11.
RELIEF
“This year, 1817, was on the whole a melancholy one…”
AS 1816 DREW to a close, American and European writers continued to search for an explanation for the year’s extraordinary weather. One thesis, advanced in the National Register and the Petersburg Intelligencer, attributed the frigid summer to two causes: a long-term cooling of the internal temperature of Earth, and a lack of circulation of the “electrical fluid” that was believed to move between the surface of Earth and the atmosphere. According to this theory, the internal heat of Earth—which the writer claimed had more influence upon the temperature of the air than any other factor—had been declining for the past thousand years. As evidence of a cooling trend, he cited the presence several centuries ago of human settlements in regions of Greenland and Iceland that were presently uninhabitable; alpine glaciers that were advancing across Switzerland and northern Italy; and significantly colder weather in Rome (snowstorms) and Lombardy (frozen lakes) than in the days of the Roman republic.
Nevertheless, the subnormal temperature of the summer of 1816 “appears to us to have been caused more by the absence of the usual circulation of the electrical fluid, than either a deficiency in the heat of the sun, or of that which we receive from the internal heat of the earth.” According to this theory, “whenever the electrical fluid circulates, heat is produced. [And] whenever there is an equilibrium of the fluid for any length of time between the surface of the earth, and the atmosphere, the temperature of the air is much lower than in its usual state.”
The electrical equilibrium allegedly existing in 1816 was attributed to a series of earthquakes that had occurred at various points around the world over the past three years—“more universal and terrible in their effects, than any which have been recorded for several centuries.” Earthquakes, the theory maintained, were the result of a disequilibrium of electrical fluid between Earth’s surface and the atmosphere, and “have been always preceded by a long tract of warm weather.” Acting as a sort of electrical shock, the quakes restored the equilibrium and thereby ushered in a period of cold weather. The general absence of lightning and thunderstorms during the summer of 1816 seemed further proof of the insufficient circulation of electrical energy. “All nature seems to declare that electricity, the great agent of heat, when in a state of motion, is equally diffused at present through her system,” the writer concluded, “and that no part either possesses a superfluity, or labours from a deficiency of this extraordinary & mysterious fluid. The earthquakes of the last years have produced this remarkable equilibrium; and we may calculate that several summers will yet pass away, before this equilibrium is destroyed, and the usual quantuum [sic] of heat necessary for vegetation will again be generated.”
Others agreed that the normal circulation of electrical energy had gone awry, but blamed the disturbance on lightning rods instead of earthquakes. According to one theory, lightning rods prevented Earth from releasing heat into the atmosphere, keeping the air much cooler than normal. Or perhaps the rods actually absorbed heat from the air when they attracted lightning, thereby depriving the atmosphere of warmth.
For their part, several British writers focused on the movement of glaciers and icebergs to explain “the causes of this wet and cold season.” Writing in the Gentleman’s Magazine, one amateur meteorologist suggested that “the removal of a considerable number of icy mountains, by tempestuous winds, from the neighbourhood of the Arctic Pole into more Southerly latitudes in the Atlantic might occasion it.” William Thomas Brande, a professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great Britain and secretary to the Royal Society of London, suggested that the culprit was the slow buildup of Arctic ice over decades and centuries. For several hundred years, Brande argued, “the Climate of England has undergone a very material change for the worse.” No one could doubt, he wrote, that “the Springs are now later and the Summers shorter; and that those seasons are colder and more humid than they were in the youthful days of many persons.”
In fact, Brande claimed, the mean annual temperature across much of the Northern Hemisphere was declining, while the accumulation of ice and snow in the mountainous regions of Europe continued to expand. The trend seemed even more pronounced in the northern reaches of the hemisphere. As evidence, Brande cited the fate of eastern Greenland, where Norwegian and Icelandic traders had established outposts in medieval times. Since the fifteenth century, however, the east coast of Greenland, “which once was perfectly accessible, has become blockaded by an immense collection of ice.” Brande blamed the “deterioration” of Britain’s climate on this rapid buildup of ice—much of which, he argued, recently had begun to drift southward in the form of immense ice islands through the North Atlantic. The “extreme chilliness” of 1816, Brande concluded, “may in great measure be referred to these visitors from the north.”
Other writers provided evidence to support this theory of an increasingly icebound hemisphere. One pointed out that in Norway, popular opinion held that “for fifty years past, the summers have been colder than they were before in that country.” A French author cited the Scottish traveler Sir George Mackenzie’s observation that the sea of ice between Iceland and Europe “has extended its empire over the vast space of sea between that island and the continent.” Others pointed to the wrecks of two merchant ships in the Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 1803, lost when they reportedly collided with icebergs in the 40th degree of latitude—on the same line as Naples and Constantinople.
A more fanciful explanation for the frigid summer came from a resident of Albany, New York, who noticed a correlation between the advent of colder weather in the Northern United States and the Madison administration’s failed attempt to invade Canada during the early stages of the recent war against Britain. “It seems very strange to me,” he informed the editor of the Columbian, “that ever since our late ‘just and necessary war,’ these Canadian winds have all blown so cold upon us! Others have noticed this as well as myself and say, that our N. winds have, of late, been much colder than formerly. At this rate,” he concluded, “it is very clear that Canada must be ours, or we must all migrate to the southward in a very few years.”
Americans who still believed in malevolent magic ascribed the frigid summer to the machinations of witches, who were supposed to wield considerable power over the weather. More common were those who viewed the cold and drought as a warning from heaven: “That God has expressed His displeasure towards the inhabitants of the earth by withholding the ordinary rains and sunshine cannot be reasonably doubted,” proclaimed one magazine editor.
Convictions of individual and collective sinfulness fueled the revival movement that was already well under way in New England, New York, and along the frontier. In late 1816, revivalism swept Vermont “from town to town in a manner very similar to an epidemic of disease,” wrote Lewis Stillwell. “As many as fifty persons succumbed to these onslaughts of emotionalism in a single town in a single day, and the total harvest of the churches ran into the thousands.” Over the next several years, the revival movement produced numerous agencies dedicated to disseminating the gospel and setting sinners on the road to salvation: the Vermont Religious Tract Society, the Vermont Juvenile Missionary Society, the first New England convention of the Sunday School movement, the Vermont Colonization Society, and the northwestern branch of the American Society for Educating Pious Youth for the Gospel Ministry.
* * *
IN the last week of January 1817, temperatures in the Northern United States suddenly plunged. Bitter cold gripped the region for the next month. On February 14, Dartmouth College recorded a low of 30 degrees below zero. “Fair, the coldest day has been for 40 years,” claimed one New Hampshire farmer. At Alexandria, Virginia, the ice on the Potomac River reportedly was twenty-five inches thick. At Cincinnati, the Ohio River froze—“a circumstance rarely, if ever, known before.”
