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

by William K. Klingaman

  Byron resumed his friendship with Polidori in Milan—the doctor had arrived several weeks before Byron—but after quarreling with a police official, Polidori was asked to leave the city. The local authorities became suspicious of Byron, as well, accusing him of harboring liberal sympathies. So the poet and Hobhouse left Milan for Verona, but along the way the weather turned bad, and very heavy autumnal rains prevented them from visiting the country house of Catullus on Sirmione.

  Northern Italy’s harvest in 1816 mirrored those of its neighbors on the other side of the Alps. Late snowfalls in April delayed the planting of crops; cold temperatures persisted throughout the growing season; and frequent, pounding rains led rivers to overflow their banks. In many areas, desperate farmers—already impoverished from poor harvests the previous two years—cut their grain early to save what they could. A significant percentage of Italian crops never matured at all. Lombardy and Venetia, especially, suffered from flooding and frosts in late September and early October that rendered much of the wheat unsuitable for human consumption, or even as fodder. According to the American consul at Livorno, “the oil and wine crops had also failed” throughout northern Italy as a result of the frigid weather. Alarmed by the prospect of famine, the government of Naples offered a bounty for the importation of wheat and other grains.

  Austrian officials decided to permit the importation of wheat, flour, oats, barley, and rice free of duty into their Italian provinces; by the first week of October, significant quantities of wheat from Odessa, Ukraine, and Alexandria, Egypt, had arrived at Trieste, and the government was negotiating contracts to purchase more grain for Dalmatia. Nevertheless, by the time Byron arrived in Milan, the price of bread was rising sharply.

  In the Netherlands, where distress was “very great, owing to the failure of the harvest, and the incessant rains that have prevailed in that country,” the government prohibited the export of potatoes and grain. Attempting to control the price of food, a number of German states followed suit; in Bremen, the storehouses of wheat had nearly disappeared. Rain continued to fall in Hanover, and the prices of most types of provisions rose “most uncommonly”; a scarcity of potatoes touched off a corresponding rise in the demand for and price of wheat. Baden suffered its worst harvest in 400 years. Facing a drastic shortfall in the harvest of rye, the King of Saxony, Frederick Augustus I, ordered the purchase of a large quantity of grain and potatoes to help feed the poor. From Switzerland came reports of rising food prices and philanthropic societies feeding hundreds of poor citizens daily, as cantonal authorities desperately sought supplies of foreign grain. In Liège, a full-scale food riot occurred following a dramatic surge in the price of grain.

  To help alleviate the distress of the working class, petitions asked the German Diet at Frankfurt to prohibit the importation of English manufactured goods. German journals carried numerous articles outlining “the immense loss which the free trade of England occasions to German industry.” A Brussels newspaper launched a campaign to urge Belgians to abstain from wearing any clothes made in England, to check the “inundation of British goods” that threatened to overwhelm native manufacturers.

  At Salzburg, officials prohibited the distillation of grain-based liquor. Sadly for the wine-drinking population, the grape harvest failed across nearly the entire continent. Grapes ripened so late throughout France and Switzerland that the start of the harvest (the vendange) occurred later in 1816 in every single wine-producing region than in any other year from 1782 to 1879. One study of the area determined that the mean harvest date of October 29 was approximately four weeks past the average vendange, a highly unusual occurrence; as John D. Post has noted, “from 1601 to 1926 there were only six dates in the Paris region later than October 15.” In Verdun the grapes never ripened at all that season. From Frankfurt came reports that “wines rise daily in price to an alarming extent,” even though consumption seemed to decline every day: “The vintage is next to nothing.” And if prices continued to rise, “we shall soon have nothing to quench our thirst but water or beer.”

