Romantic Climates: A Change in the Weather

Abstract

In April 1815 the eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, in the Indonesian archipelago, triggered a global climate disaster. In South-East Asia more than 100,000 people were killed in the explosion and the massive tsunami that followed. The effects of the eruption were to be felt far beyond its devastated epicentre. Clouds of ash filled the sky, obscuring the sun and causing rapid temporary global cooling. The disastrous consequences of the eruption would unfold over several years, causing widespread confusion, suffering and death. For Europe, still recovering after decades of war and their bloody culmination at Waterloo, the dark skies and frigid temperatures of 1816 seemed to portend a troubling future. The effects of this environmental calamity can be seen in the cultural productions of the period, in some of the most significant works of the movement we call Romantic. Today, the ‘Year Without a Summer’ offers us a starting point from which to reconsider how the Romantics responded to the changing climates of their day and to think about how these climatic events shaped the development of Romanticism itself. Scholars of Romanticism and practitioners of ecocriticism seek to uncover how today’s ideas about climate and catastrophe have been formed by the thinking of Romantic poets, novelists and scientists, and how these same ideas might once more be harnessed to assist us in the new climate challenges facing us in the present.