Four days later, a storm brought both snow and rising temperatures that nearly reached the freezing point, but when the town of Salem, Massachusetts, attempted to put hundreds of men to work breaking up the ice that filled its harbor, they met with little success. On February 24, a minister in Salem noted in his diary that “the Barometer [was] as low as I ever observed it. I could make no fire in my study after repeated attempts so furiously was the smoak [sic] forced back into the chimney.”
As the cold lingered into springtime and food remained scarce, prices continued to climb. In Maine, the price of oats tripled and the cost of potatoes doubled; in parts of New Hampshire, hay rose to $180 a ton, six times its normal price. Farmers whose corn crops had been devastated by the August frosts desperately sought seed for the new season. Occasionally neighbors would share supplies they had preserved from the 1815 harvest. Others sold their stocks at inflated prices; Samuel Goodrich recalled one New Hampshire farmer who walked forty miles for a half bushel of corn, paying two dollars when he finally found some. In Portland, Maine, residents at a town meeting authorized “the Overseers of the Poor to furnish seed of various descriptions to those individuals who are unable to procure the same from his own resources—the advances to be paid for either in labor on the highway, or in kind at the harvesting of crops.”
Still the weather remained cold. On May 15, some towns in Vermont had five inches of snow on the ground. A report in the Hallowell (Maine) American Advocate confirmed that hundreds of families in the area were in severe distress. “Many charge it to the late cold seasons,” the newspaper noted, “and are ready to sell their property for half what it cost, and migrate south.” New Englanders who had stubbornly refused to give up finally surrendered to the elements and their fears. “New England seemed to many to be worn out and done for,” wrote one historian of the exodus, “and the glacial age was returning to claim it again.”
“We have had a great deal of moving this spring,” reported Reverend Samuel Robbins from East Windsor, Connecticut. “Our number rather diminishes.” June brought light snow and more frosts. By early summer, the river of emigrants swelled to a flood. “At last a kind of despair seized upon some of the people,” wrote Samuel Goodrich, following a visit to New Hampshire. “In the pressure of adversity, many persons lost their judgment, and thousands feared or felt that New England was destined, henceforth, to become part of the frigid zone.”
“Hardly a family seemed untouched by it,” recounted historian Harlan Hatcher. “Younger sons determined to go west, daughters boldly marrying and setting out for the new land, neighbors loading their goods and youngest children into carts and wagons, fathers going along to prepare a place for their families—it was one of the largest and most homogeneous mass migrations in American history.”
As the emigrants passed through western New York State, a correspondent for Niles’ Weekly Register counted 260 wagons heading westward through the Genesee Valley in the space of nine days, plus scores of travelers on horseback or on foot. The editor of a local New York newspaper claimed that “he himself met on the road to Hamilton a cavalcade of upwards of twenty waggons, containing one company of one hundred and sixteen persons, on their way to Indiana, and all from one town in the district of Maine.” In the town of Hamilton, New York, one writer estimated that “there are now in this village and its vicinity, three hundred families, besides single travellers, amounting in all to fifteen hundred souls, waiting for a rise of water to embark for ‘the promised land.’” From St. Clairsville, Ohio—along the National Road—came word that “Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward.… Fourteen waggons yesterday, and thirteen today, have gone through this town. Myriads take their course down the Ohio. The waggons swarm with children.”
One of the more conspicuous groups of emigrants was known as the Pilgrims, a band of religious zealots who left southern Canada in the spring of 1817 and came to rest at South Woodstock, Vermont, several months later. Numbering only about eight members when they arrived in Woodstock, the Pilgrims managed to attract thirty new adherents by the time they departed in late summer. They were led by Isaac Bullard, a red-bearded “prophet” known as “Elijah” to his followers and “Old Isaac” to others, who claimed to have received a revelation from God upon recovering from a lengthy illness. Bullard promised to lead his flock—who styled themselves after the lost tribe of Judah—to a Promised Land somewhere in the Western territories, where they would plant a new church of the Redeemer. Upon leaving Woodstock, the Pilgrims divided into two groups, one of which journeyed south through the Hudson River Valley and New Jersey before turning west, and the other walking westward across New York State and then south along the Ohio River. Along the way, they practiced a type of Christian communitarianism, under which they abjured material possessions and pooled all their resources—about $10,000—under Bullard’s control. They also reportedly practiced free love, held frequent conversations with invisible spirits, and adamantly refused to bathe. Having discovered no Biblical admonition to wash oneself, Bullard decided that bathing was a sin, and boasted that he had not changed his clothes in seven years. His followers, garbed in bearskins and long knit caps, followed suit. They continued to enlist new converts along the route, and by the time they arrived at a spot subsequently named Pilgrim Island, about thirty miles south of New Madrid, Missouri, the sect numbered several hundred members. Shortly after their arrival, however, fevers killed dozens of the zealots, and Bullard’s autocratic rule alienated so many others that the enterprise soon collapsed altogether.
More typical was the experience of Gershom Flagg, a young unmarried farmer who left his home in Richmond, Vermont, in the fall of 1816, spent the winter in Springfield, Ohio, and then moved on to the town of Harmony, alongside the National Road. Although the journey took him longer than expected (“we found some of the worst hills to travel up and down that I have ever seen where there was a Road”), and the price of supplies inflated in Ohio (“there are many things which are worth but little in Vermont that cost considerable here”), Flagg informed his brother back home that “I find the Country as fertile as I expected. Corn grows with once hoeing and some time with out hoeing at all to 14 feet high and is well filled.… Hogs & Cattle run in the woods in summers and in the winter are fed on Corn & prairie hay. In this vicinity are some as handsome Cattle as ever I have seen.… I am fully of the opinion that a man may live by farming with much less labour here than in the Eastern States.” Moreover, “the weather is warm and pleasant now,” Flagg reported in January. “We have had no snow.”
Aided by similar testimonials from hundreds of other settlers, Ohio’s population jumped from 230,760 in 1810 to slightly more than 400,000 in 1817. The increase in Indiana was even more spectacular, rising from 24,500 in 1810 to nearly 100,000 seven years later; in the year 1816 alone, Indiana gained 42,000 new settlers. And in the territory of Illinois, the population rose 160 percent between 1815 and 1818.
While no precise numbers exist for the number of emigrants from any particular location, the best estimates for Maine alone put the loss of residents between ten to fifteen thousand from 1810 to 1820, with most departing in 1816–20. Numerous towns in Maine—including Freeport, Eliot, Kittery, and Durham—suffered substantial declines in population, leading local officials to fear that the “ruinous emigration of their young men” might leave towns wholly unpopulated. In Vermont, more than sixty townships lost population from 1810–20, and another fifty or sixty barely managed to break even. (The state’s population grew by only 8 percent between 1810 and 1820, compared to a 32 percent increase for the nation as a whole.) Hardest hit were the towns of northern Vermont. Worcester, just north of Montpelier, was reduced to one family; Granby, in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, lost its legal existence altogether.
