The Year Without Summer (31 page)

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H
ARVEST
time in Devon (on a good day): When wheat was ready to cut down, a farmer of a typical
holding—say, ten to twenty acres—advertised in the neighborhood that he planned to
begin reaping on a certain day. On that morning, a number of villagers (both men and
women) gathered at the field and took breakfast (including ale and cider) before getting
to work. (The turnout depended largely upon how highly the villagers regarded the
farmer.) Additional workers often dropped by during the course of the morning, attracted
by the shouts and jokes emanating from the fields.

Between noon and one o’clock, the farmer’s wife brought a dinner of meat and vegetables
(with more ale and cider) into the fields. Work recommenced around two o’clock, and
the cutting and binding of the wheat continued for perhaps three hours. Then everyone
retired to the shade to enjoy homemade cakes and buns, washed down with cider and
ale. A few more hours in the fields brought the day’s harvest to a close; occasionally
the (somewhat inebriated) men finished with a competition to see who would be the
first to knock down a target—usually a small sheaf of wheat—with a well-aimed toss
of his reap-hook. (As they let fly with their hooks, the players emitted a cry which
sounded to one observer like “We ha in! We ha in!”)

As evening fell, all retired to the farmhouse for supper with ale and cider. Often
no money changed hands; wages consisted of the day’s food and drink, plus an invitation
to enjoy the farmer’s hospitality during the Christmas season, when “the house is
kept open night and day to the guests, whose behaviour during the time may be assimilated
to the frolics of a bear-garden.”

And there were some good days in the first weeks of autumn, when some of the farmers
in some parts of England harvested some of the crops that had survived the cold and
the rains and the hailstorms. Newspapers printed advice columns on how to dry wheat
that had been harvested while still wet. One suggestion included the construction
of brick flues around the interior of barns; another imported an idea from Russia,
whereby sheaves of grain were hung from ropes stretched high across the walls of a
barn, and then dried by a fire of charred wood or cinders—but never an open flame—built
on an earthen or brick floor. Nevertheless, much of the new grain offered for sale
admittedly was “damp,” “discoloured,” and “materially injured by the late incessant
rains,” and prices varied widely depending on the quality. Generally, damp new grain—which
threatened to glut the market—brought roughly the same price as stale old grain.

In early October the deluge resumed, with a week and a half of almost incessant rains,
especially across northern Britain. “The unpropitious weather of the last ten days
has, it is to be apprehended, given an unfortunate turn to the prospects of the farmer,”
reported
The Times
of London on October 15. “All harvest work has been again suspended by the return
of rainy and uncertain weather.” In Norwich, the editor of the local newspaper claimed
that the flooding in the city “is as excessive as we ever recollect to have occurred,
with one exception only.” In nearby low-lying fields, bridges were washed out, and
farmers reportedly navigated boats over their meadows.

In the East Riding of Yorkshire, the first two weeks of October brought “such heavy
rains as nearly to put a stop to reaping of corn,” most of which remained in the fields.
The
Newcastle Mercury
reported that “the crops have sustained considerable injury, and that a very considerable
portion of the grain, if got at all, will be completely unfit for human food.” At
Berwick, the northernmost town in England, the “immense quantity of rain which has
fallen” rendered roads impassable and left meadows and lowlands under water. Without
sufficient supplies of fodder, farmers brought their animals to market ahead of schedule,
with predictably adverse effects on profits. At a fair in Wiltshire in early November,
at least 70,000 sheep were offered for sale, “the largest quantity of sheep ever remembered.”
Most of them fetched prices considerably lower than usual, and about 10,000 found
no buyers at all.

Southern Scotland suffered more severely from the same storms. Both the wheat and
oat crops in Ayrshire were considerably damaged by the heavy and continued rains.
Potatoes suffered nearly as much, and the cold weather retarded the growth of pasture
grass. “The pastures were never good this season,” noted one observer, “and now they
look very ill.” Lanarkshire reported similar difficulties, due to “the heavy and cold
rains”: “Seldom indeed has the ground at any season been so much drenched as at the
present time.” Livestock already felt the lack of fodder, and as farmers here, too,
offered their animals for sale ahead of the usual market schedule, the price of cattle
slid to less than half of its 1815 level. The price of human labor declined as well,
and farmers who needed to hire workers found that they could be procured at an employer’s
pleasure.

