The Year Without Summer (23 page)

In Vermont, farmers gathered what little hay they had saved and burned it in a desperate
attempt to keep their corn from freezing. Some farmers in eastern Massachusetts tried
a different strategy by cutting up their cornstalks by the roots and placing them
upright, where they purportedly continued to ripen. But most New Englanders agreed
with the
Connecticut Courant’
s verdict that “August was more cheerless, if possible, than the Summer months already
past.”

From below the Mason-Dixon line came reports of heavy frost in South Carolina on August
29. A correspondent in Danville, North Carolina, noted that his meadow “was white
with frost” on the same day, and again on August 30. With a touch of grim humor, he
added that the frost “killed nothing, as all was dead before” from the continuing
drought. He had recently returned from Mecklenburg, and reported that “in the country
thro’ which I past [sic], and as far southward as the Savannah river, there will be
the greatest scarcity of provisions ever known in my traveling.” The combination of
drought and cold had left fields “that would not make one grain of corn.… What the
inhabitants are to do for support time must discover.”

“The crops will be extremely short in all the upper districts of South Carolina—they
are said to be worse than they have ever been known to be,” observed another traveler.
“The people seem to be alarmed about their situation, and considerable emigration
is likely to take place.” The frost on the morning of August 29 in that state was
sufficiently severe “as to singe pumpkin and potato leaves; and I was informed by
a respectable gentleman, that he saw the dew collected on a blade of corn, congealed
into ice.”

Frost also struck fields around Petersburg, Virginia, “a circumstance unparalleled
in this part of the country,” claimed one observer, “and what is equally extraordinary,
we have had frost every month during the year.” The Richmond area, too, sustained
frost, leading the
Richmond Enquirer
to sound the now-familiar refrain that “the oldest inhabitants have no recollection
of such a prodigy.”

Thomas Jefferson confirmed that the same late-August cold wave “killed much corn over
the mountains,” in western Virginia. “We have had the most extraordinary year of drought
and cold ever known in the history of America,” Jefferson wrote to Albert Gallatin,
his Swiss-born former secretary of the treasury. In August, the meticulously observant
Jefferson measured only 0.8 inches of rain at Monticello, as opposed to the monthly
average of 9.2 inches. And still the drought continued. “The summer, too, has been
as cold as a moderate winter,” Jefferson informed his friend. “The crop of corn through
the Atlantic States will probably be less than one-third of an ordinary one, that
of tobacco still less, and of mean quality.” Wheat was “middling in quantity, but
excellent in quality.” Most of all, Jefferson feared the specter of famine in Virginia,
especially since he could recall the deaths that followed the devastating drought
of 1755. “Every species of bread grain taken together will not be sufficient for the
subsistence of the inhabitants,” he warned, “and the exportation of flour, already
begun by the indebted and the improvident, to whatsoever degree it may be carried,
will be exactly so much taken from the mouths of our own citizens.”

*   *   *

“O
H!
It rains again; it beats against the window,” wrote Jane Austen at her home in Chawton,
about eighty miles east of Bath in southwestern England. “Such weather,” she told
her nephew, Edward, “gives one little temptation to be out. It is really too bad,
& has been for a long time, much worse than anybody can bear, & I begin to think it
will never be fine again.”

Austen spent the summer of 1816 finishing a novel tentatively titled
The Elliots
, which she had been writing for the past year. She initially thought she had completed
the manuscript on July 18; dissatisfied with the ending, she rewrote the final two
chapters and finally brought the novel to a close on August 6. Along the way, Austen
changed the title as well, to
Persuasion
.

Her previous novel,
Emma
, had been published in December 1815 and gathered respectable reviews. “Whoever is
fond of an amusing, inoffensive, and well-principled novel, will be well pleased with
the perusal of
Emma
,” concluded the
British Critic
in a typical reaction. Austen’s publisher sent a specially bound copy to the Prince
Regent several days prior to publication, and His Royal Highness had kind if uninspired
words for the novel. There was, he wrote, “so much nature … and excellent description
of character.” His librarian invited Austen to the Prince Regent’s residence, Carlton
House, and informed her that she had permission to dedicate her next novel to the
prince.

Sales of
Emma
disappointed Austen’s hopes—unfortunately, because her family could have used the
money. In March, Jane’s brother Henry was forced to declare bankruptcy when his bank
failed, a misfortune that also wiped out the investments of several other family members.
The collapse was precipitated in part by the failure of one of Henry’s partners, a
merchant whose trade suffered when the government slashed its orders for food, uniforms,
and other supplies once peace returned. Another brother, Frank, a naval officer, was
forced to live on half pay since the end of the war. A third brother, Charles, also
a ship’s captain, lost his command and his fortune when his ship was wrecked in the
Mediterranean in February 1816; he returned to England impoverished. Austen had invested
the royalties from her previous novels (about 600 pounds sterling) in Navy stock,
but the 5 percent interest she received on that sum provided only minimal support
for her family. As Admiral Croft declared in
Persuasion
, “These are bad times for getting on.”