Newspaper editors attempted to stem the tide by vigorously promoting the alleged advantages of New England over Ohio or Indiana: easy coastal shipping to the markets of New York and Boston; better schools; greater proximity to Europe; a more industrious and more cultured population; and a healthier climate, with no “tropical” diseases such as malaria and other fevers that afflicted recent arrivals in the Western territories. The Massachusetts state legislature joined the campaign by approving an early version of a homestead act which opened up new townships in Maine (including some on land previously reserved for Native Americans) and promised settlers one hundred acres for a payment of only five dollars (public land in Ohio was selling for approximately two dollars per acre), provided they built a house and barn on the land within a year and cleared ten acres for farmland within ten years.
Still the exodus continued, despite reports that the Western territories were considerably less hospitable than the advertisements claimed. Settlers discovered that they were going into “a great loneliness,” a thinly settled region where farms were so isolated they might not see another family for several months at a time; where primitive cabins lacked furnishings or even chimneys; where cash was scarce, markets undeveloped, and prices for agricultural goods lower than in New England. “The bad things,” recounted Gershom Flagg from Ohio, “are Want of Stone, Want of timber for building, Bad water, which will not Wash, overflowing of all the streams which makes it very bad building Bridges especially where the materials are scarce as they are here, Bad Roads, ignorant people … plenty of Ague near the large streams [and] Bad situation as to Trade.… Swarms of locusts have lately made their appearance.” Material comforts remained few and far between. Household goods brought into the territories eventually broke or gave out—“glasses, cups, and hollow ware disappeared, iron pots were borrowed and broken”—and families had little money to purchase replacements, and few shops at which to buy them.
New Englanders also encountered recently arrived Southern farmers, particularly from Virginia and the eastern parts of North Carolina, defeated by their own poor harvests due to the cold summer and severe drought. The encounter produced something akin to culture shock for the Northerners. Their Southern brethren, observed one Vermonter, “are the most ignorant people I ever saw.… I have asked many people what township they lived in & they could not tell.”
Some settlers gave up and headed back to New England, but most decided that the benefits of life in the West outweighed the costs. After all, few prosperous farmers forsook their homes; most of the emigrants left behind farms that were only marginally profitable even in the best of times. Once they arrived in the new territories, “they spotted the mill sites, the town sites, and the best stands of timber,” as one local historian pointed out, “and bought them up while they were still cheap.” They chose the best land and cleared it and found the soil far more fertile than any in New England, and when the next wave of settlers arrived, they sold them the goods they needed. And as the population of the territories rose, so did the value of their lands.
But at last the price of grain stalled and then began to decline. After wheat reached a peak of $3.11 a bushel and corn nearly $1.75 a bushel in Eastern cities in May, the prospect of substantially improved harvests in the autumn of 1817 sent prices sharply lower.
* * *
ON January 28, 1817, a crowd of nearly 20,000 people gathered outside of Westminster Hall in London for the opening of Parliament. Many had come to support the presentation of petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures—estimates ranged between 600,000 and 1,000,000—in favor of parliamentary reform. Others had gathered to gawk at the dignitaries who attended the ceremonies; and some were there to vent their anger and frustration with the government’s failure to alleviate the growing distress among the poor throughout Britain.
By the time the Prince Regent—who had recently hosted a lavish dinner party at which thirty-six entrées were served—emerged after delivering his opening address, the mood of the crowd had turned quite dark; Sir Robert Peel noted that it was “amazingly increased both in numbers and violence.” As the Prince Regent rode back to St. James’s Palace, one or more bystanders threw large stones at his carriage, breaking at least one window. Perhaps someone in the crowd fired a couple of shots from an airgun; the government subsequently claimed that the left side of his carriage had been pierced by two small bullets, although John Quincy Adams reported that “no report was heard, no bullets [were] found in the carriage, and the opposite window, though up, was not broken.” The Prince Regent was unharmed, but the incident persuaded Peel, among others, that “the general spirit of the country is worse, I apprehend, than we understood it to be.”
Liverpool’s government responded by submitting to Parliament a series of draconian measures to quash the revolution it had been expecting for months. Lacking any reliable information beyond the reports provided by the government (aided by a small army of spies and informants paid by the Home Office), Parliament had little choice but to approve the legislation. After establishing secret committees to investigate the state of the country, Parliament passed in less than two weeks a measure effectively suspending habeas corpus, a “gagging act” that allowed magistrates to silence any speech or publication they deemed “seditious or inflammatory,” and a Seditious Meetings Act that required any assembly of fifty people or more to obtain prior permission from the government.
The government employed these new weapons enthusiastically. On March 10, a mass meeting in Manchester to publicize the plight of unemployed textile workers and protest the suspension of habeas corpus was broken up by a detachment of dragoons, and the leaders of the protest arrested. When a group of weavers decided to march from Manchester to London anyway, carrying blankets to indicate their profession (and keep them warm), they were attacked by cavalry before they reached the city; several demonstrators were wounded, and one killed.
Government informers also infiltrated a group of prospective revolutionaries centered in Pentrich, a village in Derbyshire, an area hard-pressed by the combination of rising food prices and growing unemployment in both the iron and hosiery industries. Throughout the spring of 1817, a veteran radical named Thomas Bacon and Jeremiah Brandreth, an unemployed rib-stockinger from Nottingham, worked to recruit impoverished workers for a march on London to overthrow the government. While an order for 3,000 pike handles went out to a carpenter in Lincolnshire, a shipment of daggers arrived in neighboring Leicestershire. As Bacon and his lieutenants pondered the feasibility of appropriating a huge cannon from a local ironworks to accompany the rebels on their march, a government spy named William Richard, aka William Oliver, aka “Oliver the Spy,” enthusiastically encouraged the plot. Oliver, as he was known to the conspirators, promised them that seventy-thousand sympathizers would join the marchers when they reached London.
On the evening of June 9, between 250–300 men—many of them reluctant converts pressed into service by Brandreth at gunpoint—left Pentrich in the pouring rain, armed with scythes, pikes, and a small number of guns. En route to Nottingham, where they expected sixteen thousand reinforcements to join them, they met a detachment of Light Dragoons, dispatched by the government in response to Oliver’s reports. The marchers panicked and fled. Authorities tracked down and arrested more than eighty of them; in October, thirty-five were tried on charges of attempting “by force of arms to subvert and destroy the Government and Constitution.” Twenty-three were found guilty: fourteen—including Bacon—were transported to Australia, six were imprisoned, and three (one of whom was Brandreth) were hanged and beheaded for treason. It was a pitiable end to a wretched enterprise that has been termed “England’s last attempted revolution.”
