BARS Blog

The ‘On This Day’ series continues with the second part of a post on Italian Romanticism from Fabio Camilletti, who is Associate Professor at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick. The first part of this blog post can be viewed here.

To contribute a blog to this series about the bicentenary of a significant event in 1816, please contact Anna Mercer.

29 February 1816: Italy, Romanticism, and the Year Without a Summer, part II

Cold and Warm

The Fall of Napoleon

In the imaginary space of the Classicist/Romantic quarrel, climate metaphorizes, since the beginning, Italy’s cultural specificity, resisting the tide of Northern literary fashions. Pietro Giordani, in answering Staël in the second issue of Biblioteca italiana, polemicizes against the ‘monkeys’ folly’ of those who would like to import foreign imaginaries in countries where nature ‘bids otherwise’. Romanticism, writes Carlo Giuseppe Londonio in 1817, is the literature of ‘those who are buried in snow and ice for the two thirds of the year, and to which the sun never shows itself with the fullest splendour of its beauty’, and who are therefore ‘naturally brought to see from a melancholy viewpoint all that surrounds them’: ‘their mind takes pleasure in the gloomiest ideas’, whereas ‘the lively, warm, bright-minded Italian sings nature as beautiful and smiling as he sees it around him’. Giovanni Gherardini notes in 1820 how the tempers of Northern people are ‘callous and unable to receive the soft impressions of the beautiful to which the Greeks and the Italians are so sensitive’: so rough sensibilities need ‘strong shocks’, ‘Gargantuan images’, ‘horrid objects’, ‘eccentricities’, ‘quickly changing sensations’, and ‘things outside natural laws’. In 1818, the jurist Pier Luigi Mabìl held a picturesque allocution at the university of Padua, rhetorically asking whether the ‘audacious innovators’ of Romanticism would not ask Italians to ‘abandon the pleasant and flowery Parnassus for the Hercynian forest, for the snowy and steep yokes of Scotland and Ireland’, and ‘if they, ‘accustomed to the gentle metres and to the sweet fashions of the poet from Teos [i.e. Anacreon]’, would perchance ‘give an easy and indulgent ear to the rough songs of the bards, of the skalds, of the Iroquois’, or ‘clutter theatrical stages with gallows, hangmen, skulls, sorcerers, and ghosts’. Italy, writes an anonymous editor of the anti-Romantic journal L’Attaccabrighe in March 1819, does not need the ‘barbarian’ and ‘obscure’ poetry of the Northern Romantics, because the weather – and, consequently, the aesthetic sensibility – are different. Adjectives denoting meteorological phenomena soon take on aesthetic and moral nuances:

a sky perennially bright, such as the Greek or Italian one; a most pure and tempered air, always imbued by the sweet-scenting smells of a thousand different flowers, of cedar and orange trees; such a sky will pour out of the mind of its poets joyful and pleasant ideas, full of imagination, in the same way as the soil generates through it a variety of flowers and fruits. He who secludes himself in the melancholy regions of the North, where mind and heart are both oppressed by the perennial shadows, and by the mist, and by ice, will not be surprised if the poems born in those country are gloomy, ferocious, and sad, and if the similes employed by the poets of those unfortunate climates look all the same.

The same geo-cultural opposition animates Leopardi’s Discourse on Romantic Poetry, whose apocalyptic closure explicitly equates territory and aesthetic disposition, individuating in the kind of poetry inspired by the Italian soil the only possibility for a true survival of antiquity (which, for Leopardi, is the only possibility – for poetry – to be as such). Italians, Leopardi writes, must ‘imitate this nature, and behold this sky and these fields and these hills’, for:

we are still great; we still speak that tongue before which all living ones retreat, and with perhaps would not retreat before the dead ones; […] we still drink this air and tread this earth and enjoy the same light that an army of immortals enjoyed; the fire that enflamed our ancestors still burns […]; that character that belongs to us is unchanged; it remains an inspirer of the highest things, ardent and judicious, most willing and most vivid, sweet and tender and sensitive in the highest degree, and still solemn and nonchalant, the most mortal enemy of every affectation whatsoever, aware and enamoured of naturalness above every other thing, that naturalness without which there never was nor ever will be any beauty nor grace, the yearning lover and most refined connoisseur of the beautiful the sublime and the true, and finally the most wise moderator of nature and reason.

Leopardi concretizes, therefore, a recurrent image of Classicist polemics: that modern poetry – i.e. Romantic verse – is nothing else but the prosecution, through other means, of Napoleonic invasions, aiming to ravage Italy from its last prestige, that of literature. The Romantic invasion is much subtler as it disguises itself under the (Satanic) temptations of fashion: in his later work Operette morali, of 1827, Leopardi will name fashion (moda) the sister of death; with ‘modernity’, moda shares the etymology from the Latin adverb modo (today), conveying the principle that what is new is intrinsically better than what is old.

