connecticut farmer who had recently burned off part of his land showed a visitor a log that was “frozen down, about 4 feet in length, and 8 or ten inches in breadth; I saw the ice cut up with an axe, and it appeared solid as in winter.”
Although this cold wave did not have the devastating impact of its predecessor, it did sufficient damage to raise warning flags of impending scarcity up and down the East Coast. Even though most crops survived, the growth of young plants was sufficiently retarded to make them vulnerable to early autumn frosts. Accordingly, the governor of Lower Canada (including Quebec and Montreal) issued a proclamation “in consequence of the backwardness of the season” prohibiting the export of wheat, flour, beans, and barley until September; simultaneously, he opened Canadian ports to the importation of grain from the United States, free of tariff duties.
Most of Maine’s early crop of hay—used as fodder for livestock—perished, and the July freeze killed beans, squash, and cucumbers. In much of Vermont and New Hampshire, the first crop of hay was only half its usual size. As far as wheat and rye were concerned, one observer confirmed that “the most gloomy apprehensions are entertained for the latter harvest. Indeed, if the present cold and dry weather continues a very little longer, the Indian corn, potatoes, beans, &c. cannot escape the autumnal frosts.” The New-Hampshire Sentinel agreed. “Season very unpromising,” it noted. “We begin to despair of corn, hay will come extremely light.” The New-Hampshire Patriot claimed to have heard “fears of a general famine.”
Similar reports came from Worcester, Massachusetts, where the weather had cut the crop of hay in half. Without hay, farmers would either have to slaughter their livestock in the fall or keep them alive through the winter with other crops such as oats and Indian corn, which would require another two months of warm weather to ripen. In eastern Ohio, the crop of hay also had failed, but there was still time for a second cutting if warm weather returned. Farther south, “the effects of an atmosphere thus cool and dry, are visible in our corn-fields,” reported the Richmond Enquirer. “The plant wears generally a stinted look. From present appearances, the crop threatens to be a very short one.” On the bright side, the cool weather had destroyed several summer pests that usually plagued the wheat in Virginia.
Speculation on the cause of the July frost centered on the sunspot theory, whose advocates claimed that diminished solar heat also explained the prolonged drought. On July 4, noted a l
etter to the Stockbridge Star, one large spot was surrounded by sixteen others, “and there was a considerable space around them which appeared less light than other parts of the sun.” As the New Hampshire Farmer’s Cabinet pointed out, however, “we have had several days of uncommon heat, and it is remarkable that these hot days have happened at the precise time when the sun has exhibited the largest spots; and the days which throughout the country have been the coldest, have been at the time when no spots were visible.”
Warm weather returned to the East Coast by July 11, but the drought continued. Keene, New Hampshire, went twelve weeks without rain. Northern Vermont was halfway through a four-month summer drought with no precipitation except snow. “Think I never saw our street so dry,” muttered a minister in East Windsor, Connecticut.
* * *
THOMAS Stamford Raffles returned to England on July 11, 1816. At the request of the directors of the East India Company, the British government had returned Java to the Dutch, now that the Netherlands had regained its independence from France. “The possession of Java, so far from yielding the advantages expected to arise from it, has proved a heavy burden on the finances of the parent State,” explained a member of the East India Company’s council to Raffles. Four years of administering Java and the surrounding islands had cost the company more than 7 million rupees, according to its own estimate.
Raffles protested the decision, which he considered remarkably shortsighted in its neglect of Britain’s long-term strategic and commercial interests in South Asia. Java “cannot longer be kicked about from one place and authority to another like a shuttlecock,” he argued. “All our interests in this part of the world are sacrificed.” To no avail. Lord Castlereagh and the East India Company had their hands quite full governing the territories they had acquired in India, and had no intention of adding any responsibilities in that region, especially considering Parliament’s insistence upon slashing government expenditures.
The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History Page 11