* * *
LADY Shelley arrived at Lausanne in a dark mood. Heavy rains in late July forced her and her husband to take a detour six miles out of their way to get to the city, since the customary route was under water. Lady Shelley found the countryside between Lausanne and Geneva “flat and tame.” Lausanne itself was “decidedly picturesque,” but not in a positive sense: “Its antiquity is only too apparent from the condition of its dwellings, which look wretched … The streets are narrow, steep, and dirty.” In the distance she could see mountaintops covered with snow, which, according to a local source, was “unusual at this time of the year.”
Navigating through the low-lying areas of Switzerland in the summer of 1816 tested the nerves of even experienced travelers. En route to Lausanne, Lady Shelley passed the town of Yverdon, famous for its thermal springs, and marshy at the best of times. But the rains had washed out one section of road completely, and the lake “was violently lashing its waves upon our carriage wheels as we crawled along its marge.” Yverdon, Lady Shelley noted, “wore a wintry aspect, the surrounding lands being under water, and the harvest destroyed.” Facing a massive shortage of food, local authorities had prohibited the baking of white bread; violators were fined eight louis d’or.
Among the Englishmen Lady Shelley encountered in Lausanne—she claimed there were more than a thousand visiting the area—was Henry Brougham, a rising young Whig politician. Brougham frequently visited Madame de Staël’s salon at Coppet and found it entertaining, but he dismissed the rest of Switzerland as unconscionably boring. “It is a country to be in for two hours,” he wrote a friend. “Ennui comes on the third hour, and suicide attacks you before night. There is no resource whatever for passing the time, except looking at lakes and hills, which is over immediately.”
Or one might stare at Lord Byron. Although Lady Shelley and Byron resided on opposite shores of Lake Geneva, she recognized the poet when he arrived at a party overflowing with English tourists. “Lord Byron looked in for a moment,” she wrote in her diary, “but on seeing so many people he went away without speaking to anyone. He was evidently very much put out about something; and the expression on his face was somewhat demoniacal. What a strange person!”
Day after day, Lady Shelley planned excursions through the Swiss countryside, only to postpone the outings when the rains returned. Local residents noted that the ground was so thoroughly soaked that fountains came bubbling through the ground, and new streams formed where none had previously existed. On July 29, Lord and Lady Shelley set out after a morning of heavy rains to travel along the Arve River, on the west side of Geneva, but the river “had washed away so much of the bank, which had been raised at least twenty feet above the normal flow of the stream, that a boat would have been very useful at times.” The following day the weather turned even worse. “Alas! All our hopes of fine weather are destroyed. Snow has fallen on the mountains during the night, and the rain is so persistent, that we were compelled to abandon our excursion.”
It rained again on July 31, and on the first day of August. When the skies finally cleared to allow her to visit the Castle of Chillon, Lady Shelley encountered a dismal scene along the shores of Lake Geneva: “The inundations have had grievous results. All the gardens bordering on the lake are completely under water. We saw women hard at work trying to rescue their vegetables, while the men were bringing the hay home in boats.”
Mary Godwin spent most of August indoors at her château in Chapuis, reading the Roman historian Curtius and a life of Montaigne, and writing the story that eventually became Frankenstein. Two years had passed since Percy Shelley and Mary ran away to France; apparently they did not celebrate the anniversary at Chapuis, although Mary did venture into Geneva to buy Shelley a telescope for his twenty-fourth birthday (August 4).
Occasionally Percy Shelley would take the time to discuss Mary’s story with her, but he spent most of his time writing, reading history (Tacitus, Plutarch), or chatting with Byron. At least for the next several weeks, Shelley clearly preferred Byron’s company to Mary’s. The two men sailed on the lake nearly every day the weather allowed, dodging the storms—sometimes in the morning, sometimes after dinner, and occasionally both. On the evenings they remained ashore, Shelley typically visited Byron at Diodati.
They were joined for a week in mid-August by Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis, an English gothic-horror novelist who had inherited a plantation in the West Indies. On the evening of August 14, Lewis, Byron, Shelley, and Mary Godwin gathered to speak again of ghosts and Goethe’s Faust. Lewis recited a poem which the Princess of Wales had asked him to compose; the princess, said Lewis, “was not only a believer in ghosts, but in magic & witchcraft, & asserted that prophecies made in her youth had been accomplished since.” Lewis then regaled his hosts with a series of ghost stories which Mary later summarized at length in her journal. Twelve nights later, Coleridge’s “Christabel” again graced a gathering; this time Shelley read the poem aloud, and Mary experienced a vision of a horrifying yet pathetic creature, which she filed away in her memory.