From this angle, Leopardi shares exactly the same view as Stendhal: the breach opened by Napoleon near Milan has allowed modernity to irrupt into Italy. However, whereas Stendhal saw the battle at Lodi as presenting a possibility for reawakening, Leopardi views modernity as the most threatening menace to Italian specificity, namely its being located before modernity, before that extreme sophistication of taste that exceeds civilization, turning into barbarism. Romanticism is, therefore, the last attempt, on the part of the nations that has ‘always hated and will [always] hate’ Italy, to defeat it for good: because, ‘having defeated us when we were weak and unarmed and motionless, but always defeated in the arts and writing’, it now tries to outrage Italy’s last prestige.

Hayez Meditazione

Leopardi – unlike other Classicists, who often equate Romanticism, Bonapartism, and liberalism – is not interested in the historical and political dimension of the matter: the rape of Italy he is describing is not flattened to the mere contingency of French occupation, but deliberately groups the manifold invasions suffered by the country over the centuries, to the point that the image of France itself (which he never names directly) is dissolved into the almost archetypal one of a Transalpine, imperial, and foreign Europe that has always threatened Italy’s identity, and now tries to barbarize it through the ‘sentimental and poetic dung dripping down to us from the Alps, and vomited on the shores of our seas’. The natural borders of Italy have been violated, and the passing of the Alps – a Romantic trope connected to the sublime and the experience of Grand Tour  – becomes the channel by which ‘drips down’ something intimately horrid, excessive, and Northern aiming to pervert Italy’s most intimate nature.

Turner, ‘Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps’

That ‘dung’, Leopardi writes, is ‘welcomed and greedily swallowed and praised and magnified’ by young Italians; ‘as soon as some odd newness appears on the top of Cottian or Noric Alps’, notes in 1816 Carlo Botta, ‘Italians immediately follow as a bunch of fools’.

Within this constellation, the most interesting text is perhaps the first answer received by Staël, initially appeared in the Florentine journal Novelle letterarie and republished in Lo Spettatore. The author, signed ‘P.L.V.’, compares Staël with Adam Müller, a peasant clairvoyant from Baden who had predicted the victory at Waterloo to an attendant of von Blücher and had met the Prussian king. Under the veil of irony, the Swiss Germaine de Staël is made the reincarnation of those German priestesses, mentioned by Tacitus, who enflamed warriors against Rome; the people who follow her are the victims of the same credulity of ancient Germans, which, as the telling example of Müller shows, still survives among the moderns:

The French journal named Débats referred on 29 February, date of Frankfurt, that a Spirit, one of the Lemures, a Genius or a Demon whatever we want to call it, has become acquainted since quite a while with a certain Muller, and that this good German, through his secret influence, makes all sort of prophecies, but especially political ones […]. Another Spirit, certainly not much different from the former, makes since quite a long time political and literary prophecies in several parts of Europe, through an old Pythoness; and it is almost sure that, after travelling the North, has now pointed towards the South, and that, having crossed the Alps and the Apennines, has now penetrated in the hearth of Italy. […] We know that by the Germans, or other Boreal peoples, women were believed to possess some divine power of predicting the future. By these peoples, therefore, the names of Veleda and Aurinia and many others were very famous: for them, these nations had a sort of worship, and kept in great value their advice and responses.

This text is overtly ironic, but the image is clear: a spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Romanticism – and it aims, as Botta puts it, to darken the ‘light’ of Classical tradition with its ‘Germanizing and Frenchy stuff’, and with ‘the mist of Caledonian moors’. As in Napoleon’s time, Milan is the most vulnerable front against the invasion: a borderline city between South and North, Milan is the place where the plague (of modernity and of central/Northern Europe) is more likely to make its entrance into the country.

Bringing the Plague

On 22 October of that year 1629, Pietro Antonio Lovato, an infantryman in a regiment located in the area of Lecco, made his entrance into Milan, with a load of clothes stolen or bought from German soldiers; and he went to stay at the place of some relatives of him, in the neighbourhood of Porta Orientale. As soon as he got there, he got sick; they brought him to the hospital; and on the fourth day he died. In the corpse they found a bubo, which raised the suspicion of plague.