An acquaintance suggested Austen might sell more books if she wrote historical romances
instead, but she refused. “I could no more write a romance than an epic poem,” Austen
admitted. “And if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into
laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished
the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way, though
I may never succeed again in that. I am convinced that I should totally fail in any
other.”

With money scarce, Austen rarely ventured far from Chawton. She shared her cottage
with her mother (who was chronically ill), and various nephews and nieces, whom she
babysat for weeks at a time. One of her favorite charges was Frank’s nine-year-old
daughter Mary Jane, who spent much of July 1816 at Chawton. Fortunately, Mary Jane
proved good company, because the soggy weather kept them indoors most of the time.
One day they set off in a donkey carriage to see a farmer, Mr. Woolls, in a nearby
town who wanted to show off the improvements to his property. They did not get far.
“We were obliged to turn back before we got there,” wrote Austen, “but not soon enough
to avoid a Pelter all the way home.” When Austen finally sat down with Woolls, she
talked of “it’s being bad weather for the Hay—& he returned me the comfort of it’s
being much worse for the Wheat.”

Austen had an ulterior motive in discussing the weather in her correspondence: “I
have often observed that if one writes about the weather, it is generally completely
changed before the Letter is read.” She yearned for a change from the cold and the
damp, because she had been suffering back pains since early in the year. Perhaps it
was rheumatism; perhaps she spent too much time bent over her writing desk; perhaps
it was a natural part of middle age, since Austen had turned forty the previous December.
Her sister, Cassandra, had taken Jane to the spa town of Cheltenham in the spring,
but the treatments did not help. The pains grew worse.

At the end of the summer, Jane received a note from a friend who had recently returned
from a visit to the Continent. “She speaks of France as a scene of general Poverty
& Misery,” Austen told Cassandra. “No money, no Trade—nothing to be got but by the
Innkeepers.” And at Chawton, “likewise more rain again, by the look & sound of things.…
We hear now there is to be no Honey this year.”

*   *   *

N
EARLY
three hundred miles away, Britain’s most famous landscape artist was in the midst
of a working tour of Yorkshire and the surrounding area, sketching subjects for a
proposed history of the county of York. “Weather miserably wet,” complained Joseph
Mallord William Turner from Richmond. “I shall be web-footed like a drake … but I
must proceed northwards.”

Forty-one years old in the summer of 1816, William Turner had been elected a full
member of the Royal Academy at the age of twenty-six; five years later, the academy
named him Professor of Perspective. Equally proficient in the use of watercolors and
oils, Turner had built his reputation on a remarkable ability to move beyond the literal
reproduction of a landscape and portray its essence—one admirer claimed that his dark
and threatening 1796 painting of
Fishermen at Sea
was “a summary of all that had been said about the sea by the artists of the eighteenth
century.”

Although the incessant rains of July and August 1816 hindered Turner’s progress as
he and a close friend, Walter Fawkes, traveled through northern England, he was amply
compensated for his discomfort. Turner’s fee for providing 120 watercolors for the
history of York reportedly was the princely sum of 3,150 pounds sterling (the equivalent
of approximately 150,000 pounds in 2011), the highest fee ever paid to a British artist
at the time.

In the rare intervals between storms and showers, Turner managed to complete a series
of pencil sketches of numerous landscapes, castles, and local inhabitants in Yorkshire
and Lancashire that he would subsequently turn into accomplished watercolor paintings.
Few of these works, however, reveal the unique weather conditions of the summer of
1816; as one biographer has pointed out, Turner wished the finished works to “reflect
the form and essence of the North of England as it had been for centuries,” rather
than to serve “as a diary of 1816.”

One startling scene proved the exception. In
Lancaster Sands
, a portrayal of horsemen and a carriage crossing Morecambe Bay at low tide between
Arnside and Kents Bank, Turner eloquently conveyed the misery of that summer. The
crossing itself was notoriously dangerous—hundreds of unwary travelers had perished
when they lost their way in the darkness or mists, or when the rising tide cut off
the passage. In Turner’s vision, the small band bunches together for safety under
a driving rain, hastening across the sands with red-tinged clouds reflected in the
low-lying water, heading toward a distant goal that remains indistinct under an angry
sky. There was no assurance of a safe arrival.

*   *   *

L
ADY
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.”