By that time, Parliament had begun to investigate alternatives to the traditional system of poor laws and parish relief. Alarmed by the rising cost of providing assistance to the poor in the early months of 1817, the House of Commons appointed a select committee to investigate the effects of the poor laws and recommend improvements. In July, the select committee delivered its conclusion that “unless some efficacious check be interposed, there is every reason to think that the amount of the [poor rate] will continue as it has done, to increase, till … it shall have absorbed the profits of the property on which the rate may have been assessed, producing thereby the neglect and ruin of the land.”
In the meantime, Parliament approved the Poor Employment Act of 1817, which empowered the British government to make loans for up to three years to individuals or corporations who could demonstrate that the funds would be used to employ large numbers of workers. Initially, the total amount available for loans was capped at 1.75 million pounds sterling; within two months, the government had received applications for projects—generally for public works such as roads, canals, or draining marshlands—totalling more than a million pounds. The swift response proved the depth of the distress that still afflicted Britain in the summer of 1817. Although Parliament clearly intended the measure as a temporary expedient, it was renewed repeatedly. The act represented “a significant new departure,” as M. W. Flinn has pointed out, since it “implicitly acknowledged the obligation of governments to do something more about depression than they had formerly considered adequate.” Instead of limiting assistance solely to financial institutions or established commercial firms, it provided funds that would be used directly for the relief of unemployment and poverty, and in that sense provided critical momentum to the notion that the government bore a responsibility to improve the life of the ordinary British citizen.
* * *
JANE Austen’s health deteriorated in the winter of 1816–17. She tired easily, and seldom left the house in Chawton; neighbors called her “the poor young lady.” To her family, Austen pretended her illness was really nothing: “air and exercise are what I want,” she insisted. She spent her days writing letters and the opening chapters of a new novel, The Brothers, even though her hand sometimes trembled badly. To her niece Fanny she admitted on March 23 that “I have had a good deal of fever at times & indifferent nights, but am considerably better now, & recovering my Looks a little.…”
But she was not. On May 24, Jane Austen rode in a carriage (it rained nearly all the way) to the hospital at Winchester. Although she rallied from time to time, her doctors knew of no cure for her illness, and she passed away on July 18. The precise nature of Austen’s fatal illness remains a matter of controversy among biographers and physicians. Over the past fifty years, her death has been ascribed variously to Addison’s disease, cancer, and, most recently, tuberculosis from the consumption of unpasteurized milk.
* * *
GRAIN prices in France rose throughout the winter and spring. By January 1817, the price of wheat nationwide was 180 percent higher than the average in 1815. In March, it was 190 percent higher; in May, 230 percent. But the national averages hid significant disparities among the various regions of France. Eastern provinces such as Alsace and Rhône-Alpes, where the summer’s cold and rain had wreaked the most damage on the harvest, continued to face grain prices more than twice as high as those in most western regions.
For the most part, government officials held fast to the principles enunciated in the Interior Ministry’s circular of November: They would brook no interference with the free movement of grain from one department to another, nor would they permit the mass intimidation of farmers or merchants to force the sale of grain at reduced prices. At the same time, Louis’ government made substantial purchases of foreign wheat (largely from Baltic ports), which it intended to sell to the populace below cost; it also subsidized bakers directly, established soup kitchens, and advised the local prefects to provide assistance to the elderly and infirm.
Obsessed by fears of a popular uprising in Paris, Louis insisted that local authorities hold down the price of bread in the capital, preferably below the limit of ninety centimes for a two-kilogram loaf established during Napoléon’s reign. Nevertheless, Louis adamantly refused to grant Parisian officials additional funds to help them achieve that objective. As more and more peasants from the surrounding countryside drifted into Paris in search of cheaper bread in the late winter of 1817, the task grew even more daunting: one estimate classified nearly 200,000 Parisians as indigent and therefore deserving of subsidized bread.
Although a loaf of bread in Paris—even with government subsidies—nearly doubled in price between the spring of 1816 and the spring of 1817, it still cost only about 60 percent of a similar loaf in the Alsatian capital of Strasbourg. Meanwhile, prices rose even higher in the French countryside, where bread often cost three to four times as much as in the cities. And the quality of bread suffered as well. The combination of prolonged cool weather during the summer (which kept the wheat kernels from ripening) and rain during the harvest (which led to sprout-damaged wheat) produced grain that weighed only about 75 to 80 percent of top-quality wheat. Consequently, the flour absorbed less water and frequently resulted in bread that was sticky and gummy. “You could not eat the bread,” complained one disgusted peasant in central France. “It stuck to the knife.”
In February, riots broke out in northern France, particularly in Haute-Normandie and the Somme, to prevent grain from leaving the region. Throughout the country, authorities reported an increase in property crimes, particulary theft, and a rise in attacks by armed bands of outlaws upon travelers. As a result, farmers often refused to risk shipping their grain, at least until it was completely paid for, and the dearth in eastern France deepened. In areas where local authorities provided grain allowances for the poor—in the larger cities, for the most part—they found it necessary to reduce their allotments and substitute other food, such as potatoes, for wheat or bread.
As grain from the Baltic and the United States began to arrive, royal officials directed it first to Paris and then to the supply routes in northern France through which grain shipments usually traveled, to reduce the likelihood of future disruptions. Between the cost of grain imports and the expense of bread subsidies—which together totalled nearly 70 million francs—the national budget slid quickly into the red. Only a hastily arranged loan from British and Dutch bankers in February kept the royal government afloat. Wellington, meanwhile, agreed to reduce the Allied occupation forces by 30,000 troops, particularly from the eastern departments, thereby alleviating pressure on both the French budget and local food supplies.
Despite the government’s efforts, distress continued to grow throughout France during the spring of 1817. En route to Switzerland, Louis Simond—a native Frenchman who had achieved wealth as a merchant in New York City—noticed the rising number of indigent peasants as he traveled through eastern France. “Beggars, very numerous yesterday, have increased greatly,” he noted in his journal. “At every stage, a crowd of women and children and of old men, gather round the carriage; their cries, the eloquence of all these pale and emaciated countenances, lifted up to us with imploring hands, are more than we can well bear.” Numerous citizens already had died, Simond noted, “if not of hunger, at least of the insufficiency and bad quality of the food.”
Sir Stamford Raffles, too, encountered hordes of beggars as he and his cousin, Thomas, passed through eastern France that spring. (The former lieutenant-governor of Java had recently dropped the “Thomas” from his name.) The beggars, wrote Thomas after leaving the town of Champagnole, “were chiefly children, and their numbers and their importunity was truly astonishing. From the very slow rate at which we traveled [ascending a hill], they were frequently enabled to follow us for a considerable distance, and this they did, entreating in the most piteous accents, and repeating the same words with a sort of measured intonation, Monsieur, s’il vous plaît, donnez-moi charité.” Thomas Raffles breathed a sigh of relief when the road leveled off and his carriage could pick up speed, leaving the unfortunate children behind.
