The Year Without Summer (24 page)

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 consumed,

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…”

G
HENT,
A
UGUST 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.”