Perhaps farmers took solace in the words of the renowned English cleric, Dr. William
Paley, who argued in an essay published in the journal,
Natural Theology
, that the irregularity of the seasons—such as the abnormally cold and wet summer
and autumn of 1816—was, in fact, a blessing, since it promoted the commendable qualities
of vigilance and precaution in the rural population. Indeed, Dr. Paley went so far
as to claim that “seasons of scarcity themselves are not without their advantages.”
They forced farmers to work harder; they encouraged ingenuity at work and thereby
“give birth to improvements in agriculture and economy; [and] they promote the investigation
and management of public resources.”

10.

EMIGRATION

“I must also say that the discontented are in great force…”

J
ANE
A
USTEN’S H
EALTH
grew worse in the autumn. Her back hurt nearly all the time, she tired easily, and
she was too weak to walk even a short distance outside. Austen insisted to her relatives
that she was not seriously ill, that she suffered from no more than rheumatism or
bile. But the cold, damp weather at Chawton aggravated her illness. She spent much
of her time collecting a decidedly mixed set of reviews on
Emma
, including one in which the reviewer admitted that he had read only the first and
last chapters of the novel “because he had heard it was not interesting.”

Nearby in Bath, Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin spent much of the autumn reading—he
read
Don Quixote
aloud to Mary in the evenings, and she claimed to see a resemblance between Shelley
and the knight—and writing. Apparently Mary’s manuscript of
Frankenstein
proceeded smoothly, except for a brief interruption when her half-sister, Fanny,
committed suicide. The child of Mary Wollstonecraft and an American merchant (with
whom Mary lived as a common-law wife before she met William Godwin), Fanny had been
living with Godwin and his second wife in straitened financial circumstances, growing
increasingly lonely and despondent, and bitter towards Mary, whom she felt had deserted
her. On October 9, Fanny checked into the Mackworth Arms Inn in Swansea and drank
half a bottle of laudanum. Perhaps she had been in love with Shelley; perhaps she
had recently discovered the circumstances of her illegitimate birth. Since English
law made suicide a crime, Fanny’s body was never officially identified, and she was
buried in an unmarked grave. A remorseful Shelley wrote:

Her voice did quiver as we parted,

Yet knew I not that heart was broken

From whence it came; and I departed

Heeding not the words then spoken,

Misery—O Misery,

This world is all too wide for thee.

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F
ROM
his vantage point in September and early October, Lord Liverpool saw no reason to
panic. More than a hundred years before anyone heard the term
gross national product,
Liverpool and his cabinet chose to measure the health of the British economy by tracking
tax returns, especially excise revenues, on a quarterly basis. If revenues increased,
consumers presumably were purchasing more goods and the economy was growing. If they
decreased, people either had less money, or were saving more and spending less; in
either case, the economy seemed to be headed for a downturn. It was not a particularly
sophisticated or reliable indicator of economic developments, but it provided Liverpool’s
ministry with statistical support for its inaction.

Looking back over the summer months, Liverpool expressed confidence that Britain’s
economic fundamentals were sound: “The Revenue looks better. The Excise (which is
the most material Branch) good, the Customs still very low, but the great falling
off is in the Port of London, which is a proof that it does not arise from Smuggling
or diminished Consumption, but from want of Speculation growing out of Want of Confidence.
We may trust therefore that this Evil will in a short Time be removed.” The extensive
gold reserves building up in the Bank of England in the postwar period—Britain seemed
by far the safest place for European investors to park their money—further encouraged
Liverpool. Low interest rates and easy access to credit, along with rising grain prices,
made British landowners happy. And when the landed interest was happy, Liverpool’s
government was well content.