Peasants and townspeople from the provinces surrounding Paris continued to flock into the capital; on the first of June, Simond noted one report that “one hundred thousand souls have been added to its destitute population within a few months!” Nevertheless, the government’s policy of cheap bread in the city continued to avert any outbreak of disorder or famine. The rest of France was not so fortunate. In one department after another, food riots broke out in the spring and early summer. Much of the violence was perpetrated by bands of armed vagrants, usually peasants desperate for food, who migrated to areas where there was at least an adequate supply of grain. Sometimes they seized grain wherever they could find it; often, however, they offered to purchase it at a reduced price.
At the end of May, a series of large-scale disturbances shook one market town after another. On May 30, a mob of 3,000 peasants sacked the grain market in the Burgundy town of Sens; when local officials called in troops from a nearby garrison to quell the disorder, the rioters dispersed into the countryside, where they extorted grain from farmers by threatening to kill them and their families. The following day, an even larger crowd plundered a market town in the department of Aube, in northeastern France. Again, the authorities required regular army troops to crush the disturbance.
Five thousand rioters assaulted the town of Château-Thierry on June 3, pillaging the storehouses and seizing grain shipments on the Marne River. A pitched battle ensued between the peasants—armed with swords, bayonets, and sticks—and government soldiers, leaving several rioters dead. Once more, the trouble spread into the countryside, ending only when local officials essentially requisitioned grain from farmers to distribute among the protestors.
For the most part, these disturbances were remarkably free of any political content. From the government’s perspective, however, the trouble that erupted at Lyon in the second week of June bore a far more ominous cast. Long a stronghold of Bonapartist sentiment, the town of Lyon was suffering acutely from the depression in the textile industry, and the surrounding countryside from the dearth of grain. Local officials prudently subsidized the cost of bread in Lyon, but could not afford to match that price in the rural areas. By June 1817 the price of bread in eastern France had increased to nearly four times its cost in the spring of 1816. Rumors of Napoléon’s imminent return had swirled through the region for the past several months, and the royal government braced for a reprise of the Hundred Days. “The excessive price of bread and of all kinds of provisions,” warned one local official, “has been the principal cause that has set off the ill-will likely to spur on the agitation in the country.”
On the evening of June 8, several hundred demonstrators gathered in the suburbs of Lyon and raised the tricolor flag. Already on alert, government troops quickly quashed the rising, but the mayor and the commanding general in the department of the Rhône decided to treat the incident as if it had been a full-fledged insurrection. They convened military courts and swiftly tried more than a hundred suspected conspirators, convicting seventy-nine, including a dozen who were sentenced to death. Executions took place almost immediately.
During the following year, the Lyon conspiracy became a highly charged political issue. Moderate royalists and liberals, along with the merchants of Lyon, charged that the government exaggerated the danger of revolt, and blamed the uprising primarily on the desperate food situation. Ultra-Royalists insisted the demonstrators had posed a very real threat to the royal government, and that only severely repressive measures had thwarted an insurrection. Eventually even Decazes, the minister of police, concluded that the danger had been minimal.
Following the affair at Lyon, conditions gradually improved across France. Most of the government’s purchases of grain from abroad arrived during the summer, sparking a decline in the price of bread that began in July and continued through the remainder of the year, although in December grain still cost 166 percent of its base price in 1815. There were twice as many criminal prosecutions in French courts in 1817 as in 1815, but government officials were happy to attribute the increase to food shortages, rather than political discontent. Accordingly, the king issued a pardon on August 14 for all crimes committed as a result of the scarcity of grain. “The zeal and firmness which our courts and tribunals have brought to the maintenance of public order has merited our approval,” Louis declared, “but our heart has groaned from the severities that justice and the law have commanded against a too large number of persons, who, in several parts of the kingdom, have been involved in criminal disorders through the scarcity and dearness of provisions. We feel the need not to confuse these unfortunates with the vicious men who would have tried, in some places, to push them into excesses whose most certain result was to aggravate their distress and to increase the ills of the state.”
Louis spent the rest of 1817 trying to eradicate the memory of Napoléon from the consciousness of Parisians. The Austerlitz Bridge was renamed the Bridge of the King’s Garden, and workers scratched the large letter “N” from the exterior of the Louvre. The first steamboat “smoked and clattered” its way up the Seine as a harbinger of a new era. And, as Victor Hugo pointed out, “all sensible people were agreed that the era of revolution had been closed forever by King Louis XVIII, surnamed ‘the Immortal Author of the Charter.’”
But in the eastern provinces—particularly Alsace and Lorraine—an estimated 20,000 disillusioned farmers and laborers emigrated by the end of the year, lured by extravagant promises from agents for shipowners of the opportunities that awaited them in the promised lands of Russia and the United States. Nearly a fourth of the emigrants were Alsatians who chose to settle in the United States. After making their way across France to the port of Le Havre, they found that passage across the Atlantic cost between 350 to 400 francs. Those who could not afford to pay were offered labor contracts which essentially turned the passengers into indentured servants; many ended up in Louisiana working in appalling conditions on cotton plantations. Treatment of these “redemptioners” was so brutal that the Louisiana legislature passed a measure in 1818 providing them with at least a modicum of protection by the state government.
* * *
BY early 1817, the typhus epidemic in Ireland was spreading rapidly from the west. As cold, wet conditions persisted through the winter and spring, and food shortages mounted, the fever claimed more and more lives. Nearly all of those affected lived in impoverished rural areas; wealthy landowners, removed from physical contact with peasants and laborers, barely suffered at all.
Peel’s hopes for continued peace in Ireland perished in the wake of the epidemic. The authorities attempted to redistribute what little grain remained in the country, taking supplies from those regions with even meager harvests to provide for those areas where the harvest had failed entirely. Not surprisingly, the residents of those towns forced to export food—many of whose residents were close to starvation themselves—rioted at the prospect of being left with even less. Merchants whose desire for profit outweighed their sense of charity began to buy grain, even at expensive prices, and hoarded it, believing that they could sell it for still more as the shortages worsened. Their actions provoked angry reactions from starving peasants, who demanded that the government set a maximum price for grain.
On the night of February 19, 1817, the residents of the western coastal town of Carrigaholt attacked the supply ship Inverness, which had been loaded at Limerick with butter, pork, and bacon to be shipped to London. When the ship landed briefly at Carrigaholt, a mob formed, apparently furious that Irish provisions were destined for the more affluent English. As the local police commander, Captain Miller, explained in a note to the shipment’s owner, the crowd “boarded and rendered [the Inverness] not seaworthy, by scuttling her, and tearing away all her rigging.” The rioters then proceeded to “rob the crew of all their clothes, tore their shirts, which they made bags of, to carry away the plunder, and then broached the tierces of pork and distributed the contents to people on shore, who waited to convey them to the country.” The police intervened, recovered the goods, and arrested the rioters.
