“1816, The Year without a Summer”

Gillen D’Arcy Wood :

In a similar vein, it is important to remember that the misery of the Tambora period in Europe—years of famine, disease, and homelessness—was borne overwhelmingly by the poor, who left scant record of their sufferings. For most of those belonging to the middle and upper classes—including the Shelleys and their circle—the social and economic upheaval of those years presented only minor inconveniences. By contrast with the illiterate underclass, these affluent Europeans left voluminous accounts of their lives. To look at only their documentary record, therefore, can leave one with the misleading impression that the Tambora years were not exceptional in the history of the early nineteenth century. It is necessary to scrutinize what they wrote carefully for clues to the experience of the silent millions who suffered displacement, hunger, disease, and death at that time. From the bubble of privilege within which educated people such as the Shelleys and their friends composed their brilliant verse and letters, it is possible to catch gleams of this benighted other world through which they mostly passed oblivious.

In her account of the stormy night in Geneva when she first conceived her famous novel, Shelley imagines Frankenstein waking from a nightmare to find his hideous creation at his bedside, “looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes” (196). The description is reminiscent of numerous impressions of European beggars in this period. One English tourist, travelling from Rome to Naples in 1817, remarked on “the livid aspect of the miserable inhabitants of this region.” When asked how they lived, these “animated spectres” replied simply: “We die” (Matthews 192-3). From the beginning, then, Shelley’s imaginative conjuring of her famous Creature bears the mark of the famished and diseased European population by which she was surrounded in 1816-18. Like the hordes of hungry refugees spreading typhus across the continent during Shelley’s writing of the novel, the Creature in Frankenstein is a wanderer and a perceived menace to civilized society. In the novel, this murderous capability is attributed to the monster’s preternatural strength. But the terrifying atmosphere of his rampage, and his ability to strike at will across thousands of miles, seems more like the spread of a famine or contagion. In short, once the supernatural element of the monster’s creation is set aside, the experience of Mary Shelley’s creature most closely embodies the degradation and suffering of the homeless European poor in the Tambora period, while the violent disgust of Frankenstein and everyone else toward him mirrors the utter want of sympathy shown by most affluent Europeans toward the millions of Tambora’s climate victims suffering hunger, disease, and the loss of their homes and livelihoods. As the Creature himself puts it, he suffered first “from the inclemency of the season,” but “still more from the barbarity of man” (84).