The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History

by William K. Klingaman

  A week of fair weather provided a window for farmers to harvest any remaining crops that were even close to maturing, but when rain returned on September 9, they could only watch helplessly as the downpour pounded their fields. Two days later southeastern England suffered another violent storm that brought rain, hail, and snow. Outside of Maidstone, in Kent, hailstones “as large as nuts” severely damaged both wheat and barley. “Snow fell once or twice in the neighbourhood during the week,” reported The Times, “and more than once ice of the thickness of half-a-crown was found in the morning.” Hops farmers in Canterbury suffered losses worth thousands of pounds sterling from storm damage.

  Surveying the devastation, The Times of London clung to its assertion that despite “the late and wet season,” the wheat harvest “has proved propitious as the husbandman could desire.” It acknowledged, however, that the quality of wheat varied widely among different regions, especially since many farmers cut their grain too early or when it was damp. With so much wheat spoiled, seed for the following season would be in short supply. Even optimistic observers acknowledged that more than 75 percent of the hops harvest was lost. A considerable quantity of barley had been harvested, but most of it was of inferior quality. Although peas and beans from the east were plentiful, in the home counties “they have run too much to straw.”

  From Gatcombe Park, David Ricardo reported that “the continuance of the cold and wet weather does not afford us a very good propect for the harvest, and I am very much afraid that the poor will have much to suffer during the next winter.” Malthus agreed. The harvest in Hertfordshire, Malthus informed his friend in a letter of September 8, “has begun about us at last and seems as if it would be pretty good if it could be got in, but there has hardly ever been known so late a year, and in the backward parts of the country, a late year is always a bad one.”

  As real and anticipated shortages sent commodity prices higher, the peculiar operation of the Corn Laws delayed the importation of foreign grain. The legislation compelled the government to close or open the ports to grain imports for three months at a time, based upon the average price of wheat over a six-week period. The implementation of the law therefore always lagged behind the actual movement of prices. By the end of September 1816, wheat was selling well above the eighty shillings per quarter threshold established by the Corn Laws. Given the dismal failure of the harvest on much of the Continent, there seemed little chance the price of wheat would fall below the threshold anytime soon.

  Lord Liverpool’s ministry inadvertently contributed to public anxiety over the prospect of sharply higher food prices when it attempted to suppress the quarterly Report on the Agricultural State of the Kingdom for March, April, and May. The report was a routine gathering of information from farmers throughout Britain about the condition of their crops and livestock, but the government found the farmers’ responses so alarming that it printed only twenty-two copies of the report and tried to restrict access to it. Even The Times deemed this foolish: “Secrecy is looked upon as a sign of extreme and imminent danger; and what is kept back from knowledge acts far more terribly than what is known.”

  Nevertheless, public demonstrations against the government remained rare, save for isolated outbursts in Preston and Glasgow. Yet it seemed likely that widespread protests wanted only deepening distress and the coordination of discontent by parliamentary reformers. Following the end of the war against France, radicals led by Major Cartwright and Sir Francis Burdett had helped to establish local reform clubs—usually known as Hampden clubs—in numerous English counties. Unlike previous reform efforts, which sought to mobilize only the middle and upper classes, this campaign attempted to mobilize as many Englishmen as possible behind a platform of annual elections, equal parliamentary constituencies, and the extension of the franchise to all taxpayers, and eventually to all adult males. William Cobbett contributed ammunition on a weekly basis through his “Two-Penny Trash,” an inexpensive, pamphlet version (which avoided the newspaper tax) of his more staid Political Register; by the summer of 1816, Cobbett’s pamphlets were the primary printed source of news for Britain’s working class, with a circulation that often exceeded 50,000.

