The Year Without Summer (19 page)

Distress bred more disorder. In January 1816, Peel wrote to the prime minister informing
him of a rash of crimes in Tipperary that amounted to a virtual rebellion. Many cases
involved combinations of tenants avenging themselves upon anyone paying what they
considered an excessive rent for land. The local magistrates responded harshly, condemning
thirteen of the convicted men to death, with fourteen more transported to penal colonies.
“You can have no idea of the moral depravation of the lower orders in that county,”
complained Peel. Actually, Liverpool believed he could. “In truth,” the prime minister
wrote, “Ireland is a political phenomenon—not influenced by the same feelings as appear
to affect mankind in other countries—and the singular nature of the disorder must
be the cause why it has hitherto been found impracticable to apply an effectual and
permanent remedy.”

Springtime brought a brief respite, perhaps because the cold, wet weather of April
and May dampened any hostile impulses among the citizenry. Whitworth believed that
he and Peel deserved credit for the lull, based upon the forceful measures they had
encouraged in recent months. “The people see that there is something stronger than
themselves, from which they cannot escape,” the lord lieutenant concluded. “They have
been taught respect, or at least dread of the law, and that is the instruction most
wanted.” One of the more curious reports came from County Clare, where a band of moonshiners
distilling illegal whiskey had barricaded themselves in a castle to avoid arrest.
Local authorities asked the chief secretary to send artillery to demolish the castle;
Peel urged them to try less drastic measures instead.

Calm continued into the summer, but so did the rain and the cold. “Eight weeks of
rain in succession,” grumbled one writer. “Hay and corn crops in a deplorable state.
The grains of corn in many places are covered with a reddish powder like rust”—probably
a fungus which thrived in wet weather—“which has proved very destructive to the crop.”
Especially in the western counties, “the fields of corn presented a lamentable appearance,
in many places being quite black.”

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Ricardo believed he knew the solution to Ireland’s economic woes. A successful stockbroker
and economic theorist—his most recent work,
An Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock
(1815), had introduced the law of diminishing marginal returns—Ricardo was in the
process of turning himself into an English country gentleman in the summer of 1816.
Two years earlier, he had purchased Gatcombe Park, an estate in Gloucestershire in
southwest England. In early July 1816, Ricardo spent several days at Gatcombe entertaining
Thomas Robert Malthus, England’s other foremost political economist. “We were held
prisoners by the weather,” Ricardo confided to a friend, but the constant rain provided
the two men with an opportunity to discuss economic theory and the challenges currently
confronting the government in London.

Malthus, an ordained Anglican priest who served as Professor of Modern History and
Political Economy at the East India College in Haileybury, just north of London, had
initially gained fame through the publication of his
Essay on the Principle of Population
in 1798. A reaction against the Enlightenment notion that human society could improve
itself endlessly, Malthus’ essay suggested that a society’s population always had
a tendency to expand beyond the available supply of food. Unless individuals voluntarily
slowed the rate of population growth by “preventive checks” such as postponing marriage
and practicing celibacy, nature would dispose of the “surplus population” through
“positive checks,” including starvation and plague. In his original essay, Malthus
argued that any attempts to ameliorate the condition of the poor through charitable
donations would fail, since the increased income would be absorbed by even more offspring.
Five years later, however, Malthus published a revised edition of his essay, in which
he suggested that the poor could be taught to practice “moral restraint” and “virtuous
celibacy”—delaying marriage until they could reasonably expect to earn an income that
would allow them to support their (smaller) families at the level they wished to live.
Once they became accustomed to a higher standard of living, Malthus believed the lower
classes would continue to voluntarily limit the size of their families and thereby
help keep the population in check.

This, Ricardo argued in July 1816, was precisely what Ireland required: “a taste for
other objects besides mere food,” and less passion for mindless activities such as
faction fighting. Any stimulus, Ricardo wrote, that would “rouse the Irish to activity
which should induce them to dispose of their surplus time in procuring luxuries for
themselves, instead of employing it in the most brutal pursuits, would tend more to
the civilization and prosperity of their country than any other measures which could
be recommended.”

