How the Eruption of Mount Tambora and its Apocalyptic Fallout During the Era Influenced the Works of Mary Shelley and Lord Byron During “The Year Without a Summer” (1816).

On the 5th of April 1815, the human race bore witness to the eruption of the stratovolcano Mount Tambora (Gunung Tambora, in Indonesian)—the largest and most destructive eruption ever recorded in modern human history, undoubtably dwarfing the more culturally memorable Krakatoa eruption of 1883. This earlier eruption was paramount in providing the necessary environment to fan the flames of the culturally acknowledged Christian idea of an impending “Judgement Day” – an apocalyptic era where God would rapture the devout and hence leave sinners to fend for themselves in the Dante-inspired hellscape that Earth would become after God had departed his cares for mankind.

It is this message that is clearly delivered as the underlying warning in the tragedy of the novel Frankenstein – Mary Shelley does not merely illuminate the fears of the supernatural and ignite the phenomenon of science-fiction, but she uses the novel as a warning as to what it means for man to play God. This historic idea that mankind affects the natural world – whether via sins and religion, or their industrial actions; and whether these consequences are implemented by a deity or linear scientific reasoning – is known as ecopoetics, and the matter is no less pertinent today in the sense that humanity’s industry has polluted and marred the face of the planet, than it was when the natural disasters of the past occurred, with inexplicable impacts on unwitting civilians across the globe. With the eruption of Mount Tambora and its chaotic effects on the entire world increasing religious zeal in more than just the Christian circles, Shelley was truly of the belief that God had forsaken his creation; this credence represented by Victor Frankenstein, who in turn forsook his own unnatural and ungodly creation.

The Tambora volcano erupted in 1815, but its effects devastated the planet as a whole for years proceeding. Sulphurous aerosols were released into the stratosphere, and were enough to cover the entire world in a thick veil that, in the subsequent months, restricted usual levels of sunlight from reaching Earth’s surface (Stenchikov, et al., 1997) and caused devastating drops in temperature, snow to fall thick in June, glaciers to grow, and according to Lord Byron, his chickens to retreat to bed at noon (Behringer, 2016, p. 215).

While the late Romantics did not struggle financially when it came to feeding themselves as would the common folk – Lord Byron, Polidori, Mary Godwin Shelley and Percy Shelley, and Claire Clairmont predominantly funded by their family estates, inheritance, and published works (and Polidori being a medical physician) – they did record something potentially more important, and posthumously immeasurable. Atmosphere – and not the one choked by sulphurous gases, but the encompassing emotion that took hold of the populous during this season of starvation and misery – and the adverse displays of unnatural happenings during their stay at Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Unnatural occurrences, such as a fifteen-pound trout being caught in the lobby of a hotel, flooded with the rains; and flotsam of dead cows flowing down river among tree trunks and the possessions of the lives of whole villages (Behringer, Tambora and the Year Without a Summer, 2016).

While the effects were less fatalistic for the middle and upper classes, it is without doubt that a grim aura descended upon the works of the poets and writers of this era. Mary Godwin (later, Shelley) penned, during this “cold and rainy season” (Shelley, 1818) what is often considered the first recognisable work of science-fiction in literature: Frankenstein; and Lord Byron’s poetry took on the introspective and existential themes of entrapment, of political impotence, and a contemporary gaze into the nature of depression as a mental state, separate from that of the physical body and its inhabitation in the realm of man. 

In Lord Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon”, one of many poems penned by the prolific writer in the summer of 1816 (among them the far more overt poem “Darkness”), Byron presses the idea that mankind is imprisoned by matters of the mind, not physical shackles. The poem outlines the story of a history Byron studied while in residence in Geneva on the edge of Lac Leman; the story of a man such as himself – an aristocrat, whose world is shaken when he and his brothers are detained by angry proletariat citizens and he witnesses his brothers – first that which he calls “bright and pure”, “the flower” waste away, while struggling with his internal torture of isolation, darkness, and the freedoms and beauty of the world being just out of reach – the green and mountains outside his cell, where in “quiet we had learn’d to dwell,” and “regain’d my freedom with a sigh.” The mimesis here of the darkness of TYWAS in which the great creative forge was stoked is evident in Byron’s mind, his vision of oppression birthing great passion and a new way of viewing the world. But it is also a resignation – the sigh, a reluctance to be a part of nature as opposed to the imagined “monarch of every race”, and having to rekindle the same mentality as those in the rest of the world who merely see nature as beauty, and not as freedom.

