The Summer That Wasn’t, and the Monster It Made

It rained at Lake Geneva for most of June 1816. Cold rain, the kind the locals had no recent memory of seeing in summer. The five English visitors at the Villa Diodati, on the south shore at Cologny, were trapped indoors. They were Lord Byron, twenty-eight, his physician John Polidori, twenty, and Percy Shelley, twenty-three, with his lover Mary Godwin, eighteen, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, seventeen.

The fire was lit even in the afternoons. Byron, who had taken the villa for the summer, kept opening the doors of the drawing room to look at the rain and then closing them again. On the night of 15 June — the date appears in Polidori’s diary — he proposed, half in irritation, that each of them write a ghost story.

Polidori wrote The Vampyre, the first English-language vampire story in prose, published three years later and the direct ancestor of every vampire novel that has followed. Mary Godwin, after several nights of trying and failing to come up with anything, dreamed on the night of 16 June of a “pale student of unhallowed arts” kneeling beside the body of “the thing he had put together.” She began writing the next morning. Two years later, in 1818, the result was published in London under the title Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. She was twenty.

Both books were written because it had been too wet to leave the house.

The rain was not local weather. It was the visible end of a chain of consequences from an event that had happened the previous April, in the southern hemisphere, eleven thousand kilometers away.

Tambora

On 5 April 1815, the volcano Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa began a series of eruptions that culminated, ten days later on 10 April, in the largest single eruption observed in the last 1,300 years. Tambora ejected an estimated 41 cubic kilometers of dense rock and ash into the atmosphere, removed 1,500 meters of its own summit, and emptied a magma chamber whose collapse left a caldera six kilometers across.

Roughly ten thousand people were killed by the eruption directly, mostly by pyroclastic flows that swept down the volcano’s flanks. Another seventy thousand or so died over the following months, on Sumbawa and the surrounding islands, of starvation and disease as the ash blanketed crops. The British East India Company governor on Java, Sir Stamford Raffles, sent investigators who reported that “all the trees and herbage of every description, along the northern side of the peninsula, have been completely destroyed.”

Tambora put roughly 60 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The chemistry, as with Krakatoa sixty-eight years later, produced a fine sulfuric acid aerosol that wrapped the upper atmosphere and reflected sunlight back into space before it could reach the ground.

It took the aerosol about ten months to spread fully across both hemispheres. By the spring of 1816, average temperatures across Europe and North America were about half a degree Celsius cooler than normal — small in the abstract, devastating in practice. Crops failed. Frost killed corn in New England in July. Snow fell in Quebec in June. In Switzerland, the wheat harvest was the worst of the nineteenth century, and bread riots began in Geneva by the autumn.

The English in their villa on the lake did not know any of this. The connection between a volcanic eruption in 1815 in the Dutch East Indies and the rain on their windows in 1816 would not be established by climate scientists for another century and a half.

What they knew was that the summer had not arrived. The skies were strange. Sunsets were unusually colored — Polidori noted in his diary “the rays of the setting sun rich beyond imagination.” The weather refused to cooperate with their holiday plans. So they stayed indoors and made things up.

What they made

Mary Godwin’s dream, as she described it in the 1831 preface to Frankenstein, came after several nights of frustrated attempts. She had been listening to Byron and Percy Shelley discuss the experiments of Erasmus Darwin and Luigi Galvani — could animal tissue be reanimated by electricity, was the principle of life simply a current waiting to be applied? She went to bed, she wrote, with these questions in her head:

“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.”

The next day she began writing what she initially conceived of as a short story. Over the following fourteen months it became the novel. Percy Shelley provided editorial suggestions, mostly along the lines of making the prose more elaborate than it needed to be, and wrote the preface for the first edition. Mary’s name appeared on the title page of the second edition, 1823.

Byron, during the same wet week, wrote his apocalyptic poem Darkness:

“I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space…”

He set the poem in a sunless world where the last humans burn their own houses for light. It was a literal description, in places, of what the sky over Switzerland had looked like that summer.

Polidori’s story The Vampyre — featuring an aristocratic, charming, sexually dangerous vampire named Lord Ruthven who was, transparently, a caricature of Byron — sat in his notebook for two years before he showed it to anyone. When it was finally published in 1819, in the New Monthly Magazine, it was widely attributed to Byron himself (who had to publicly disclaim it). It became the model for every subsequent vampire-aristocrat in English literature, including the most famous of them, Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula.

Two literary genres — gothic science fiction and the vampire novel — were initiated, in the space of about a week, by five bored people who could not go for their walk.

Footnote to a footnote

Tambora’s other effects on 1816 were less literary and more grim. Famine across Europe. A typhus epidemic across the Mediterranean. Failed monsoons in India. The first global cholera pandemic of the modern era began in Bengal in 1817 and is now believed by some climate historians to have been precipitated by the Tambora-driven weather changes in the Ganges delta.

The Villa Diodati still stands on the south shore of Lake Geneva, in the village of Cologny. It is privately owned and not open to the public. A small plaque on the gate notes that Byron stayed there in 1816 and that Mary Godwin began Frankenstein in one of its rooms.

The plaque does not mention the volcano.