Lovato enters Milan

In Alessandro Manzoni’s novel Fermo e Lucia, begun in 1821, the great plague of 1630 enters Milan on a specific date and from a specific gate, Porta Orientale, from whence the otherwise unknown infantryman Pietro Lovato had brought infected clothes, stolen from German soldiers. Names of streets running parallel to the former Corso di Porta Orientale – now Corso Venezia – still bear the memory of the contagion: and are named via Lazzaretto, or via Lodovico Settala, in honour of the doctor who had first acknowledged the disease to be bubonic plague.

In Manzoni’s times, another kind of plague had entered the city, and from the same route. After the forced closure of the Romantic journal Il Conciliatore, in 1819, and while he was being transferred from the Milanese prison of Santa Margherita to the Venetian one of Piombi, from whence he would be deported to the Spielberg fortress, in Moravia, Silvio Pellico remembered the glory days of Italian Romanticism:

Oh, you avenue of Porta Orientale! Oh, you the public gardens, where I had often walked with Foscolo, Monti, Lodovico di Breme, with Pietro Borsieri, with Porro and his children, and with so many other beloved mortals, talking in the fullest of life and of hope! […] When we exited the Porta, I brought my hat over my eyes and, unnoticed, I cried.

From this angle, in the topography of Milan, Porta Orientale and its Corso are remarkably allusive. Not only do they recall – as we have seen – the memory of Napoleon’s invasion and the route of Simplon, but also that of the plague and, at the same time, of Romanticism: another kind of contagion, since the arrival of which nothing will ever be the same.

Manzoni’s view of Romanticism was ambiguous. Initially, he had sided with the Milanese Romantics, for he viewed Romanticism as a salutary revolution for Italian literature: since then, he had progressively withdrawn his support, seeing – as did many of his contemporaries – the plain import of Northern Romanticism as a ‘hodge-podge of witches and ghosts’, to be rejected with the greatest severity. In 1821, while Pellico was being transferred to the Venice prison of Piombi, he began to write Fermo e Lucia – a draft and a prelude to his masterpiece I promessi sposi (1827), bearing the traces of the cultural and political conflicts animating Italy at the time.

From this angle, the emphasis Manzoni places in mentioning Porta Orientale in Fermo e Lucia is less innocent than it could seem at a first glance. In the novel, Porta Orientale is the doorway through which something innately Other enters into Milan, as a deadly consequence of the foreign invasion of Landsknechts coming from Germany.

Melchiorre Gherardini, The Plague in Porta Orientale

Equally, in Fermo e Lucia the ambiguity surrounding the theme of the plague echoes the ambiguity with which Manzoni views Romanticism, a ‘hodge-podge of witches and ghosts’ that has nonetheless had the merit – as Manzoni writes to Cesare D’Azeglio – to sweep away the Arcadia-like and provincial junk plaguing Italian literature. Such ambiguity will remain unresolved throughout the entire course of Italian modernity, between the defence of tradition and the yearning for renovation, intellectual autarchy and foreignizing temptations: South and North. ‘This pestilence has been a curse, my sons, a curse’ – comments Don Abbondio in the ending of Manzoni’s novel: ‘but it was also a broom: it swept away certain people whom, my sons, we’d never got rid of’.

We continue the ‘On This Day’ series with a post on Italian Romanticism from Fabio Camilletti, who is Associate Professor at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick. This post has two parts; the second will be posted here next week.

As always, to contribute a blog to this series about the bicentenary of a significant event in 1816, please contact Anna Mercer.

29 February 1816: Italy, Romanticism, and the Year Without a Summer (Part I)

Damn Bonaparte!

‘Maladett Bonaparte!’ – ‘Damn Bonaparte!’: thus ladies exclaimed around 1816 (at least, according to Stendhal’s testimony), when approaching Porta Orientale, the ancient door of Milan – nowadays Porta Venezia – from whence the Alps could be seen at the end of the Corso, where aristocrats’ carriages used to parade.

Milan – Corso di Porta Orientale

For them, Stendhal records, the French Emperor was the cause of the early frosts experienced in Lombardy since the French Revolution: in opening the route of the Simplon, Napoleon must have breached the natural wall of the Alps, which had thus far sheltered the city from the inclemency of Northern winds.

Together with the frost, Bonaparte had also brought something else. Many years later, in The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), Stendhal credits to another breach opened by Napoleon – in 1796, at the bridge of Lodi, during the first Italian campaign – the opening of a deeper and far more incisive breach in Italy’s national consciousness, which had slumbered through centuries of political servitude and literary Classicism:

The Battle of Lodi

On 15 May 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of the youthful army that had just crossed the bridge at Lodi […]. The miracles of valour and genius of which Italy was the witness within a few months re-awoke a slumbering people […] In the Middle Ages, the republican Lombards had given proof of a valour equal to that of the French, and deserved to see their town razed to the grounds by the emperors of Germany. Since they had become ‘loyal subjects’, their main business was printing sonnets on little pink taffeta handkerchiefs whenever a girl belonging to some noble or wealthy family happened to get married […] Such effeminate customs were a far cry from the profound emotions aroused by the unforeseen arrival of the French army. Soon new and passionate customs arose. An entire people realized, on 15 May 1796, that everything it had hitherto respected was supremely ridiculous and sometimes odious.