For protagonist Victor in Frankenstein, he often seeks solace in the natural world by embosoming himself in the waters of the lake and the forests and the mountains – but it is tainted by the knowledge of his Creature running wild in its criminal endeavours, and so he becomes trapped in a cage of his own making; he was compelled by hubris to engage himself in the Natural Sciences – a misnomer, as they are conveyed by Shelley as the most unnatural of mans’ exploits in modernity, separating man from the natural world – or, in line with the ecopoetic analysis, nature rejecting man from its kinship with expulsion into darkness. This punishment is Shelley’s way of reinforcing her beliefs that the so-called “natural sciences” should belong solely in the hands of the “Creator” – of God – and are not powers that should be tampered with by man. She instils this idea via quotations from Paradise Lost – “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man?; Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?”—and hence imparts upon Victor his crime and his punishment.

In researching for his novel, Frankenstein Unbound (Aldiss, 1973), Brian Aldiss declared that Shelley was the first author whose work would be truly accountable to the label of “Science-Fiction” – but many have discussed too the works of Lady Margaret Cavendish and her work Blazing World (Cavendish, 1666) in which the protagonist enters into a parallel universe via a north-pole based portal and finds a collectivised society run by anthropomorphic bugs and beasts. While this hints at the imagination of the unnatural, it does not specifically rely on imagined science as the crux of its causation (Boyle, 2013). Fantasy is all that is required to imagine a realm of bug-men and ape-men; whereas Frankenstein is grounded in reality – and fashioned around the all-too-realistic idea that with scientific progression, humans may find answers to questions they ought not be asking. Human intention alone forges the critical occurrences in Shelley’s novel – and while fantasy can be dismissed as pure imagination, science-fiction forces the reader to evaluate the realism that the text is, by its nature, desperate to impart. Through this realism, Shelley communicates her moral implications on humanity.

That is not to dismiss Cavendish having laid the groundwork for Shelley. There is an undeniable overlap when it comes to the morality of scientific human endeavours into the subjects where both authors believed that man should not venture, and that only a divine Creator should have the power to work.

Ecopoetics incite the reader to determine how the protagonist, perhaps as a potential self-insert, is situated within his habitat. It is to explore how ‘home’ can be defined; whether borders exist between our inner being and outside experiences; and how our senses and memories assist us in the distinctly human desire to navigate the self in the wider world (Mambrol, 2021). By these means a reader can move beyond the Romantic Poets’ intentions of The Sublime (Budd, 1998)  – but also find what it means to be human in this world – a question that Frankenstein’s Creature yearns to understand consistently. The criticism of humanity’s influence on the rest of the world comes under scrutiny in both Cavendish and Shelley’s prose, transparent in its critique, foreboding in its condemnation of the sins of human interference with nature. It is not that “artificial things are intrinsically bad, but simply that they do not help us understand the true nature of the world” (Boyle, 2013) as when in Blazing World Cavendish describes a “wind producing engine” (Cavendish, 1666, p. 7) with no overt inference that it is monstrous or dangerous; but by the conclusion of the story, the protagonist’s influence has made the society within the Blazing World less stable than before she arrived. Hence, though “all creatures have some natural rules, but every creature may [choose] whether they follow those rules.” (Cavendish, 1666, p. 246). 

Observing a fictional world in turmoil where the environment reacts to its inhabitants’ sins can be clearly observed in the real world that surrounded Shelley at the time of penning Frankenstein – people starved in the streets and the world was shrouded in an apocalyptic cloud, literally and figuratively. The influence of mankind upon the Earth had been worrisome in the observations of the Romantic Poets and contemporary scientists alike, from the “dark, Satanic mills” (Blake, 1810) of William Blake’s east London home and their marring of the landscape – important to the ecopoetic analyses of all works at this period in history – as well as the underlying notion that society’s moral fabric was fraying. Not to mention, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his albatross in Rime of the Ancient Mariner present the concept of the mockery of man at God, and the swift punishment such hubris can inflict upon man in this life and on his immortal soul by way of refashioning his natural world into a punishment befitting the crime.

