A Year Without Summer, a Guest Post from Ann Hawthorne

Imagine a year without summer – and one haunted by apocalyptic portents, at that.

It sounds nightmarish – and yet that was exactly the kind of year Jane Austen had lived through in 1816, not long before her own departure from the world.

So, what caused it?

On the 10th of April 1815, Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa erupted in a horrible cataclysm that could only be compared to the disaster that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum all those centuries ago. Only in the first, initial pyroclastic flow killed, depending on the estimate, from 10,000 to 90,000 people!

An account from a sailor who was in Java at the time of the eruption presents a haunting picture. According to him,

“On the 11th April, while at sea far distant form Sumbawa, he was in utter darkness; that on his passing the Tomboro Mountain at a distance of 5 miles, the lower part of it was in flames, and the upper part covered with clouds; he went on shore for water and found the ground covered with ashes to the depth of three feet, several large prows thrown on the land by a concussion of the sea, and many of the Inhabitants dead from famine.” [emphasis mine]

The results had been felt across the globe. In UK, for example, bad harvests have already been a consistent problem for several years, but the eruption has impacted the weather and made the already existing problem much, much worse. The incessant downpours, for instance, did not allow plenty of crops to grow. One Edmund Woolterton of Denton, Norfolk, wrote of the situation this way: “Violent winds, more floods, drifts of snow that made roads impassable, and hard frosts greeted autumn and winter…“

First turnips were damaged, depriving the already often starving animals of fodder; then wheat crops failed. Jane Austen’s letter to her sister Anna in the same year was characteristically moderate in tone, merely remarking on the thoroughness of the recent afternoon rains. However, for people in more precarious circumstances, the consequences of the disaster could spell disasters of their own – up to and including starvation.

Where the steps of dire hunger were felt, social unrest did not hesitate to follow. Food riots of 1816-17 were later described the most violent since the days of the French Revolution.

To some people’s credit, several landowners and politicians did their best to alleviate the suffering through charity. In July 1816, The Gentleman’s Magazine reported, for instance, that a Gentleman Barnet, happening to go into the market-place, found about 140 poor people literally starving; he ordered them all to be supplied with half a quartern loaf, and to come back next morning for another. On Friday, the number that applied for relief was 338, and they got the same bounty then. On a grander scale, Lord Middleton had donated hundreds of tons of coal, while many parishes created soup kitchens.

Some of the more unexpected effects of the eruption changed the course of literary history. The “wet, ungenial summer” kept Percy and Mary Shelley inside their house on Lake Geneva – they could neither take walks nor swim in that weather. The only thing left, as proposed by their friend Lord Byron, was competitive ghost stories-writing. Mary’s entry became Frankenstein, one of the most iconic Gothic novels of all time that endure to this day.

However, the most unexpected consequence was probably the invention of the earliest form of bicycle. It came out of the fact that the cost of feeding horses was becoming astronomical. Sure, Karl Drais’ invention had neither brakes nor pedals, but… details! (We Are Cycling UK)