In 1796, in other words, modernity had made its entrance into Italy – under the guise of an army whose soldiers ‘were not yet twenty-five and their commanding general, who was twenty-seven, passed for being the oldest man in his army’. Exactly twenty years later, in 1816, with Napoleon defeated and exiled in Saint Helena, one could easily believe that time had turned back. On the 6^th of January, the Austrian monarchs – restored to their throne by the Congress of Vienna – had shown themselves again on the Corso di Porta Orientale. On that evening, the theatre La Scala had witnessed the premiere of Il ritorno di Astrea, a Classicist and apologetic piece by Vincenzo Monti celebrating the return to order. Italy, sang its chorus, was still alive and ‘divine’, but only by the favour of the Austrian Emperor. Italians – as well as Hungarians, the Moravians, and the Czechs – were back to their status of ‘loyal subjects’, all worshipping the Austrian throne that appeared in the middle of the scene – as per the libretto – at the end of the piece.

In sum, all evidence showed that the ‘new and passionate customs’ of 1796 had died – but was it really so? After all, some were still feeling that sonnets printed on handkerchiefs were odious. And, after all, it felt colder.

The Fall of the Sun

In a sense, the ladies parading in the Corso were right. The years from 1812 to 1816 had been particularly severe. 1816, in particular, would become globally known as the ‘year without a summer’ – a year of rains and floods in the whole Atlantic area, plaguing economies that had already been weakened by the Napoleonic wars. Literary works of 1816 bear the traces of such devastation, coupled with the idea that the entire world is growing colder and darker. In Byron’s lodgings in Geneva, the poet, his physician John Polidori, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont, inspired by the unusual climate of that summer, took pleasure in reading German ghost stories: weather propitiated the abandonment to ‘Northern’ and Gothic imaginary, and the narratives produced in those weeks – the thunderstorms of Frankenstein, the blackened sun of Byron’s Darkness, the Swiss glaciers of Shelley’s Mont Blanc and of Polidori’s Ernestus Berchtold – are all marked by the vestiges of something obscure and apocalyptic that is impacting Europe, deeply interweaving reality and imagination.

The ‘year without a summer’, as is nowadays well known, had most probably been caused by the eruption, on 10 April 1815, of the Indonesian volcano Tambora: ashes and toxic gases caused a remarkable lowering of temperatures all over the world for several years, giving birth to unusually cold summers, rigid winters, and hurricanes; volcanic ashes gave sunsets a brightly red colour, as portrayed in William Turner’s canvases. Two months later, on 18 June 1815, an unexpected night rain had transformed the area surrounding the village of Mont Saint-Jean, near the Belgian town of Waterloo, into a sort of morass: the French army had had to wait for the sun to dry the wet ground, and when Napoleon had finally be able to draw his attack, late in the morning, cannons had remained blocked by the mud, leaving the Prussian troops the time to re-join the British infantry. On that evening, both armies had lost many men, but the British-Prussian coalition of Wellington and von Blücher had won, and the French had been defeated.

The connection between Waterloo and Tambora is merely speculative: there remains its involuntarily symbolic charm, and the idea that only some apocalyptic fatality could destroy the power of Napoleon, a sort of Icarus or Phaethon who had more ruinously fallen, the more he had attempted to ascend. Not incidentally, when commemorating Napoleon’s death in the poem ‘The Fifth of May’ (1821), Alessandro Manzoni would surreptitiously evoke the mythologem of the reckless son of Apollo: Napoleon, once ‘shining in his throne’, has fallen; in his exile at Saint Helena, ‘at the silent dying of a useless day’, the Emperor’s ‘lightning eyes’ – but Manzoni uses the lyrical term ‘rai’, literally meaning ‘rays’ – bend down, subtly delineating the image of a dying sun. By so doing, Manzoni transforms the chariot of Napoleon-Apollo of imperial iconography into the wrecked carriage of Phaethon: the sun of Austerlitz reveals itself to be a false star, betraying the folly and haughtiness of a usurper who had come to the point of defying God.

Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret, Allegory of the Battle of Austerlitz

Apocalyptic Imaginaries

Not only literature bears the traces of such symbolic short circuits. In the ‘year without a summer’ all Europe seems to be crossed by apocalyptic fears, a sort of post-traumatic aftermath of Waterloo, mixing science and superstition, political metaphors, and the entire panoply of the age’s taste – from the grotesque to the sublime, and through the Gothic. Popular imagery often points to the sun as a seemingly dying star on the point of extinguishing or exploding. Rumours had spread about the planet getting colder, and between 1815 and 1816 spots had been seen on the surface of the sun. Both phenomena could be perfectly explicable: Carlo Riccati, a nobleman from Piedmont who had written a first-hand chronicle of the first two years of the Bourbon Restoration, explained through the data of the Milan observatory of Brera that temperature fluctuations and sunspots were perfectly natural. Still, the idea that the sun was extinguishing, and that a fragment of it was about to fall on earth, had run all over the continent. Rumours fixed the catastrophe for the 18^th of July, and it is interesting – Riccati notes – how this whisper had been particularly welcomed in such a formerly revolutionary country as France: while travelling through France and the Brabant, in July 1816, one would have wondered – he writes – to see so many people believing in such superstitious ways among those who had lately erected temples to Reason.

Finally, on the 26^th of July, the newspaper Gazzetta di Milano commented the ‘ridiculous prophecy’ that had been cheating so many between Alsace and Belgium. The article was ironic, but also ironic was its incidentally being followed by an article in praise of Wellington, including a meditation on Napoleon that reactivated, again, the image of Phaethon:

Wellington was the first who dared to challenge Bonaparte when this latter, at the peak of his glory, aspired to rule the continent. Wellington made the dream of human ambition to vanish.

It is, therefore, as if an unconscious but tenacious knot encompassed – in the collective imaginary of 1816 – the falling sun and the ruination of Napoleon’s star. The very distribution of the 18^th of July gossip is eloquent: Paris, the Alsace, Belgium – that is to say, the military geography of the Hundred Days. On the 11^th of July, Riccardi notes, people in Gand (less than 45 miles from Waterloo) had mistaken the trumpet of a cavalry regiment for that of the angel of the last day; like the French army, terror had invaded the entire Europe. Thus comments the Gazette de Lausanne on the 23^rd of July:

18 July has passed, and this day, which had to be devastated by the most terrible cataclysm, has offered no other marvel than the return of nice weather. This terrible catastrophe of the planet has often been predicted, but never, perhaps, has terror exalted so many minds and run over so many countries. Since a month, all Belgian churches were full of anxious and fearful masses of people. In Germany there have been towns were people stopped working and disdained daily occupations. In Naples a priest has announced terrible devastations from the pulpit. In Paris, still on the 17th, travelling booksellers distributed a poor writing bearing the title of Details on the end of the world, gathering an alarmed people.

The weather could well have improved, but what collective imaginary was confusedly trying to express, all over Europe, was the idea of a fracture from whence it was impossible to come back. The falling sun, the Northern winds coming from the Simplon, the very idea of something terrible and fateful that has forever changed Europe and the world, unchaining the fury of elements, are nothing but ways of metabolizing and elaborating a historical transition: Napoleon – and, more broadly, the French Revolution and the war, in a word: modernity – was seen as having dissolved the timeless connection binding humankind and nature, opening a fissure between a pre-modern, Arcadian world and a new, enlightened and technicized, one.

Et In Arcadia Ego

On 29 February 1816, in Milan, the weather was fine; temperature, however, had remained low, at least if compared to contemporary standards – between 4 and 10-15 degrees, in February-March – oscillating between 2 degrees in the morning and 5.5 degrees in the afternoon. This data is taken from the measurements of the Milan observatory of Brera, published as an appendix to each volume of Biblioteca italiana, a literary and scientific journal printed in Milan and directly funded by the Austrian government. On that day, the first issue of the periodical made its first appearance: the journal was opened by a short text by Madame de Staël, Sulla maniera e la utilità delle Traduzioni (On the Custom and Usefulness of Translations), which – as the following months would make clear – was to be the inaugural act of the so-called ‘Classicist/Romantic quarrel’.

Biblioteca Italiana vol. 1, 1816

The debate would enflame Italy for years, dividing those who felt that it was necessary for Italian literature to open itself to the literary novelties coming from the rest of Europe (the ‘Romantics’) and those who reclaimed, instead, the legacy of Classical tradition as the most characteristic trait of Italian identity. In years of political and cultural censorship, the quarrel incorporated and challenged, under the guise of a literary skirmish, a deeply political problem concerning Italian identity and its role within the broader scenario of modern Europe. While Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich contemptuously claimed that Italy was ‘a geographical expression’, the quarrel raised questions that would deeply permeate Italy’s later cultural history: the onerous heritage of its historical past, its troubled transition into modernity, its ambiguous relationship with foreign cultures and their ‘lure of Italy’ – in many cases, a badly dissimulated colonial attitude.