While still living in her father’s house as a girl, Mary was invited by Coleridge himself to sit after her bedtime to listen to his poetry, and it is sure to have influenced the young Mary in her morality. Though her father, William Godwin, was a staunch atheist, Mary did believe in God (as did Coleridge) and understanding the moral demands of the Christian God is paramount to the understanding of how Mary perceived nature, and hence the way it could penalise mankind for defiance of the laws which it had set. In her introduction to Frankenstein, Shelley states: “frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

From this jumping off point, the tone for the novel is certainly set—the intent of the author is clearly to moralise the hubris of the human race. Percy Shelley’s preface confirms that Byron’s Ghost Story competition was inspiration for the novel, but it is theorised (Moore, 1830) that the competition itself was born out of necessity to quell the fighting amongst the poets that had stemmed from being cooped up inside with their own grandiose and clashing whilst philosophising and debating in “tea and politics”. Polidori – Byron’s friend and surgeon, and a literary hobbyist himself – ‘made his own contributions to these debates, drawing on his special study of dreams, nightmares and somnambulism and his interest in the possibility of life after death,’ (MacCarthy, 2003) The very spark came to Mary in a dream: the literal spark of life inflicted upon a corpse “by some powerful engine”, an echo of the machine in Blazing World; “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” This dream was the amalgamation of a troubling environment and set of tragic circumstances, and ultimately, while her companions may have influenced her idea, it was truly the fear of the consequences of life, death, and the punishing hand of a jealous creator that birthed Victor Frankenstein and his Creature. Mary’s ghost story was the only one to be pursued to full novel format due to the others’ tales remaining as short, unedited prose only.. This was confirmed in the foreword of Frankenstein by Percy Shelley to be due to that “the weather suddenly became serene; and my two friends left me on a journey among the Alps and lost, in the magnificent scenes which they present, all memory of their ghostly visions” (Shelley, 1818) – but the weather was more than merely circumstantial in the crafting of the fleshed-out novel, and clearly the completion of this work was important to Mary in moral duty.

Lord Byron’s Darkness was written in observation of the weather of the year, as well as the Italian astronomer’s prediction of the “bright sun extinguish’d”, as Byron writes. His eerie predictions of the alleged oncoming apocalypse, where “men forgot their passions in the dread of this their desolation; and all hearts were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light” – instil a fearful return to God in lieu of their fires and burning palaces and huts and forests. A stark warning, a reminder of the fragile nature of humanity on the earth where “the meagre by the meagre were devoured” and even “holy” relics and “altar-pieces” are not spared from the fires they attempt to burn in a feeble “mockery” of true light, where the “populous and powerful” die as one “lump”. One cannot help but find the thought indubitably pertinent to the troubles of modern capitalism in our disdain for the reverent nature of our God – or ‘nature’ in her essence – in favour of greed, the dark clouds which cover the sun a product of our avarice. It is ironic that a misguided prediction from an unknowing astronomer should come so close to truth – especially when the warnings of modern scientists on global climate change catastrophe, where fires literally consume our rainforests and scrublands, are so eagerly ignored in their urgency by those who work the ‘satanic mills’ of our day.

In Frankenstein, the concept of Light and Darkness work as the symbolic rewards and punishments upon Victor. When he rejects the Light of his own creator, God, and forsakes the natural order, he is initially consumed by an arrogance, bragging that “darkness had no effect upon my fancy” while he robs a graveyard for the limbs and torsos of the dead, observing “the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life” as “the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.” (p. 52-53). In this objective mindset, void of reverence for God’s work behind this process of unfeeling nature, Victor claims “from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me”; the light is God’s power – but Victor chooses to apply his own ‘genius’ and hubris to it, and malform the effect of what God intended, and what it means to animate life from death. Following this vein, it is easy to see how the weather, and its unnatural darkness, in Shelley’s environment could come as that global rejection of light and nature. Darkness was the punishment for man’s interference in God’s work.