  In open-air meetings and gatherings in taverns and guild halls, speakers informed factory hands and farm laborers that their current distress stemmed in large measure from a corrupt and uncaring political system, and that their only remedy lay in a reformed Parliament. In late August, a meeting of eight thousand angry liverymen—members of London’s trade and craft organizations—unanimously demanded lower taxes and legislative reform. When John Quincy Adams asked the Lord Mayor of London how such resolutions could have been carried without even a murmur of dissent, the Lord Mayor replied that “the friends of the Government had not dared to make any opposition.” At another meeting on September 5 in Westminster, speakers denounced the government’s attempted suppression of the Board of Agriculture’s report, and insisted that “the distresses of the country were without parallel.” Shortly thereafter, a self-styled “Committee of Public Safety”—a charged term, given the government’s paranoia about any movement recalling the French Revolution—launched a campaign to obtain thousands of signatures on petitions demanding reform, to be presented to Parliament when it reconvened in early 1817.

  Tory journals insisted the government’s policies bore little, if any, responsibility for the nation’s economic troubles. “Of distresses, such as now pervade the mass of the community,” noted the Quarterly Review, “small indeed is the part which parliaments or governments either create or cure.” Certainly Liverpool’s ministers and individual members of the royal family could encourage more affluent Englishmen to contribute to charitable causes, while the government cut spending and reduced taxes, in hopes of stimulating business activity. “Every expedient should be used to reduce the expenses of Government, and lessen the burdens of the people,” urged the editors of The Times of London, “in order that they may be put in good humour … The diminution of the public burdens must and ought at all events to take place, whatever other measure may ensue.”

  Across the Atlantic, the American press foresaw trouble for Britain if the harvest failed. In a September 10 editorial, the Daily National Intelligencer informed its readers that as bad as the summer had been for American farmers, “the season has been even more unfavorable to agriculture in Europe than in this country.” And if the poorer classes of Britain were stalked by hunger, at a time when the rest of British society lived in relative comfort, “the consequences of a scarcity will be terrible indeed.”

  James Mill, the utilitarian political philosopher and economist, painted his own grim picture of Britain’s future. In a letter to David Ricardo, Mill wrote from Ford Abbey in Dorset that “the corn here is absolutely green, nothing whatsoever in the ear; and a perfect continuance of rain and cold. There must now be of necessity a very deficient crop, and very high prices—and these with an unexampled scarcity of work will produce a degree of misery, the thought of which makes the flesh creep on ones [sic] bones—one third of the people must die—it would be a blessing to take them into the streets and highways, and cut their throats as we do with pigs.”

  * * *

  PERCY Shelley arrived in England shortly before the harvest began. After leaving Geneva on the morning of August 29, Shelley, Mary Godwin, and Claire Clairmont made their way back over the Jura Mountains (“The Swiss are very slow drivers,” complained an impatient Mary) and then through France in the same stormy weather that had crushed British crops in the last days of August. When the sun finally broke through, they stopped to visit the palaces and gardens at Fontainebleau and Versailles, which Mary found disappointing. “In all that essentially belongs to a garden they are extraordinarily deficient,” she noted in her journal. “The orangery is a stupid piece of expense.”

  Contrary winds delayed the party at Le Havre for several days, but they finally crossed the Channel through heavy seas and arrived in Portsmouth on September 8. (�
��Our passage from Havre hither was wretched—26 hours,” grumbled Shelley.) It took longer than expected to pass through customs when an officious clerk—“greasy,” Shelley called him—decided to leaf laboriously through the manuscript of Byron’s third canto of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” to make sure Shelley was not smuggling Belgian lace between its pages. Bureaucratic curiosity satisfied, Shelley headed for London to deliver Byron’s manuscripts to his publisher and settle some personal financial matters, before heading to Marlow, a town between the city and Oxford, to look for a new house.

  Since Claire did not want the Godwins to learn about her pregnancy, she and Mary told them Claire felt ill, and that she would stay in Bath until she recovered. Mary agreed to help Claire get settled; they found lodgings next to the Pump Room, the fashionable meeting hall frequented by Jane Austen’s characters in Northanger Abbey. Mary spent the next week reading, working on the manuscript of her novel, and attending scientific lectures at the Literary and Philosophical Society. Several blocks away, at the spacious and elegantly decorated Theatre Royale (which opened in its new location on the south side of Beauford Square in 1805), the company was posthumously honoring the late Richard Brinsley Sheridan—a friend of William Godwin—with its productions of The School for Scandal and The Rivals.