Ireland was one of the few subjects upon which Ricardo and Malthus agreed, however.
Their differences were especially sharp on the issue of Britain’s Corn Laws. Ricardo
steadfastly opposed protectionist legislation, believing that the artifically high
price of grain kept too much marginal land in production and reduced the profits of
business owners, thereby hindering Britain’s economic progress. Although Malthus originally
had opposed the Corn Laws, by 1816 he had reversed his position. The need for Britain
to maintain self-sufficiency in food production, Malthus claimed, outweighed any deleterious
economic effects of the legislation. But both men foresaw serious trouble ahead if
the dismal summer weather continued, threatening Britain’s harvest.

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NGLISH
tourists continued to flood into Switzerland—ten thousand, by one estimate. One British
correspondent complained that Geneva was so full of his fellow countrymen that English
families who wished to send their children there for an education in a foreign culture
“could not find a family to place them in where there were not other English boarders.”

“I hear old England is to be quite deserted this summer,” wrote Lady Caroline Capel.
Her daughter Georgy agreed: “I should think England was the only part of the world
now where there was a lack of English. Lausanne is full of them, there are several
here, in short it is quite amazing!” Lady Capel and her family had rented the Château
Bel Air (“too small for our size … but very well furnished”) about half a mile outside
Vevey, on the north shore of Lake Geneva, and were having a splendid time touring
local historical sites—including the notorious Castle of Chillon, the former fortress/arsenal/prison
built on an island in the lake—and scrambling about the hillsides surrounding their
house when the weather permitted.

But it seldom did. For nearly the entire month of July, the rain had “been violent
& incessant with the exception of 4 or 5 days.” Prices for produce in the local markets
were rising rapidly, complained Lady Caroline. “It is being rather out of Luck, for
the Oldest Man in the Country does not remember the price of Bread so high as it is
at this time.” She blamed the exorbitant prices on “the dreadfull & tremendous rains
which have now continued so long.” The vineyards, too, were “totally spoilt as well
as the Corn, & the greatest scarcity is apprehended. The same accounts are received
from Italy & your letter mentions the bad Weather in England—Heaven defend Us from
a Famine! Sometimes I have the most gloomy forebodings.”

Farther down the lake, Percy Bysshe Shelley crammed as much travel into the summer
as he could. Following the evenings of ghost stories at Lord Byron’s villa in late
June, the two poets had embarked on a weeklong tour of Lake Geneva. They intended
to visit a number of sites made famous by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century
philosophe who was a native and sometime resident of Geneva, and whose books were
eventually banned by the local authorities. The trip was something of a pilgrimage
for Shelley, who spoke in awed tones of “the divine beauty” of Rousseau’s imagination.
“In my mind,” Shelley wrote to a friend in London, “Rousseau is indeed … the greatest
man the world has produced since Milton.”

Following the geography set out in Rousseau’s 1761 historical novel,
La Nouvelle Héloïse
, Byron and Shelley began their pilgrimage at the Castle of Chillon. Shelley shuddered
at the dungeons, excavated below the lake, with their iron rings, narrow cells, and
the engraven names of prisoners. “I never saw a monument more terrible of that cold
and inhuman tyranny, which it has been the delight of man to exercise over man,” he
later told a friend. The poets then moved on to Vevey, where the Capels were staying,
which Shelley considered “a town more beautiful in its simplicity than any I have
ever seen.”

Looking out over a magnificent view of the Alps, Shelley suddenly mused about the
end of the world. “What a thing it would be,” he said, “if all were involved in darkness
at this moment, the sun and stars to go out. How terrible the idea!” Heavy rains subsequently
forced a premature end to the poets’ expedition, although they did visit the house
outside Lausanne where the British historian Edward Gibbon—whom Byron admired greatly—completed
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Before they left, Byron gathered a few acacia leaves to preserve in Gibbon’s memory.