Shelley had elbowed Dr. Polidori out of Byron’s company; wounded, the aspiring novelist assuaged the snub by visiting Madame de Staël’s salon at Coppet. He, too, spent much of August writing of fantastic characters, completing the story The Vampyre, which subsequently served as the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Claire Clairmont, now visibly pregnant with Byron’s child, continued to beg Byron for attention, but he refused to meet with her alone. “A foolish girl,” he called her, and told his half sister Augusta that “I could not help this [affair], that I did all I could to prevent it, and have at last put an end to it. I was not in love, nor have any love left for any.” Banished from Byron’s bed, Claire settled for serving as his amanuensis, copying his drafts of “The Prisoner of Chillon” and the third canto of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” into legible versions for his publisher in England. Shelley attempted a reconciliation between the pair, but Byron would concede nothing more than a promise to let Claire raise their child (assuming, he said, it was his child) until he should decide to send for it.
Their summer ended abruptly after Shelley received a message from his father, whom he had asked for an increase in his allowance. His father consented, providing Shelley returned to England. Unable to live on their own meager income, Shelley and Mary (accompanied by Claire) began packing for the journey home; on the evening of August 28, Shelley visited Diodati for the last time. Besides their own belongings, they packed the manuscripts of “The Prisoner of Chillon” and the third canto of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” which Shelley promised to deliver to Byron’s publisher.
At some point between July 21 and August 25, Byron completed the poem, “Darkness,” the literary work most closely associated with the summer of 1816. After leaving Switzerland, he told a friend that he had composed the poem “at Geneva, where there was a celebrated dark day, on which the fowls went to roost at noon, and the candles were lighted as at midnight.” There was no shortage of candidates for such a day. “Darkness” captured the summer’s sense of impending apocalypse, the fears of a dying sun, the frigid atmosphere, the approaching and inevitable famine, and the desolation and mockery of faith as prayers went unanswered:
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were co
nsumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d;
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish’d with a crash—and all was black.…
8.
THE PRICE OF BREAD
“There has not been this whole summer one day of steady sunshine, not one day of heat, nor one night when a coverlet and blanket could have been thrown off with comfort…”
GHENT, AUGUST 3: “The waters are excessively high, and have not subsided for these three days. The Scheldt is at the height of 16 feet at Oudenarde. Our rich and beautiful meadows are partly inundated. The grass which is not mown will rot in the water, and that which was already mown has been carried off by the current. Hay has risen 100 per cent.” Outside of Antwerp, a severe hailstorm ruined crops waiting to be harvested.
In Württemberg in southwestern Germany, the sun seldom shone for more than a small part of the day. “Thunderstorms brought forth the worst weather, so that one could say a quarter or even a third of the grain was ruined throughout the state,” wrote the mayor of Geradstetten. “The weather also caused the potatoes to rot in the ground, and in many towns you could not harvest as many potatoes as you planted. Similarly it went in the vineyards, where the grapes did not ripen. The same fate befell the high hills as well as the high meadow.” From all parts of Denmark came complaints of constant storms; in Copenhagen it rained nearly every day for five weeks.
Reports of devastating storms and floods throughout France poured into London in the first week of August. “The weather continues as ungenial in that country as with us,” noted The Times. In Burgundy, rain and cold “have ruined the finer sort of vines,” and threatened to wipe out the common ones as well. At Chambray, just south of Geneva, snow fell on the mountains outside of town. Residents of Grenoble, in southeastern France, were trapped between two flooding rivers. The Isère overflowed its banks, sending water cascading through the entire valley. Meanwhile the Drec “burst its dikes … and in consequence three or four villages, together with the suburbs of Grenoble, were inundated.”
On August 5, storms struck the department of Haute-Marne to the north. “The increase of waters has every where been greater than was ever before known,” reported one correspondent, “and what yet remained in the meadows has been swept away and destroyed. Independent of the loss of hay, more than 15 communes have had their crops completely destroyed.” The same storm struck Nancy, where “the harvest is completely destroyed: wheat, barley, oats, vegetables, vines, and even trees…”
In Paris, the Seine continued to rise. On August 4, church authorities ordered additional prayers for nine days in all the city’s churches for better weather; the following day, the churches were filled “with an immense concourse of the faithful.” For a moment, it seemed as if their prayers were answered. By August 9, the rain ceased and warm temperatures returned. An unofficial survey of the state of French crops concluded that “the first crop of hay has been almost universally destroyed or spoiled; and though the rains will have rendered the second crop more productive, that will not be sufficient: the rye likewise turns out bad in quality, and not abundant. The wine probably will be scarce and bad.”
Anticipating poor harvests in France, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and the German states, merchants bid up the price of grain. Popular anxiety intensified, and governments strengthened their efforts to forestall panic. The city of Mainz, considered a vital link in the Prussian and Austrian defenses against France, received gifts from both those nations to help allay its residents’ fears about the rising price of bread. Austrian officials gave the city 300,000 pounds of flour, while Prussian authorities pledged an equal amount of wheat, to be delivered after the harvest.