  Württemberg, in southwestern Germany, faced far more severe problems. There, too, the frigid summer delayed the harvest for nearly six weeks. “Every storm of the past summer … was followed by the most severe cold, so that it regularly felt like November,” a local almanac recalled years later, “and no month went by in which many houses were not heated.” Whatever crops remained in the fields on October 17 perished from the one-two punch of a severe frost and a snowstorm several days later. “Fields in the highland districts could not be harvested at all,” concluded one study, “and more than two-thirds of the oat fields rotted under snow and ice.” Confronting this disaster, the King of Württemberg, the immensely corpulent Frederick William Charles (who recently had purchased a rhinoceros at great expense for the royal zoo), approved the release of a substantial quantity of wheat from the royal storehouses. The wheat was to be ground and made into bread sold at a discounted price and distributed every morning to needy residents of the capital, Stuttgart. Several days later, King Frederick—severely afflicted by gout—passed away.

  After the frigid summer temperatures retarded the ripening of grapes in both Spain and Portugal, “immense rains” set in, beating down the grapes and causing them to rot on the vines. Early autumn brought snows to northeastern Spain that covered the peaks of Montserrat and Montseny, outside of Barcelona, and a cold wave froze the Llobregat River. According to José Manuel da Silva Tedim, “the vineyard harvest [in Spain] lasted until the 19th of November, due to the lack of heat necessary to mature grapes”; in Portugal, Franzini noted that “grapes have suffered for the same reason and never got ripe and as a consequence the wine was of inferior quality.” Since the olive harvest also suffered, the price of olive oil on the Iberian peninsula commenced a yearlong rise that set a record for the years between 1750 and 1854. Wheat prices in Lisbon were not far behind. Although the abnormally low temperatures continued to reduce the frequency of the usual summer ailments—such as dysentery and bilious fevers—in the Iberian peninsula, they also produced more cases of scarlet fever and various inflammatory diseases that typically struck in the winter.

  * * *

  HARVEST time in Devon (on a good day): When wheat was ready to cut down, a farmer of a typical holding—say, ten to twenty acres—advertised in the neighborhood that he planned to begin reaping on a certain day. On that morning, a number of villagers (both men and women) gathered at the field and took breakfast (including ale and cider) before getting to work. (The turnout depended largely upon how highly the villagers regarded the farmer.) Additional workers often dropped by during the course of the morning, attracted by the shouts and jokes emanating from the fields.

  Between noon and one o’clock, the farmer’s wife brought a dinner of meat and vegetables (with more ale and cider) into the fields. Work recommenced around two o’clock, and the cutting and binding of the wheat continued for perhaps three hours. Then everyone retired to the shade to enjoy homemade cakes and buns, washed down with cider and ale. A few more hours in the fields brought the day’s harvest to a close; occasionally the (somewhat inebriated) men finished with a competition to see who would be the first to knock down a target—usually a small sheaf of wheat—with a well-aimed toss of his reap-hook. (As they let fly with their hooks, the players emitted a cry which sounded to one observer like “We ha in! We ha in!”)

  As evening fell, all retired to the farmhouse for supper with ale and cider. Often no money changed hands; wages consisted of the day’s food and drink, plus an invitation to enjoy the farmer’s hospitality during the Christmas season, when “the house is kept open night and day to the guests, whose behaviour during the time may be assimilated to the frolics of a bear-garden.”

  And there were some good days in the first weeks of autumn, when some of the farmers in some parts of England harvested some of the crops that had survived the cold and the rains and the hailstorms. Newspapers printed advice columns on how to dry wheat th
at had been harvested while still wet. One suggestion included the construction of brick flues around the interior of barns; another imported an idea from Russia, whereby sheaves of grain were hung from ropes stretched high across the walls of a barn, and then dried by a fire of charred wood or cinders—but never an open flame—built on an earthen or brick floor. Nevertheless, much of the new grain offered for sale admittedly was “damp,” “discoloured,” and “materially injured by the late incessant rains,” and prices varied widely depending on the quality. Generally, damp new grain—which threatened to glut the market—brought roughly the same price as stale old grain.