  Shelley sent for Mary on September 18; she left Bath and Claire with alacrity. Meanwhile, Shelley drafted a letter to Byron to update him on events in England. “The harvest is not yet cut,” he told his friend. “There are, however, as yet no very glaring symptoms of disaffection, though the distress is said to be severe. But winter is the season when the burthen will be felt. Most earnestly I do hope that despair will not drive the people to premature and useless struggles.”

  * * *

  “EVEN now we have suffered much from the Cold and the dreadful storms of Wind & Thunder,” wrote Lady Caroline Capel from Lausanne in early September. From April through August, Switzerland had received measurable rainfall for 130 out of 152 days. The harvest of 1816 was the worst in years—twice as bad as the dismal harvest of 1815. Grain was almost completely ruined, as was much of the hay crop, and the grape harvest failed altogether. Fodder for cattle grew scarce. The price of bread more than doubled; hostesses asked their guests to bring their own loaves to dinner parties.

  For the first two weeks of September, Byron divided his time between Coppet and Diodati, where he welcomed John Hobhouse, a friend from Trinity College days. Accompanied by Polidori, Byron and Hobhouse visited Madame de Staël on September 12 despite a hard, driving rain; their dinner conversation turned to Richard Sheridan and the book Madame de Staël was writing about Napoléon. Several days later, Byron dismissed Polidori. To Hobhouse—who had known the Italian physician for a brief time only—it seemed that Polidori, with his literary aspirations, “does not answer to Madame de Staël’s definition of a happy man, whose capacities are squared with his inclinations.… He is anything but an amiable man, and has a most unmeasured ambition, as well as inordinate vanity. The true ingredients of misery…”

  On September 17, Byron and Hobhouse embarked on another tour of the Alps. This time the weather cooperated; it rained for only four hours in eight days. As they traveled, Hobhouse noticed the backward state of Swiss vineyards: “Grapes appeared many, but little hopes of ripening.” Passing through Yverdon, they saw more crops that would never mature. By the time Byron and Hobhouse returned to Diodati on September 29, the Grand Council of Geneva had approved an emergency expenditure of 800,000 francs to purchase food for the inhabitants of the canton. The council subsequently doubled that amount.

  Rain continued to pelt the crops around Brussels through September. One local observer deemed the season “the most inclement within the memory of man.” Grain already was in short supply, partly because any surplus that had been stored from the previous harvest had been consumed by Allied armies earlier in the year. Newspapers called for the government to prohibit the exportation of grain. Prices rose so rapidly that “thousands of fathers of families are unable to supply the wants of their children, and can hardly give them a wretched crust of unwholesome black bread.” Here, too, the grape harvest failed; fruits ripened in mid-September, much later than usual; and potatoes rotted in the soggy fields.

  “How cold and triste is this vast Germany,” sighed Lady Shelley as she passed through Prussia in the late summer. In Dresden, she noted that “the weather is dreadfully cold; frequent showers of rain, and very damp.” In Mannheim, a violent storm on September 11 sent the Rhine flowing over its banks for the fifth time in three months—six feet above its mean height. Rain prevented farmers from harvesting the hay around Hamburg; then more rain ruined the hay still in the fields. In Württemberg, grain failed and grass took over the fields; then flooding rivers ravaged the hay as well, leaving livestock with almost nothing to eat. Potatoes decayed in the ground, and grapes failed to ripen on either hills or meadows. Losses to the crops outside of Frankfurt were deemed “incalculable.” One Bavarian official deemed 1816 one of the three worst harvests since the mid-sixteenth century; the only grain that eventually ripened was almost too sodden to sell. To the east, authorities in Strasburg arrested two Jewish businessmen “of the lower class” whom they blamed for raising grain prices through their speculative activities in the local markets—Kornjuden, they called the accused.