And in his willingness to toy in the realm of darkness, Victor finds that in creating his life from death, he is hindered by his humanity, and inability to create something from nothing – hence his diggings in the cemetery. But in the novel he comes to find that the light his Creature reminds him of as being too good for them both is gone – and without it, Victor realises his mistake too late, as such is the tragedy of a tragic hero’s journey: “although the sun shone upon me, I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me” (p. 186) – the eyes of his Creature, as man observes God through a hateful lens in modernity and spurns the natural order in favour of self-serving notions of genius. The Creature does not take this for granted as his creator does – anxious during his time with the cottagers who unwittingly nurture him to meet with them and be a part of their beauteous and natural workings, wherein they do as man should: nurture one another and provide for each other from the herbs of the earth: “Happy, happy earth! fit habitation for the gods… My spirits were elevated by the enchanting appearance of nature [i.e. the forthcoming spring and joy of his unwitting company] the present was tranquil, and the future gilded by bright rays of hope—” therein again reaffirming Shelley’s view that a calm and warm nature bathed in light is the hallmark of celestial approval. In turn, darkness and ice, just like that of the enveloping stratospheric clouds of The Year Without a Summer – was a definitive curse upon mankind and its detrimental actions upon the natural order. Walton observes in finality that “Light, feeling, and sense will pass away.” The final sentence in the novel: “He was soon born away by the waves, lost in darkness and distance,” proposes that, in representing the workings and mechanisms of mankind’s unnatural sciences, there are two ends: the end of nature, and the end of humankind, who had destroyed their home in their own hubris, and are doomed to perish in a dark catharsis for both Creator and Creation in tandem.

It is pitiful that in his determination, Victor Frankenstein is the digger of his own grave due to pity – but the pity and fear that Victor feels for his creation is mimetic in Shelley’s writing of the proposed pity and fear that God must feel for the men he has created, seeing their sins against nature – as Victor sees his Creature as a sin against nature by his very creation. This would have been relevant in Shelley’s reality in the summer of 1816 with the “populous” of Darkness facing famine and starvation; and the “powerful” circles of society unexempt from the apocalypse predictions. In the same way that Frankenstein’s Creature knew for certain he had been forsaken at once by his creator – and was also forsaken by those Cottagers with whom he requested refuge, the insult to injury felt by multitudes of climate refugees at this time (Wood, 2017) – people were desperate for salvation, both spiritual and from starvation. But rejection is inevitable in desperate times, when even the Creature’s creator, Victor, “sought to avoid the wretch,” in the pathetic fallacy of “rain which poured from a black and comfortless sky”, seeing his creation as a “demoniacal corpse to which [he] had so miserably given life,” – the instantaneous regret of a creator for a creature who is born to detest his maker. As the Creature understands, “you my creator detest and spurn me,…You purpose to kill me, how dare you sport thus with life?” It is vividly cruel that the self-awareness of the Creature for Victor’s conduit as God’s unwarranted hand is an aberration against nature: that order is undone by his very existence as a living corpse, and that though “God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring” where Victor so arrogantly raised life from death while God raised life from himself, it is still God and Creator to whom man and creature must turn “for succour, although towards you I felt no sentiment but that of hatred”; for it is the creation who is made to be subservient to his creator in nature. Shelley was supported this idea, for her father was the man who instilled her with knowledge and genius of her own – but while her obsession with her father was deep, she was not blind to outside ideas, such as religion, as while William Godwin was an atheist, Mary was a devout Christian. The ability to criticise a creator whilst also upholding his design of the self is one that Shelley held dear; and she would have seen the eruption and effects of the Tambora disaster as divine intervention.

Science!

For is it not always that “student of unhallowed arts who kneels beside the thing he has put together” in the darkness, while the beauty of nature fills the soul and fulfils the soul with bounty? It is Victor Frankenstein who presents in contrast to those around him as the devil, creator of demons – surrounded by family and friends who represent piety, duty, love, and innocence: Clerval, Justine, Elizabeth and William, respectively – for these are the values that mankind forsake in turning from natural inclinations of goodness and light. There is also the demise of Victor’s own soul – for while though he finds solace in nature and it is observed that “no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauty of nature”, it is in turn he believes his companion Henry Clerval to be the true worshipper of the natural world: “He was a being formed in the very poetry of nature… his soul overflowed with ardent affections, and his friendship was that devoted and wondrous nature that the worldly-minded teach us to look for only in the imagination.”