  In early October the deluge resumed, with a week and a half of almost incessant rains, especially across northern Britain. “The unpropitious weather of the last ten days has, it is to be apprehended, given an unfortunate turn to the prospects of the farmer,” reported The Times of London on October 15. “All harvest work has been again suspended by the return of rainy and uncertain weather.” In Norwich, the editor of the local newspaper claimed that the flooding in the city “is as excessive as we ever recollect to have occurred, with one exception only.” In nearby low-lying fields, bridges were washed out, and farmers reportedly navigated boats over their meadows.

  In the East Riding of Yorkshire, the first two weeks of October brought “such heavy rains as nearly to put a stop to reaping of corn,” most of which remained in the fields. The Newcastle Mercury reported that “the crops have sustained considerable injury, and that a very considerable portion of the grain, if got at all, will be completely unfit for human food.” At Berwick, the northernmost town in England, the “immense quantity of rain which has fallen” rendered roads impassable and left meadows and lowlands under water. Without sufficient supplies of fodder, farmers brought their animals to market ahead of schedule, with predictably adverse effects on profits. At a fair in Wiltshire in early November, at least 70,000 sheep were offered for sale, “the largest quantity of sheep ever remembered.” Most of them fetched prices considerably lower than usual, and about 10,000 found no buyers at all.

  Southern Scotland suffered more severely from the same storms. Both the wheat and oat crops in Ayrshire were considerably damaged by the heavy and continued rains. Potatoes suffered nearly as much, and the cold weather retarded the growth of pasture grass. “The pastures were never good this season,” noted one observer, “and now they look very ill.” Lanarkshire reported similar difficulties, due to “the heavy and cold rains”: “Seldom indeed has the ground at any season been so much drenched as at the present time.” Livestock already felt the lack of fodder, and as farmers here, too, offered their animals for sale ahead of the usual market schedule, the price of cattle slid to less than half of its 1815 level. The price of human labor declined as well, and farmers who needed to hire workers found that they could be procured at an employer’s pleasure.

  Perhaps farmers took solace in the words of the renowned English cleric, Dr. William Paley, who argued in an essay published in the journal, Natural Theology, that the irregularity of the seasons—such as the abnormally cold and wet summer and autumn of 1816—was, in fact, a blessing, since it promoted the commendable qualities of vigilance and precaution in the rural population. Indeed, Dr. Paley went so far as to claim that “seasons of scarcity themselves are not without their advantages.” They forced farmers to work harder; they encouraged ingenuity at work and thereby “give birth to improvements in agriculture and economy; [and] they promote the investigation and management of public resources.”

  10.

  EMIGRATION

  “I must also say that the discontented are in great force…”

  JANE AUSTEN’S HEALTH grew worse in the autumn. Her back hurt nearly all the time, she tired easily, and she was too weak to walk even a short distance outside. Austen insisted to her relatives that she was not seriously ill, that she suffered from no more than rheumatism or bile. But the cold, damp weather at Chawton aggravated her illness. She spent much of her time collecting a decidedly mixed set of reviews on Emma, including one in which the reviewer admitted that he had read only the first and last chapters of the novel “because he had heard it was not interesting.”

  Nearby in Bath, Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin spent much of the autumn reading—he read Don Quixote aloud to Mary in the evenings, and she claimed to see a resemblance between Shelley and the knight—and writing. Apparently Mary’s manuscript of Frankenstein proceeded smoothly, except for a brief interruption when her half-sister, Fanny, committed suicide. The child of Mary Wollstonecraft and an American merchant (with whom Mary lived as a common-law wife before she met William Godwin), Fanny had been living with Godwin and his second wife in straitened financial circumstances, growing increasingly lonely and despondent, and bitter towards Mary, whom she felt had deserted her. On October 9, Fanny checked into the Mackworth Arms Inn in Swansea and drank half a bottle of laudanum. Perhaps she had been in love with Shelley; perhaps she had recently discovered the circumstances of her illegitimate birth. Since English law made suicide a crime, Fanny’s body was never officially identified, and she was buried in an unmarked grave. A remorseful Shelley wrote:

  Her voice did quiver as we parted,

  Yet knew I not that heart was broken

  From whence it came; and I departed

  Heeding not the words then spoken,

  Misery—O Misery,

  This world is all too wide for thee.

