The Year Without Summer (27 page)

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.”

*   *   *

P
ERCY
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.”

*   *   *

“E
VEN
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.

In the summer of 1816, O’Connell’s practice was growing rapidly under the pressure
of hard times. “I have had an immense number of cases,” he told his wife at the end
of August. “The times are very distressing to the country and there is no prospect
of alleviation.” As the price of bread and butter rose, the prices of other Irish
goods fell, because demand kept declining as the depression deepened. “Between the
fall of prices and the dreadful weather,” O’Connell declared on September 30, “there
is nothing but rain and wretchedness.”

As the summer drew to a close, emigration from Ireland to the United States increased
substantially. In a single week, more than 700 Irish applied for permission to leave
the country; fewer than 2,000 had left in the entire twelve months of 1815. Peel would
have preferred the emigrants to have come from the southern counties, which he felt
would benefit from a reduction in population, since the land clearly could not support
the numbers already there. But the prospective emigrants came almost exclusively from
Ulster, the northern counties, and most were Protestant. Peel was especially loath
to see them go to the United States. “I think it still more unfortunate that not only
Ireland should lose so many industrious and valuable inhabitants,” he told Lord Liverpool,
“but that the United States of America should reap the advantage.” (Actually, the
British government was partly responsible for the disparity in emigration figures
between northern and southern Ireland. By levying higher duties on American shipping,
the Liverpool administration raised the price of passage to the United States, placing
it beyond the reach of most Irish Catholic peasants.)

Sometimes the arrivals brought no advantage to their new homeland. In September, a
ship arrived in Philadelphia carrying emigrants from Ireland. It had left Ireland
with 300 passengers, but on the journey the provisions had nearly run out. About a
hundred of the most famished passengers had been put ashore at Cape May, New Jersey,
“in a most miserable plight,” according to one press report. “The remainder were landed
at Philadelphia in a distressed situation.” Many of the newcomers were “so reduced
to poverty and wretchedness,” continued the news story, “that they were actually dying
in the streets.”