Henry represents the ideal – a parent can so easily dote upon the devoted child. In turn, Victor describes himself “as always having been imbued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature” where the “world was to me a secret which I desired to divine”, to “penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding places.” – such is the warning of M. Waldman in the warning of studying ‘Natural Sciences’ in their era – for it is dipping more than toes into the unnatural, and in the face of God “they have acquired new and almost unlimited powers.”

In modernity it can be understood that man still strives to defy nature, and destroy the creator as did the Creature desire to destroy Victor; we are devastating to the natural world with our forms of science and proposed ‘innovations’ – where our world heats up due to a fault that is objectively understood to be our own fault, it was merely theorised to be the machinations of mankind that had determined the apocalyptic airs of 1816 due to our sins against nature, not only in literature but in reality of herald of the end from Italian prophets and scholars (Behringer, 2016, p. 40), that were met with no less ridicule than cautionary mindfulness and a rise in religiosity. Now, whether nature is God, or nature is nature, it is seemingly inevitable that mankind should not triumph over nature in any meaningful, long-lasting victory; for centuries prior the natural world was seen as a “semiotic system” with which God would make his feelings known (Behringer, 2019, p. 107)

Frankenstein undoubtably remains relevant in our contemporary culture; but due to the deeper warning in which Shelley found fit to portray – in its unnatural acts against nature, mankind shall meet its miserable end. As she and her cohorts felt the pressure of a world engulfed by a very real and natural, ultra-Plinian apocalypse, they looked to the sky and saw an angry god with a disdain for the creatures he had created – the creatures, mankind itself, which spat back in the face of its maker with vile industry and innovation that neither fed the masses, nor could save the rich or poor who indulged in the pillaging of nature from the judgment of the purest ideals of Christian morality, as William Blake so firmly denoted throughout his works (Nuri, 2010).

Shelley noted in her author’s introduction, “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of the void…”, as God himself as a natural creator did so in her personal beliefs; “… but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.” It is clear that Mary was of the belief that the acts of her protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, are that of the latter – of scientific hubris and its unnatural forms mutating the nature of God; and furthermore, the inevitable punishment of this scorn for our natural world.

References

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• Behringer, W. (2019). Tambora: The Year Without a Summer. Cambridge: Polity Press.

• Blake, W. (1810). Jerusalem [And did those feet in ancient time].

• Boyle, D. (2013). Margaret Cavendish on Gender, Nature, and Freedom. Hypatia, 28, 516-532. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/24542000

• Budd, M. (1998). Delight in the Natural World: Kant on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature. British Journal of Aesthetics, 28, 233-250.

• Cavendish, L. M. (1666). The Blazing World. London: A. Maxwell.

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• MacCarthy, F. (2003). Byron: Life and Legend. London: Faber & Faber.

• Mambrol, N. (2021, February 19). Ecopoetics. Retrieved from Literary Theory & Criticism: https://literariness.org/2021/02/19/ecopoetics/

• Moore, T. (1830). Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, Vol. II. London: John Murray.

• Nuri, M. A. (2010, February 6). William Blake’s Criticism of Society in his Poems. Retrieved from Literary Articles: http://www.literary-articles.com/2010/02/william-blakes-criticism-of-society-in.html

• Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (8th Edition ed.). (2010). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Shelley, P. B. (1818). Preface. In M. Shelley, Frankenstein (p. 12). London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mayor, & Jones, Finsbury Square.

• Stenchikov, G. L., Kirchner, I., Robock, A., Graf, H., Antuna, J., Grainger, R. G., . . . Thomason, L. (1997). Radiative forcing from the 1991 Mount Pinatubo Volcanic Eruption. 103: J. Geophys. Res.

• Wood, G. D. (2017). Frankenstein, the Baroness, and the Climate. The Wordsworth Circle, 3-6.