Trouble continued the following morning, however, when local residents “collected in some thousands, and went down to the beach, where they formed into three bodies … declaring that they defied the police, and would possess themselves again of what had been taken from them.” This time the crowd succeeded in overcoming the police; again they boarded the ship and stripped it clean. “A more complete plunder,” reported Captain Miller, “has seldom been witnessed.” The mob even managed to steal the ship’s anchors and bilge pump, while the women of the town supplied their husbands and brothers with whiskey. A detachment of twenty cavalry managed to disperse the crowd, but not before three men were killed and thirty-five arrested.
News of grain shortages in Ireland reached Parliament shortly thereafter. On March 7, the House of Lords debated whether to prohibit the distillation of grain alcohol in Ireland in order to make more grain available for food. Several days later, the Commons discussed a similar proposal brought in a petition from the people of Belfast, which sought to outlaw distillation in the whole of the United Kingdom. The measures elicited considerable debate. Lord Liverpool believed that suspending distillation would only shift production to the black market, resulting in no increase in grain supplies but a substantial rise in alcohol prices. Liverpool refused to acknowledge that the disorder in Ireland was widespread or warranted government intervention: as the Morning Chronicle pointed out, “there was therefore no general measure wanted, the difficulties in Ireland were altogether local.” In such situations, Liverpool believed government interference “frequently did more harm than good.”
Faced with mounting public discontent and multiple riots, Peel did not have the luxury of Liverpool’s caution. As grain stocks in Ireland reached precipitously low levels in March, Peel decided to import low-quality oats to be sold as seed at a fixed price of two shillings and six pence per stone (fourteen pounds). Farmers needed seed oats both to plant for the coming season—most had eaten their entire stocks over the winter, leaving no grain to plant in the spring—and to release for consumption the stocks of better-quality oats that remained. “Several cargoes of oats are on their way from abroad to the North of Ireland,” reported the Bury and Norwich Post, “which will be a considerable help to the farmers, who are greatly in want of seed.”
Peel’s plan met with disaster. When the ships arrived in Ireland, the oats proved of even lower quality than seed oats: Some were already spoiled, and others were black-colored oats that farmers knew they would be unable to sell on the market. The government’s price also proved far too high. Ultimately, Peel was forced to sell the unpalatable oats for a far lower price and admit that his scheme had done little to ease the country’s grain shortage.
As the typhus epidemic continued to spread across Ireland, Peel turned to direct financial intervention. He established a seven-member committee, financed with £50,000, to distribute aid to the poor and starving. To avoid any accusations of religious prejudice, the committee included two Quakers and a Catholic. Peel instructed the committee to buy and sell grain, set up “soup shops,” and provide handouts where necessary. This support paled in comparison to the contributions of private charitable concerns, however, which relied upon contributions from local landowners and other wealthy individuals. One estimate of these organizations’ finances puts their combined budgets at £300,000, or six times that of the government relief fund. It was not until the passage of the Poor Employment Act in June 1817 that the British government provided substantial funds for alleviating Irish poverty. Of a total budget of £1.75 million across the United Kingdom, the act allowed the lord lieutenant to spend up to £250,000 to employ Irish workers, mostly on infrastructure projects such as building roads, bridges, churches, and schools.
Peel’s response to the typhus epidemic followed the same strategy as his response to the food shortages. He set up a national relief committee that received and evaluated applications from local committees for funds, but by the time the epidemic subsided in 1819, the national committee had spent less than £20,000. The government again left the bulk of the charitable work to private committees, relying on the Irish national tradition of generosity.
An 1821 survey by Francis Barker and John Cheyne estimated that the typhus epidemic killed 65,000 Irish and rendered another 1.5 million—roughly one out of every four people on the island—seriously ill. Although the epidemic had ended, the disease never completely left Ireland. Periodic outbreaks occurred throughout the 1820s and 1830s, generally associated with poor harvests and famines in particular regions. With each period of “distress,” London became steadily more involved in providing relief to the Irish. Although the food shortages in 1822 were not as severe as those in 1817, the government sent nearly £200,000 of assistance, four times Peel’s original budget. Nevertheless, each round of famine and epidemic reduced the resilience of the Irish poor and depressed their standard of living still further. The events of 1816 and 1817 accelerated a vicious cycle of hunger, sickness, and poverty that would culminate in the disaster of the Great Famine in 1845.
* * *
NO country on the European continent suffered more than Switzerland from the disastrous effects of the summer of 1816. The mountainous eastern cantons, including St. Gall, Glarus, and Appenzell, were particularly hard-hit. By April 1817, the price of wheat in that region had risen to 350 percent of the average level of 1815. Wages of weavers and cotton spinners, meanwhile, continued to fall, until many workers earned less for a full day’s work than the price of a one-pound loaf of bread.
Widespread famine ensued. The misery was exacerbated by the political structure of the Swiss federation, as canton officials jealously guarded their own supplies and established barriers to the shipment of grain outside their boundaries. Most canton governments purchased grain abroad, typically from Russia or Egypt, but with no sea or ocean ports, the importation of food stocks proceeded even more slowly than in nations such as France or the Netherlands. In the meantime, authorities obtained whatever grain they could and provided it to their indigent citizens at prices below market, or else gave bakers subsidies to produce cheaper bread. Some cantons put a fraction of the unemployed to work on public works projects. Town governments also established soup kitchens to feed their poor, and private charities raised funds to care for local orphans and widows, but the task seemed overwhelming when more than 20 percent of the population of St. Gall and Appenzell were classified as paupers, and when “nearly one-quarter of the population of Glarus lacked means of subsistence.”
Thousands of Swiss peasants took to wandering and begging, sometimes in vast throngs that stretched out along the highways. One writer noticed “the paleness of death in their cheeks”; another noted “a wild, benumbed look of desperation in their eyes.” When Louis Simond reached the town of Herisau in Appenzell in June 1817, he discovered that “the number of beggars, mostly women and children, is perfectly shocking … Manufactures are without work, and it is impossible for them to procure food: they are supported by private and public charities, and distributions of economical soup (made with oatmeal and a little meat) in quantities scarcely sufficient to sustain life. We see nothing but meadows and pastures, not a patch of potatoes or grain, not even a garden.” The following day, Simond arrived in the village of Wattwyl, where he found fewer beggars—but only because “many distressed people are dead, if not absolutely of hunger, yet of the consequences. After supporting for some time a miserable existence, on scarcely any thing but boiled nettles and other herbs, their organs became impaired … and they perished in a few days.”