Lord Liverpool’s government preferred to leave relief efforts to private charities and local parishes. In early August, pressure mounted on the Prince Regent to recall Parliament to deal with the rising distress in Britain, but conventional Tory opinion firmly opposed the idea. New taxes appeared out of the question at a time when the existing rates were, in The Times’ words, “laid on with a sufficiently heavy hand already.” Besides, reasoned The Times, it would be a mistake to bring members of Parliament to London so near to harvest season; far better to allow them to remain in their home districts, where they could direct charitable relief efforts if necessary. “It would, in fact, be as rational to call Parliament together for the wet weather, or the spots in the Sun,” sniffed The Times, “as for the want of work and consequent distress in particular districts.”
In any event, the Prince Regent was in no condition to participate in any political concourse in August 1816. His inveterate habit of overindulgence and gluttony left him extremely ill with a condition known delicately as an “inflammation of the bowels.” The cure prescribed by his physicians, according to Ambassador John Quincy Adams, involved “a girdle of thirty-six leeches round his waist, and, when they dropped off, [he] was put into a warm bath to continue the bleeding.” Before his doctors were done, they reportedly took eighty ounces of blood from the Prince Regent. He recovered nonetheless.
Adams met frequently with Lord Castlereagh during August to discuss a new commercial treaty between the United States and the United Kingdom. Castlereagh typically began their conversations by discussing the weather, and to Adams’ surprise, the foreign secretary seemed remarkably sanguine about the prospects for the forthcoming harvest. “He said that he hoped we should now have a month or six weeks of fine weather,” Adams noted in his diary on August 21, “and if so, from the accounts he had from the different parts of the country, there would be a fine harvest.” Adams found this optimism quite surprising, “as all the appearances of the harvest in our neighborhood are unfavorable; as there have been now for a full month public prayers in the churches for a change of weather; and as the average price of flour and wheat throughout England and Wales has been gradually rising at the moment when the harvest season is arrived.”
English newspapers echoed Castlereagh’s confident rhetoric, at least from mid-August on. In the early part of the month, they acknowledged that weeks of cold and rain had produced much “fire-blast” (a fungus) and mold—not to mention an explosion in the population of vermin—among crops in Kent and Sussex, and that a great deal of hay already had rotted in various districts. Starting around August 10, however, press reports suddenly turned stoutly optimistic. “The wheats everywhere present a bold, heavy, and well set ear,” ran one article. “The late rains have done more good than harm,” claimed another. “The corn generally looks very thriving, and promises a more than average crop.” “The weather continues fine,” observed The Times on August 20, “and the crop of wheat will be very abundant. You can form no idea of the uneasiness which pervaded all ranks on this subject before the change of weather.”
But some opposition leaders believed these optimistic news stories were nothing more than a clumsy government ruse. William Cobbett and Henry Hunt, two of the leading radical reformers in Britain, suspected that the Liverpool ministry and moderate Whig leaders were trying to lull the public into a false sense of security—and thereby dampen enthusiasm for reform—by encouraging the press to publish misleading articles about the state of the approaching harvest. So the weather and its effects turned into a political controversy, as Cobbett and Hunt spent much of August telling their audiences to expect widespread crop failures. When the Morning Chronicle, a Whig journal, printed an article on August 21 asserting that, “notwithstanding the lateness of the season, there would be this year an uncommon fine harvest,” Hunt publicly contradicted the newspaper and “pledged his honor” as a gentleman that England’s crops would fail miserably. The Morning Chronicle’s editor insisted that
his information indicated an excellent harvest, and Castlereagh supported him. “It is strange that such a thing should be made a party question,” mused John Quincy Adams, “but it is.”
* * *
AMERICANS could not generate any enthusiasm about the presidential election campaign of 1816. The election of James Monroe seemed a foregone conclusion—not because of any overwhelming groundswell of support for his candidacy, although most voters had no serious objection to him, save for a parochial objection to yet another president (four out of five) from Virginia. Rather, it resulted partly from the Federalist Party’s inability to nominate a slate of electors in nearly half of the eighteen states, and partly from the almost total indifference of the Federalist nominee. “So certain is the result,” wrote Rufus King of his own impending defeat, “that no pains are taken to excite the community on the subject.” Ten states allowed voters to choose presidential electors directly; the others still allowed state legislatures to select electors. And each state chose its own election day, so voting was staggered throughout the summer and autumn.
Elections on the state level were more hotly contested. As Virginia’s acerbic congressman John Randolph pointed out, “There was no election for Burgesses to the General Assembly which had not caused ten times the excitement that had been caused by the election of the President of the United States.” Incumbent congressmen continued to suffer unremitting abuse for their support of the Compensation Bill. In one state after another, they went down to defeat; in New York, only one-fourth of the incumbent congressional representatives won reelection.
The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History Page 18