After returning to the Villa Diodati, Byron spent much of July and August writing.
The dismal weather deepened his customary melancholy. “Really we have had lately such
stupid mists, fogs, and perpetual density,” Byron wrote to his publisher on July 22,
“that one would think Castlereagh had the Foreign Affairs of the kingdom of Heaven
also on his hands.” Despite his weather-induced gloom (or perhaps because of it),
the summer was a remarkably creative period for Byron: “The Prisoner of Chillon,”
the third canto of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” “The Dream,” “Sonnet To Lake Leman,”
“Prometheus,” “Monody on the Death of the Right Hon. R. B. Sheridan,” and a poem directly
inspired by the bleak summer of 1816, “Darkness.”

Whenever he sought a respite from writing, Byron found congenial company at the Château
de Coppet, the salon of Madame Germaine de Staël. Madame de Staël was perhaps the
only woman in the world who could match Byron for notoriety in 1816. The daughter
of Swiss banker Jacques Necker, who achieved fame as Louis XVI’s finance minister,
Anne Louise Germaine grew up in the same sort of freethinking intellectual atmosphere
as Mary Wollstonecraft. Her mother, Suzanne Curchod (a former lover of Edward Gibbon),
hosted the leading salon in pre-Revolutionary Paris, a gathering place for writers,
artists, scientists, and diplomats. Anne Louise Germaine’s marriage at the age of
twenty to the Swedish ambassador to France, Baron de Staël von Holstein, quickly deteriorated,
and Madame de Staël spent the remainder of her life studying, writing, and hosting
her own salon. Her vocal support for individual liberties and a constitutional monarchy
earned her the enmity of both radicals and royalists in revolutionary France; she
was banished from Paris in turn by the Committee for Public Safety in 1795, by the
Directory the following year, and in 1803 by Napoléon, who subsequently exiled her
altogether from France.

After extensive travels through Europe—particularly Germany and Italy—Madame de Staël
found refuge at her family estate at Coppet, on the northern shore of Lake Geneva.
There she assembled a new coterie of scholars, politicians, and writers: English,
French, German, Italian, Russian, and Greek. It was “the general headquarters of European
thought,” wrote the French novelist Stendhal, “the Estates General of European opinion …
Voltaire never saw anything like it. Six hundred of the most distinguished people
would gather on the shores of the lake: wit, wealth, the most exalted ranks came there
seeking pleasure in the salon of the celebrated lady.”

Among those gathered at Coppet was Charles Victor de Bonstetten, a Swiss writer and
philosopher who would subsequently publish an influential study of the effect of climate
on human society—
L’homme du midi et l’homme du nord: ou l’influence du climat
, a topic that also interested Madame de Staël—and the economist Jean Charles Leonard
Simonde de Sismondi. Already famous for his multivolume history of the Italian republics,
Sismondi was studying the deleterious effects of unpredictable disturbances (such
as an exceptionally cold and wet summer) on the economy of Britain, increasingly vulnerable
to such shocks due to its dependence on exports and the whims of international commerce.

On a Saturday afternoon in July 1816, Byron arrived at Coppet for dinner. As soon
as he entered the room, all eyes turned toward him, staring “as at some outlandish
beast in a raree-show. One of the ladies fainted, and the rest looked as if his Satanic
Majesty had been among them.” Madame de Staël, immune to scandal and quite unperturbed,
gave Byron a warm and gracious welcome. Between their discussions of literature, she
peppered him with detailed questions about his personal life, and particularly his
troubled marriage. Byron, who was practicing his melancholy public persona while pretending
to be devoted to his estranged wife, took no offense at her intrusive queries. “I
believe Madame de Staël did her utmost to bring about a reconciliation between us,”
he confided to a friend. “She was the best creature in the world.”

Byron returned to Coppet frequently over the next several months. “She has made Coppet
as agreeable as society and talent can make any place on earth,” he told his editor.
The celebrated hostess “ventured to protect me when all London was crying out against
me on the separation, and behaved courageously and kindly; indeed, Madame de S defended
me when few dared to do so, and I have always remembered it.”