Few riots shook Switzerland, but crimes against property soared. Burglary, theft, embezzlement, arson—“crimes multiply with wants,” noted one traveler, “the prisons are full, and executions frequent.” In the spring of 1817, The Times of London published reports of “the perpetually increasing crowd of mendicants and vagabonds who menace the rights of property, and endanger the public health and safety.” Still the price of bread continued to rise; by the summer of 1817, it peaked at four to five times the price in 1815. “The general impression,” observed The Times, “is that the mass privation seems in no wise to diminish, and that hardships and sufferings may fairly be anticipated more grievous than have been experienced by the poor.”
Local authorities responded with vicious punishments. Louis Simond reported that officials in the town of Appenzell had sentenced two convicted criminals to death by beheading—“one for setting fire to a barn, the other for repeated robberies.” Eight others had recently been whipped. “There is,” Simond concluded, “nothing Arcadian in all this.” Yet even the harshest penalties appeared to have little effect. “Neither sentries nor bailiffs nor policemen nor begging-ordinances were any longer respected; not even severe penalties were feared—hunger and misery, instinct of self-preservation, and gross, often base temper engendered a far stronger command, which despised harsh measures as mere child’s play.”
Frequently canton officials encouraged emigration to reduce the poor rolls; nevertheless, the best estimates indicate that fewer than 20,000 Swiss left the country. Most either headed for southern Russia, or traveled down the Rhine to the Netherlands ports, where they took passage on ships bound for North America. A substantial number of Swiss settled in the Midwestern United States, including a community of Swiss Mennonites who bought land in the hill country of Ohio and Indiana, purportedly because it “reminded them of their former Swiss homeland.” Others settled in Canada, where the Earl of Selkirk recruited Swiss mercenaries to defend his Red River Colony in Manitoba from native attacks. Meanwhile, negotiations commenced between the canton of Fribourg and the royal government of Portugal to establish the first Swiss colony in Latin America: the settlement of Nova Friburgo, in Brazil.
If sunspots and cataclysmic weather had seemed to presage the end of the world in the summer of 1816, the appalling spectacle of famine and misery in 1817 gave further evidence of an approaching apocalypse, and provided momentum to a revival movement that already was under way in Switzerland. The most notorious champion of divine reckoning was the Baroness de Krüdener, a Russian writer and mystic who had gained notoriety through her relationship with Tsar Alexander I in 1815. Convinced that corruption and evil governed Europe in the post-Napoleonic world, de Krüdener predicted that God would soon intervene and restore justice for the poor. “The Rhine rots with corpses; people, contrary to the law, are buying blood at butcher shops. Misery is rampant and menaces all our security,” she wrote in January 1817. “The time is approaching when the Lord of Lords will reassume the reins. He himself will feed his flock. He will dry the eyes of the poor. He will lead his people, and nothing will remain of the powers of darkness save destruction, shame, and contempt.”
Well-known for her benevolence, de Krüdener spent the spring of 1817 moving from one part of eastern Switzerland to another, dispensing food to the hordes of vagrants and beggars who followed her, and denouncing the wealthy and powerful who ignored the plight of the poor. “It is a disgraceful falsehood of the newspapers to talk of idle vagabonds at a time when no one has any work to do, and when thousands come and implore me to give them work; when all the factories are closed in consequence of the punishments inflicted on cupidity and selfishness,” de Krüdener insisted. “Far from hearing of robberies as the papers declare, the only wonder is that the whole country is not given up to brigandage.” Alarmed by her gospel of social radicalism, and fearful of the crowds of starving paupers she attracted, police officials—enthusiastically supported by local residents—drove de Krüdener from village to village, dispersing and expelling her followers. By the end of the summer she had been driven out of Switzerland altogether, into Breisgau in southwestern Germany.
A fair harvest finally brought grain prices down in the autumn, but so many Swiss perished in the Hungerjahre of 1817 that the nation recorded more deaths than births for one of the few years in its history.
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PRUSSIA escaped the worst of the devastation. The summer’s weather wreaked slightly less damage upon its crops in 1816 than the states to the south, and a more efficient system of political administration, along with a strong tradition of active government intervention, limited the effects of the grain shortages that appeared in 1817. Officials moved aggressively to purchase foreign grain, even at inflated prices, and the leading citizens of numerous Prussian cities (including Coblenz, Düsseldorf, and Frankfurt) established Kornvereine—cooperatives funded by local businessmen and landowners that purchased grain abroad and then sold tokens that residents could redeem for bread at prices about twenty-five percent below the market price. (Some of these tokens subsequently became collectors’ items for numismatists.)
Conditions in the southern German states and neighboring regions of the Austrian empire, however, rivaled those in Switzerland. Grain yields in Württemberg in 1816 were 15 percent lower than the previous year, but so much of the harvested grain was damaged that the effective yield was closer to 50 percent of a normal year’s harvest. Bavaria and Baden experienced similar problems, and by the end of 1816, grain prices in Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg had nearly doubled from their 1815 levels—then they rose by a similar amount over the following six months. Some towns witnessed even greater inflation in food prices; in Geradstetten, in Württemberg, the price of wheat more than doubled between November 1816 and July 1817, while the price of oats tripled, and the cost of potatoes quadrupled.
Governments in these areas moved more slowly and reluctantly than their counterparts in the north to respond to the crisis. The result was widespread starvation. Contemporaries’ reports spoke of peasants eating rotting grain, or boiled weeds known as “pig’s ears,” or bread made from sawdust and straw, or the decaying flesh of dead animals. Some killed their own dogs and ate them. Traveling through Eifel (in the western Rhineland) in the spring of 1817, the noted Prussian military officer and theorist Carl von Clausewitz described “ruined figures, scarcely resembling men, prowling around the fields searching for food among the unharvested and already half rotten potatoes that never grew to maturity.”
Local authorities attempted to purchase foreign grain, but the minimal amounts they imported fell far short of the public need. Bans on exports of grain failed to provide relief when the poor could not afford to purchase the wheat and oats that remained. When officials tried to set maximum prices for wheat, supplies often dried up as farmers and merchants withheld their grain from market. In the town of Laichingen, where nearly 80 percent of the population lacked the resources to purchase bread or grain, officials refused to distribute wheat from the state granaries until the citizens threatened a violent hunger march. (Meanwhile, the wealthier citizens of Laichingen withheld donations to the fund for poor relief, and instead loaned money to the needy, and took advantage of the crisis to purchase property from their impoverished neighbors.)
Towns that provided effective relief in the form of Rumford soup kitchens or subsidized bread found themselves overwhelmed with vagrants—“beggars appeared from all directions, as if they had crawled out of the ground.” There were few organized food riots, but desperation bred contempt for law and order among individual beggars. A visitor to Württemberg saw “persons who looked like cadavers, and among them multitudes of children crying out for bread. Hunger and unnatural food produced wretched and chronic ill health among some, outbreaks of frenzy among others; those in the most desperate condition deemed themselves no longer bound by the laws that are adopted for the protection of private property.”