Liverpool and his ministers did not turn a blind eye to the distress wracking Britain
in the autumn of 1816, but neither did they feel responsible for the hardship of the
laboring classes. The lens through which they viewed “the condition of England” blended
classical economic theory and the eighteenth-century tradition of limited government.
Authorities firmly believed that they had neither the resources nor the duty to alter
the course of the economic cycle; instead, they needed to allow market forces to work
themselves out.

Whatever economic difficulties Britain faced in the autumn of 1816, Liverpool argued,
stemmed primarily from the arduous transition from a lengthy war to peace, from a
period of expansive government spending and frenetic production, to reductions in
nearly every aspect of the economy. As an article (much admired by Liverpool) in the
Quarterly Review
of July 1816 explained, “a vacuum was inevitably produced by this sudden diminution,
and the general dislocation which ensued may not unaptly be compared to the settling
of the ice upon a wide sheet of water: explosions are made and convulsions are seen
on all sides, in one place the ruptured ice is disloged and lifted up, in another
it sinks … and thus the agitation continues for many hours till the whole has found
its level, and nature resumes in silence its ordinary course.”

There simply was no magic bullet in the government’s limited arsenal of weapons to
cure economic distress. “I see no immediate or adequate Remedy which Govt can apply,”
insisted William Huskisson, a member of Liverpool’s ministry who subsequently earned
a reputation as a fierce defender of free trade. “Their Game must be patience, temper
and great discretion in all that is done or said.” Such a policy enjoyed David Ricardo’s
wholehearted support. “I am sorry that the distresses still continue,” Ricardo wrote
to James Mill on November 17. “The short crop this year was most unfortunate, it aggravated
all our former ills.” Yet Ricardo insisted there was little the government could do
to ameliorate the situation. “I am sorry to see a disposition to inflame the minds
of the lower orders by persuading them that legislation can afford them any relief,”
he continued. “The country has a right to insist, and I hope will insist, on the most
rigid economy in every branch of the public expenditure, but when this is yielded
nothing further can be done for us.”

Yet Liverpool and his ministers also recognized their responsibility to keep the British
economy from falling off the cliff altogether. Clearly they could not permit widespread
misery to accumulate until it exploded into a full-fledged revolution. So they issued
reassuring statements to calm the public, and encouraged local communities to sponsor
relief efforts through a limited program of public works and charitable contributions
to feed the poor.

In an editorial on November 7,
The Times
of London explained this mind-set in detail. “In this country,”
The Times
argued, “it generally happens that public difficulty and distress are relieved by
the good sense of the nation itself; for the Government on such occasions is rather
accustomed to follow, than to take the lead.” Therefore “reliance must be placed on
private liberality and wisdom to alleviate particular instances of hardship.” But
while the propertied classes had a duty to preserve peace and alleviate the misery
of the poor, the means of providing assistance mattered greatly. There would be no
relief without work. “The best way to assist the poor,”
The Times
subsequently pointed out, “would be to maintain, together with their independent
spirit, their industrious habits.” There should be “an economy of relief” that provided
the poor “with the means of labour, and they will then feel that they are assisting
themselves.” On another occasion,
The Times
charged, rather gratuitously, that workers who presently found themselves in desperate
straits should have put more of their income into savings banks when they were employed,
instead of spending it on “the gin-shop, the pawnbroker, and the lottery-offices.”

Typically, communities took up a subscription among the middle and upper classes,
and used the proceeds to fund various projects to benefit the community. In the northeastern
port town of Scarborough, for instance, 150 local men were put to work in November
clearing away a large quantity of accumulated rubbish from the harbor. The city of
Salisbury raised enough money to pay 140 people to dig and screen gravel, and then
to carry it to streets in need of repair. In Hampstead, a number of “labouring poor”
found work “altering and improving the highways and footpaths of the parish, and in
other works of general utility.” The authorities at Frome, in Somerset, employed men
to quarry stones and transport them to a depot; depending on how many loads they carried,
the men earned from eight to ten shillings per week. A town meeting in Helston, Cornwall,
elected to pay members of “the industrious poor” to enclose the Commons adjoining
the town.