Of this attitude, Staël’s article was a perfect example. She made a conventional paean of praise to Italian culture and its tradition: still, Staël could not help but noticing how Italian culture had lost its central and propulsive role, and how the most lively cultural experiences were now taking place elsewhere, in the ‘rest of Europe’, ‘beyond the Alps’, in the North. Even Italy’s sun, an already outworn Grand Tour cliché, was almost useless, for a people – such as the Italian – plagued by centuries of Classicism and sterile classical philology: presently, it was nothing but a motionless star, shining over a landscape made of ruins and tombs.

Sablet’s Elégie romaine, 1791

This image was combined, in the article’s ending, with an insulting consideration of the role of Italy in the Europe to come, relegating it to an unspecified ‘prestige’ in literature and the arts:

nations must have some interest moving them. Some have it in the war, some in politics: Italian must find their prestige in literature and the arts, without which they would lie in a dark sleep, whence even the sun could not awake them.

The fracture between North and South, and between cold and warm, aimed thus at delineating a specific political and cultural geography, placing Italy in a subaltern position against Transalpine Europe: an equation between climate and the national inclinations grounded in the thought of the French Enlightenment, but which in 1816 could possess far more literal resonances.

Here is part II of the essay ‘Every Cloud: How Art and Literature Benefited from a Year Without Summer’ by Eleanor Fitzsimons. This is part of the ongoing ‘On This Day’ series celebrating the literary and historical events from 1816 in 2016 (if you missed part I, you can read it here).

If you want to contribute to the ‘On This Day’ series with a post on literary/historical events in 1816, please contact Anna Mercer (anna.mercer@york.ac.uk). 

EVERY CLOUD: HOW ART AND LITERATURE BENEFITED FROM A YEAR WITHOUT SUMMER

Jane Austen by Cassandra Austen, pencil and watercolour, circa 1810. National Portrait Gallery

The English novelist Jane Austen spent the summer of 1816 in the village of Chawton in Hampshire, where she shared a cottage with her sister Cassandra, her chronically ill mother and an assortment of nieces and nephews. In a letter to her niece Anna, written on June 23, 1816, Austen described how their neighbor Mrs. Digweed had been soaked to the skin by a rain shower she characterized as ‘beyond everything’. The appalling weather kept the author indoors: ‘Oh! It rains again; it beats against the window’, she told her nephew Edward, adding, ‘such weather gives one little temptation to be out. It is really too bad, and it has been for a long time, much worse that anybody can bear and I begin to think it will never be fine again’. On July 9, Austen, accompanied by her niece Mary Jane, attempted a jaunt to nearby Farringdon in the family’s donkey cart: ‘we were obliged to turn back before we got there’, she told Edward, ‘but not soon enough to avoid a Pelter all the way home’.

At the time, Austen was working on The Elliots, which she later renamed Persuasion. Although she had thought the book finished in July, as she sat indoors watching rain cascade down her windowpanes, she decided that she was dissatisfied with its ending and spent a further three weeks rewriting the final two chapters. By autumn, Austen’s health had deteriorated dramatically. Her back ached continuously and she felt unable to walk even a short distance. Although she blamed her wretchedness on rheumatism brought on by the unusually damp weather, her symptoms were indicative of something far more serious, possibly Addison’s disease, a tubercular disease of the kidneys. By winter she was housebound, but she remained stoic: ‘Air and exercise is what I want’ she assured her family. In May 1817, Jane Austen was taken by carriage in the pouring rain to Winchester Hospital where she died in the arms of her sister Cassandra on July 18, 1817.

The world had been forecast to end precisely twelve months earlier, on July 18, 1816. Seeking an explanation for the bizarre weather, a superstitious populace had concluded that such weird portents could only indicate an impending apocalypse. This supernatural thinking was forgivable. News of the eruption of Mount Tambora did not reach Europe for many months and, even if it had, the link between volcanic eruptions and unseasonal weather was not recognized until 1913, when William Jackson Humphreys, an American physicist and atmospheric researcher with the U. S. Weather Bureau, presented evidence to the Cleveland meeting of the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America. However, in the absence of a sound scientific explanation, news of the planet’s imminent demise was widely accepted. Such fear mongering prompted opium-addled poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge to remark ‘this end of the World Weather is sadly against me by preventing all exercise’. At the time, Coleridge had left his home in the Lake District and was living in London as a patient and houseguest of Dr. James Gillman, who had prescribed daily walks as an integral part of his treatment regime.