In some German states, the death rate rose by more than 20 percent. In the region surrounding the Transvylvanian town of Arad, an estimated eighteen thousand people died of starvation. The famine in three counties in the mountains of eastern Hungary took another 26,000 lives. In Württemberg, deaths in 1817 outnumbered births by 3,000.
Northern Italy also suffered substantially from famine and disease. In the higher elevations of Lombardy, the wheat harvest failed almost completely in 1816. Tuscany and Bologna also experienced dearth conditions. Authorities imported significant amounts of grain, but primitive transportation systems prevented effective distribution. Here, too, beggars thronged the highways, often carrying disease with them. “A contagious malady, analogous to typhus fever, which at present afflicts a great part of Italy, has taken its source in crowded meetings of beggars and wretched persons, whose numbers are very great,” reported The Times of London in April 1817. “It is attributed to famine and the use of bad aliment.” Deaths mounted throughout the region; in Bologna, the official death rate rose by 80 percent.
Thousands of families escaped the devastation by leaving their homes and traveling down the Rhine to the ports of the Netherlands, or down the Danube to the Russian border. The band of religious extremists who had emigrated from Württemberg in September of 1816 and wintered in Grossliebental finally continued along the Black Sea coast to Rostov and Stavropol, crossing the Caucasus Mountains in the summer of 1817 and establishing the new village of Marienfeld, outside of Tiflis (Tbilisi). When word of their arrival reached their brethren in Württemberg, another 8,000 desperate people—not all of them members of the same separatist sect—gathered in Ulm to make the same journey. Nearly half of them died along the way; over a thousand reportedly perished from disease in a single day. Others simply gave up and settled wherever they stopped. About 5,000 survivors finally reached Bessarabia, recently ceded to Russia by its former Ottoman rulers, where they founded their own new villages.
Perhaps 15,000 Germans emigrated to Russia between the summer of 1816 and the end of 1817. Another 20,000—primarily from Baden and Württemberg—landed in the United States. They were the fortunate ones. An even greater number, perhaps as many as 30,000, reached Dutch seaports—especially Amsterdam—and discovered that they lacked sufficient funds to buy passage across the Atlantic, or that there was no room even on the vastly overcrowded ships. Forced to retrace their steps, they begged or stole their way back through the Rhineland, driven on at every turn by the local authorities.
* * *
ON December 10, London police removed the lifeless body of a young woman from the Serpentine River in the West End. They subsequently identified her as Harriet Shelley, the estranged wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Harriet had disappeared a month earlier; although an inquest declared only that she had been “found drowned,” her death was presumed to be a suicide. Her husband blamed Harriet’s death on “her abhorred and unnatural family,” and particularly her sister, whom Shelley claimed had driven Harriet to kill herself.
Less than three weeks later, Shelley and Mary Godwin were married in London. The ceremony, Shelley informed Byron, was “simply with us a matter of convenience,” performed primarily to please Mary’s father. The couple soon returned to Bath, where Mary continued to work on the manuscript of her novel. In January, Claire Clairmont gave birth to a daughter, whom the Shelleys named (albeit temporarily) “Alba,” a play on their nickname for Byron (“Albe,” from his initials, “L.B.”).
Byron spent the winter on the Continent. From Milan he traveled back to Geneva, and then to Venice. Although Shelley informed him of the birth of his daughter, and asked his intentions for the girl in several different letters, Byron refused to accept any responsibility for the care of the child at that time.
In March, the Shelleys moved into a house in Marlow. Shelley was spending an increasing amount of time with Leigh Hunt, a radical reformer and author who had become a vocal champion of Shelley’s poetry. Their friendship encouraged Shelley in his own liberal political views. Beyond his own personal charitable donations to the unemployed laceworkers in and around Marlow—he purportedly once gave away his shoes and walked home barefoot—Shelley contributed a pamphlet entitled “A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote Throughout the Kingdom,” and signed it “The Hermit of Marlow.”
To no avail. As Liverpool’s government shepherded its program of repressive legislation through Parliament, Shelley could only lament the nation’s misfortune. “You will have heard that the ministers have gained a victory,” Shelley informed Byron on April 23, “which has not been disturbed by a single murmur; if I except those of famine, which they have troops of hireling soldiers to repress.”
Summer passed peacefully, although Shelley complained about the cold, wet weather in July. “At present we have little else than clouds and rain,” he wrote to a friend in London. “We have a water chariot drawn by the oursers of Notus, but except some fine warm days … which lost their way in this abominable climate as they were crossing from Italy to Greece, it has been of little use to us. I hope you coming will be like that of Alcuone in storms, to this wintry season.”
A month later, a London firm agreed to publish Mary Shelley’s novel. The first printing of Frankenstein—a total of 500 copies—was scheduled for early 1818.
* * *
WHILE Tambora’s stratospheric aerosol cloud had its greatest impact on the Atlantic climate during the year 1816, the thin veil of sulfuric acid droplets continued to affect weather patterns for at least another two years. The delayed effect of the aerosol on the North Atlantic Oscillation—due to tropical latitudes cooling more than the poles—continued during the winter of 1816–17. The positive phase of the Oscillation persisted throughout the season, with strong westerly winds bringing warm and moist air from the Atlantic to western and central Europe. This warm air was able to overcome the cooling from the aerosol cloud reflecting sunlight, such that the winter was one or two degrees Fahrenheit milder than normal throughout Europe. By this point, the amount of sulfuric acid in the stratosphere was beginning to decline. More than eighteen months after the eruption, gravity was beginning to take its toll on the tiny droplets. Chance collisions between the droplets caused them to coagulate into larger, heavier droplets that were more quickly extracted from the stratosphere. Occasionally, intense storm systems—such as those that produced colored snows across central Europe in the winter of 1815–16—were able to penetrate into the stratosphere and drag a fraction of the cloud into the troposphere and, from there, to the surface. Droplet by droplet, the aerosol cloud lost its coherence; by the end of 1817, very little of it remained.
Just as the land and ocean—through their reservoirs of heat—delayed the cooling effect of the aerosol cloud on global temperatures, they also opposed the climate’s return towards its original, pre-Tambora balance of energies. Even though the aerosol cloud was dwindling by the summer of 1817, Europe experienced yet another abnormally cold season. The effect was not as dramatic as in 1816, though, due to the dissipating stratospheric veil: The summer of 1817 was only two or three degrees Fahrenheit cooler than normal, compared to the five- or six-degree cooling which Europe witnessed in 1816. Over the next year, as the aerosol cloud faded, the soil and oceans gradually absorbed and stored heat. After a final particularly cold winter across northern Europe and Scandinavia in 1817–18, the summer of 1818 saw temperatures on both sides of the Atlantic return to something approaching normal.