  * * *

  FROM his vantage point in September and early October, Lord Liverpool saw no reason to panic. More than a hundred years before anyone heard the term gross national product, Liverpool and his cabinet chose to measure the health of the British economy by tracking tax returns, especially excise revenues, on a quarterly basis. If revenues increased, consumers presumably were purchasing more goods and the economy was growing. If they decreased, people either had less money, or were saving more and spending less; in either case, the economy seemed to be headed for a downturn. It was not a particularly sophisticated or reliable indicator of economic developments, but it provided Liverpool’s ministry with statistical support for its inaction.

  Looking back over the summer months, Liverpool expressed confidence that Britain’s economic fundamentals were sound: “The Revenue looks better. The Excise (which is the most material Branch) good, the Customs still very low, but the great falling off is in the Port of London, which is a proof that it does not arise from Smuggling or diminished Consumption, but from want of Speculation growing out of Want of Confidence. We may trust therefore that this Evil will in a short Time be removed.” The extensive gold reserves building up in the Bank of England in the postwar period—Britain seemed by far the safest place for European investors to park their money—further encouraged Liverpool. Low interest rates and easy access to credit, along with rising grain prices, made British landowners happy. And when the landed interest was happy, Liverpool’s government was well content.

  Liverpool and his ministers did not turn a blind eye to the distress wracking Britain in the autumn of 1816, but neither did they feel responsible for the hardship of the laboring classes. The lens through which they viewed “the condition of England” blended classical economic theory and the eighteenth-century tradition of limited government. Authorities firmly believed that they had neither the resources nor the duty to alter the course of the economic cycle; instead, they needed to allow market forces to work themselves out.

  Whatever economic difficulties Britain faced in the autumn of 1816, Liverpool argued, stemmed primarily from the arduous transition from a lengthy war to peace, from a period of expansive government spending and frenetic production, to reductions in nearly every aspect of the economy. As an article (much admired by Liverpool) in the Quarterly Review of July 1816 explained, “a vacuum was inevitably produced by this sudden diminution, and the general dislocation which ensued may not unaptly be compared to the settling of the ice upon a wide sheet of water: explosions are made and convulsions are
seen on all sides, in one place the ruptured ice is disloged and lifted up, in another it sinks … and thus the agitation continues for many hours till the whole has found its level, and nature resumes in silence its ordinary course.”

  There simply was no magic bullet in the government’s limited arsenal of weapons to cure economic distress. “I see no immediate or adequate Remedy which Govt can apply,” insisted William Huskisson, a member of Liverpool’s ministry who subsequently earned a reputation as a fierce defender of free trade. “Their Game must be patience, temper and great discretion in all that is done or said.” Such a policy enjoyed David Ricardo’s wholehearted support. “I am sorry that the distresses still continue,” Ricardo wrote to James Mill on November 17. “The short crop this year was most unfortunate, it aggravated all our former ills.” Yet Ricardo insisted there was little the government could do to ameliorate the situation. “I am sorry to see a disposition to inflame the minds of the lower orders by persuading them that legislation can afford them any relief,” he continued. “The country has a right to insist, and I hope will insist, on the most rigid economy in every branch of the public expenditure, but when this is yielded nothing further can be done for us.”

  Yet Liverpool and his ministers also recognized their responsibility to keep the British economy from falling off the cliff altogether. Clearly they could not permit widespread misery to accumulate until it exploded into a full-fledged revolution. So they issued reassuring statements to calm the public, and encouraged local communities to sponsor relief efforts through a limited program of public works and charitable contributions to feed the poor.