Attempts were made to calm the situation. While newspapers carried soothing editorials, clerics held public prayer services and recommended mass demonstrations of piety, but apocalyptic fear was fuelled by a series of sunspots, visible to the naked eye, which were interpreted as proof of the disintegration of the sun. Keen to strike a lighter note in the face of mass hysteria, English satirist William Hone published ‘Napoleon and the Spots on the Sun or the Regents Waltz’, a satirical ditty in which he claimed that Napoleon had escaped from the Island of St. Helena and invaded the sun in revenge for his defeat at Waterloo. The solution proposed by Hone involved catapulting the Prince of Wales, then Prince Regent, into space where he would engage in hand-to-hand combat with Britain’s nemesis.

The citizens of Europe had every reason to feel aggrieved with their rulers. During the early years of the nineteenth century, the entire continent had been ravaged by a serious of ruinous wars that left its populace ill-equipped to withstand the destruction wrought by devastating weather patterns. Bands of unemployed veterans recently returned from the grueling Napoleonic campaign now faced rocketing food prices, destitution and disease. They had surely had their fill of wet weather too. It had poured with rain on June 18, 1815, the eve of the Battle of Waterloo, turning the battlefield into a quagmire and compounding the horror of the occasion. By 1816, these battle-weary men were back in Britain, feeling abandoned by their rulers. In response to the lack of gratitude for the loyalty they had shown to the Crown, these men took to rioting in the streets, looting everything they could get their hands on and considering it no more than their due.

Widespread unrest culminated in the ‘Bread or Blood’ riots that erupted in East Anglia, home to painter John Constable who lived in the Suffolk village of East Bergholt. Constable, a committed Tory who had lost two cousins at Waterloo, had little patience with the band of armed veterans and laborers that marched on the cathedral town of Ely in protest at food shortages, holding the town’s magistrates hostage and fighting a running battle against the militia. Rather than incorporate the inclement weather into his work, as Turner had, Constable did precisely the opposite, painting idyllic representations of bucolic Albion as a reaction to this social and climactic upheaval; The Wheatfield and Flatford Mill, both painted in 1816, are examples of this.

As ever, enterprising folk found opportunity in a crisis. When the German oat crop failed, leaving people unable to feed their horses, the entrepreneurial Baron Karl Christian Ludwig von Drais de Sauerbrun enjoyed a sudden upsurge of interest in his latest invention, the bicycle. There were cultural benefits too: the spectacular sunsets and ominous sulphurous skies that lit the skies with bilious yellow and orange tints, found their way into the paintings of J.M.W. Turner and recent scientific analysis demonstrates that the works he completed in the years immediately following major volcanic eruptions contain significantly higher levels of red pigmentation in his extravagant sunsets. His Chichester Canal, which is included in the Tate Britain collection, captures the distinctive sepia hue so characteristic of refracted sunlight.

Turner paid a high price for accessing such beauty. He was dogged by bad weather all summer long and left Yorkshire to travel throughout continental Europe where conditions were, if anything, even worse than those he had endured at home. This caused him to exclaim:

Rain, Rain, Rain, day after day. Italy deluged, Switzerland a wash-pot, Neufchatel, Bienne and Morat Lakes all in one. All chance of getting over the Simplon or any of the passes now vanished like the morning mist.

Switzerland in particular was battered. Prodigious rainfall filled Lake Geneva, adding two meters to the water level and flooding low-lying districts for miles around. Homes were destroyed, livelihoods lost and livestock drowned, their bloated corpses found floating across the brimming lake. Turner arrived just in time to witness the disastrous wheat harvest that resulted in a serious flour shortage and inflated the price of a loaf of bread to the extent that Swiss dinner guests were asked, politely, to bring their own.

Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell, oil on canvas, exhibited 1840. National Portrait Gallery

Eighteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who called herself Mary Shelley by then, had been in Switzerland since June 1816. Along with her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her stepsister, Claire Claremont, she was renting the modest Maison Chapuis on the southern shore of Lake Geneva, close to the opulent Villa Diodati that was occupied by Lord Byron and his entourage. Unremitting rain put paid to any plans for alpine walks, boating trips and sightseeing excursions. In her journal, Mary recorded: ‘it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house’. When Byron and Shelley embarked on a sailing trip to the medieval fortress of Château de Chillon, torrential rain delayed their return, obliging them to take refuge for two days in the Hôtel de L’Ancre in the lakeside resort of Ouchy. It was during this enforced hiatus that Byron wrote his narrative poem The Prisoner of Chillon.