  As Lady Shelley crossed the Danube into Hungary, she passed through lands where stands of ruined wheat already had been cut. “This looked as dismal as anything I ever saw in Norfolk,” she decided. At Vienna, she dined with royalty and wealthy landowners, one of whom—Count Francois Zichy—told her that the wheat had failed on his lands in southern Austria. “The peasants must eat rye,” he concluded, and “provisions will be dear.” He added that in nearby Styria, where there was barely enough food in good times, “the scarcity is great.” Prospects for the following year already looked dim, since the late harvest and heavy rains made it impossible to plant more than half of the rye fields for the winter season.

  As the harvest failed in one German state after another, emigration became a more attractive option. In Württemberg, an extremist Protestant sect obsessed with the New Testament Book of Revelation and the visions of Saint John suspected that the end of the world was near: first the devastation wrought by years of war, then the recent appearance of a comet, followed by the emergence of heresy within the Lutheran Church, and finally the catastrophic rains and hailstorms of the summer of 1816. Convinced that they needed to emigrate to the Holy Land to escape the coming plagues, a band of forty families departed in September, sailing down the Danube as far as Ismail in the Ukraine. There they remained, stranded, as their food ran out.

  Another German writer blamed the summer’s cold not on heaven or the sinfulness of man, but on the advent of peace. In a pamphlet entitled “The Effects of War upon the Seasons,” the author argued that wars in the Northern Hemisphere “rendered the seasons warmer and more temperate.” In normal times, he claimed, a perpetual current of cold air swept from the polar regions toward the equator. But “the concussion produced in the atmosphere by large and frequent discharges of gunpowder, obstructed this current, and often caused a current in the opposite direction.” When the wars ended, therefore, the normal flow of frigid air returned, and so the statesmen of Europe bore the responsibility for the cold and wet summer.

  * * *

  “I recollect no period since I have had any connection with Ireland in which it has been more at rest than it is at the present moment,” wrote a contented Robert Peel to Lord Sidmouth, the home secretary, on August 17. Indeed, the chief secretary for Ireland pointed out that the government in Dublin had not needed to invoke the Insurrection Act even once in 1816. Peel did not suppose that the Irish peasantry had reformed its querulous ways, nor did he believe “that the condition of the lower orders is much improved.” Instead, Peel concluded that the absence of major disturbances stemmed mainly from the strong measures the government had taken the previous
year to convince troublemakers “of the futility of their absurd projects to better their condition by acts of violence. We are in a much better state than we were eighteen months hence.”

  It is not clear whether Peel understood the disastrous state of the Irish harvest in the late summer. British officials in Dublin frequently lacked accurate and timely information about conditions outside of their immediate area, although Peel usually made a concerted effort to stay abreast of developments in even the remoter counties. But crops in Ireland certainly were suffering more from the incessant rain even than those in England. It rained for 143 days in 1816 in Ireland—a total of 34 inches, which contemporaries believed may have been a record if records had been kept—and most of the precipitation fell during the summer and autumn. Wheat and, more ominously, potatoes were rotting in the fields.

  “There never was such distress and want of money known in any former times,” wrote Daniel O’Connell to his wife on August 18. “Half of the gentry in the country are ruined.” An attorney in Dublin, O’Connell was the rising star of Irish nationalism. The scion of a County Kerry clan that had been dispossessed of most of its lands, O’Connell was educated in France in the early 1790s, since the penal laws still precluded Roman Catholics from studying at British universities. His experiences there during the early years of the French Revolution helped turn O’Connell against the use of physical force to achieve political goals, a conviction bolstered by his subsequent reading of William Godwin’s works on liberal democracy and the power of public opinion. Once O’Connell gained admission to the bar in Ireland, he became a passionate advocate for the rights of Catholic tenant farmers against their Protestant landlords.