Ghastly weather: What Frankenstein can tell us on climate change

“Really we have had lately such stupid mists, fogs, rains and perpetual density,” Lord Byron wrote from Switzerland to fellow poet Samuel Rogers in July 1816, “that one would think Castlereagh had the foreign affairs of the kingdom of Heaven also upon his hands.”

By mock-blaming the dreadful weather of mid-1816 – soon dubbed “the year without a summer” – on the policies of Britain’s reactionary foreign secretary, Byron spoke a century or two ahead of time. Without any human agency, the April 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), at 10 times the force of the legendary Krakatoa in 1883, threw enough volcanic ash, dust and debris into the atmosphere to ruin crops and trigger famines from China to New England. The disaster also killed around 90,000 local people, mostly through starvation.

Year without a summer

Historian John Post called the aftermath “the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world”. Average global temperatures fell by an estimated 0.4 to 0.7 °C. Land became flooded or parched.

In faraway Virginia, where it snowed in June 1816 and crops failed, Thomas Jefferson lamented “the most extraordinary year of drought and cold” America had ever seen. In Bengal, three years of skies shrouded in a sulphate veil impeded the monsoons and led not only to mass hunger but also to the spread of a new strain of cholera, triggering a global epidemic.

And in Switzerland, where the scandal-clouded Byron had fled to spend the sodden summer with his new poetic soulmate Percy Shelley, Shelley’s teenage lover Mary Godwin and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, rain fell on 130 of 153 days between April and August.

At the dawn of Europe’s industrial revolution, a purely natural disaster – possibly the most extreme volcanic eruption since the Hatepe event in New Zealand around AD 185 – thus convulsed societies and states across the globe.

Two centuries later, in a world of frets and fears about human responsibility for climate change, the cultural fallout from that “year without a summer” still colours the stories we tell.

As Byron’s jokey aside about Castelreagh hints, for post-Enlightenment minds in the early 19th century, it was no longer easy to endure climate calamities as the simple will of God. In the US, penitent cults spread as ruined farmers migrated from the cold, barren soils of New England.

For free-thinking Europeans such as the Bryon-Shelley crew, these grim months came swiftly on the heels of Napoleon’s defeat and the collapse of hopes for change. However much it rested on coincidence and contingency, the collision of social and natural catastrophes gave rise to long, dark nights of the Romantic soul.

Stormy origins

On one of those dark nights, in late June 1816, an evergreen myth was born. The story of how 18-year-old Mary Godwin, the precocious daughter of two notorious radical thinkers (Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin) and already mother to a baby boy, came to compose Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, has been told many times. The most gripping account remains her own. It appears in the preface to an 1831 edition of the novel, in which Mary Shelley (she married Percy in December 1816) distilled the hopes and fears of Enlightenment enquiry and Romantic imagination into a deathless story of curiosity and obsession.

In that “wet, ungenial summer”, she recalls, “incessant rain often confined us for days to the house”. One soaking night, at Byron’s rented Villa Diodati beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the company of rebels had spooked themselves by reading a collection of German horror stories. “We will each write a ghost story,” Byron imperiously declared afterwards. Nothing came to Mary.

A few days later, however, she sat silent and attentive while Byron and Shelley ruminated over galvanism, the experiments of physician Erasmus Darwin and “the principle of life” itself. Later that night, sleepless and “possessed… beyond the usual bounds of reverie”, Mary in a “waking dream” saw “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together”.

In the morning, dread yielded to exultation: “What terrified me will terrify others,” she later wrote. By January 1818, she had published Frankenstein. It shocked the critics but thrilled its readers. With lordly understatement, Byron told his publisher John Murray: “Methinks it is wonderful work for a girl of nineteen – not nineteen, indeed, at that time.” The “girl” had changed, forever and everywhere, the popular conception of Western science.

Weird weather

That “ungenial summer” lends the novel its backdrop of meteorological shock and awe. Weird weather scours the book. The sense of transgression and reversal, as summer became winter and day night, also underlies The Vampyre, the clumsy but influential entry in the ghost-story contest by John Polidori, Byron’s doctor and companion. In this uncanny season, as the frontiers among the elements collapsed, so did frontiers in the mind: between reason and magic, daylight and dream, the living and the dead.

Byron himself, in response to those “stupid” mists, fogs and rains, wrote the apocalyptic poem Darkness, with its vision of a “void” planet: “A lump of death, a chaos of hard clay”, where “Morn came and went, and came, and brought no day”.

Mary, too, felt horror at these atmospheric breakdowns – but also a sense of galvanising possibility. Frankenstein’s mission, and his noble Creature, excites as much it dismays. As the cultural historian Alexandra Harris puts it in Weatherland, her book about climate in English literature, “Where Byron saw lumpen deathliness that summer, Mary Shelley saw terrifying new forms of vitality.”

Darkness is a mesmeric piece of verse, much quoted during Cold War-era panics about the threat of “nuclear winter”. Frankenstein, though, conceives of something grander than another doomsday chill. Along with its mood of risk and guilt come idealism and hope – dashed not by the high-minded Creature, but by the self-hatred and broken vows of his fabricator. Mary Shelley delivers heroism along with hubris.

The age of cli-fi

Now, 200 years after her world-shaking summer, the art that responds to human-made environmental peril may have more to learn from Shelley than from her aristocratic ally.

At least since J. G. Ballard published his great twin tales of planetary catastrophe in the early 1960s (The Drowned World and The Burning World, later retitled The Drought), climate-change fiction has spread like livid algae across a stagnant pool. “Cli-fi”, as the critic Dan Bloom called it, now stretches across 200-odd titles – from early visions such as Arthur Herzog’s Heat to the ecological precision of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour and the exuberant end-time speculation of David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks.

Even before the hard news came in about greenhouse gas emissions, weather-driven apocalypse had long lost its novelty. In Mary Shelley’s spirit of excitement and enchantment, writers and other green-minded artists may now need to recalibrate their instruments of warning and prophecy.

A couple of years before Ian McEwan published Solar – his bold bid in 2010 to do exactly that – he told me in an interview about the limits of disaster narratives. “We’ve had so many dystopias that we’re brain-dead in that direction,” the novelist argued. Instead, climate change called for fiercer, nimbler forms of art. “It’s got to be fascinating, in the way that gossip is. It’s got to be about ourselves. Maybe it needs an Animal Farm. Maybe it needs an allegory. But if you’re going in that direction, you need a lot of wit.”

A light in the darkness

With wit, cunning and a measure of satirical ferocity, McEwan went on to create (in Solar) the Nobel-prizewinning slob Michael Beard: a guzzling, boozing, one-man embodiment of human overconsumption, but also a potential saviour with a mind to change the world.

Although more comic than tragic, Beard perhaps has something in common with Victor Frankenstein himself. As the Genevan scientist and his undead progeny celebrate their bicentenary, remember that their inventor reacted to the crashing turbulence that oversaw their birth more with delight than dismay.

“One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld,” she wrote to her half-sister Fanny Imlay. Mark the verb. While Mount Tambora’s ash cloud did its remote, unknown worst, the lightning bolts lit creative exhilaration rather than frozen doom and gloom. As Mary Shelley intuited, and Ian McEwan knows, the art of climate crisis demands more than endless downpours of apocalypse. It’s high time for a break in the clouds.