Confined to Byron’s rented villa, the party huddled by the fireside, recounting chilling tales of the supernatural as lightning cleft the skies above and thunder reverberated off the mountains that surrounded them. Byron found the weather frustrating and complained of the ‘stupid mists, fogs and perpetual density’, but enforced confinement allowed him to complete several works including his autobiographical ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, which includes a vivid description of the storms that raged across the lake as the ‘big rain comes dancing to the earth’. His apocalyptic poem ‘Darkness’, which describes an ‘icy Earth’ presided over by an ‘extinguished sun’, was written, by his own account, on ‘a celebrated dark day, on which fowls went to roost at noon, and the candles were lighted as at midnight’. It contains the line: ‘Morn came and went, and came, and brought no day’.

In late July, in defiance of the weather, the Shelleys set out to visit Mer de Glace, a vast glacier that nestled in the Chamonix Valley at the base of Mont Blanc, but a dense white mist descended and Mary recorded that ‘the rain continued in torrents’. Shelley incorporated the rain-swollen torrent of the River Arve into his poem ‘Mont Blanc: Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni’, and he used that image to denote great power. Although the weather curtailed their activities, all were enthralled by the frequent and frenetic thunderstorms that reverberated off the mountains, imbuing the landscape with a supernatural light. Mary described these tempests as ‘grander and more terrific than I have ever seen before’, and described in her journal how, as each discharge of lightning rent the clouds, the landscape was: ‘illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness’.

Safe indoors, they would read aloud from Fantasmagoriana, a collection of ghost stories. In Shelley’s preface to Frankenstein, he described how hearing these stories ‘excited in us a playful desire of imitation’. Byron issued a challenge to those present that they should write a story ‘founded on some supernatural occurrence’; he started immediately on ‘A Fragment’, which is recognized as one of the first stories to feature a vampire and hailed as a key inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Percy Bysshe Shelley by Amelia Curran, oil on canvas, 1819. National Portrait Gallery

Lord Byron by Richard Westall, oil on canvas, 1813. National Portrait Gallery

Although Mary struggled to settle on a theme, she found inspiration in a conversation between Byron and Shelley concerning the reanimation of a corpse. In her preface to the third edition of Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus, she described how her gothic tale of rejection and revenge was informed by a ‘waking dream’ that she experienced later that night, when the ‘bright and shining moon’ hanging over Lake Geneva shone through the shutters into the bedroom she shared with Shelley. This preface also mentions the ‘incessant rain’ that beat against the windows of the Villa Diodati, keeping them all indoors. Percussive rain accompanied the creation of Frankenstein and found its way into her story; ‘rain pattered dismally against the panes’ as the eponymous scientist gave life to his monster.

Mary punctuated her narrative with the thunderstorms that raged above. In one instance, Victor Frankenstein describes a storm that ‘advanced from behind the mountains of Jura’:

The thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak, which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbands of wood. I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed.

Later, he is described watching a terrifying storm from the same lakeside spot where Mary herself stood. His words echo almost exactly the entry Mary made in her journal on June 1, 1816:

…the darkness and storm increased every minute, and the thunder burst with a terrific crash over my head. It was echoed from Saleve, the Juras, and the Alps of Savoy; vivid flashes of lightning dazzled my eyes, illuminating the lake, making it appear like a vast sheet of fire; then for an instant everything seemed of a pitchy darkness, until the eye recovered itself from the preceding flash. The storm, as is often the case in Switzerland, appeared at once in various parts of the heavens.

Weather is inescapable in the works of the Romantics, and never before had they experienced the conditions that characterized the ‘year without summer’. Yet, had a benign Swiss summer encouraged Byron and the Shelleys to abandon their fireside tales and embark on Alpine walks instead, we might not have Frankenstein, or at a stretch, Dracula. Had clement weather permitted Jane Austen to leave her cottage in Chawton, her wonderful Persuasion might have a different, less satisfying ending. The incessant downpour that prevented J.M.W. Turner from entering Weathercote Cave swelled the Ure, the Washburn and the Wharfe, and filled the high glacial Malham Tarn, providing him with dramatic subjects at every turn. At Malham Cove, Turner painted the arc of a rainbow. He sketched children as they gazed down on the raging torrent at Cotter Force and he captured the torrential descent of the Aysgarth waterfalls. He even hired a guide to take him underground so that he could sketch Dow Cave by candlelight, keeping one ear to the roar of the swollen river. The old adage reminds us that every cloud has a silver lining. Certainly, there was no shortage of clouds during the bleak summer of 1816 and the dramatic weather that prevailed permeates some of our best loved art and literature.