Nature As Schism Between Romantic Generations and As Catalyst Between Romanticism and Science Fiction

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ROMANTIC SCIENCE: NATURE AS SCHISM BETWEEN ROMANTIC

GENERATIONS AND AS CATALYST BETWEEN ROMANTICISM AND SCIENCE

FICTION

Gabrielle Helo

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

December 2015

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to express her gratitude to her thesis committee for all the inspiration gleaned from their classes and their advice, but especially to her thesis chair for his patience and guidance. Additional thanks is to be given to consultants at the

University Center for Excellence in Writing for their feedback as well as to peers

Mellissa Carr, Gyasi Byng, Megan Mandell, and Mikaela von Kursell for their advice and constructive criticism. Last, but not least, the author expresses appreciation to her mother and father for their encouragement and to her sister, who, though no longer present, would have been proud of her little sister.

ABSTRACT

Author: Gabrielle Helo

Title: Romantic Science: Nature As Schism Between Romantic Generations and As Catalyst Between Romanticism and Science Fiction

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. John Golden

Degree: Master of Arts

Year: 2015

After 1815’s eruption of Mount Tambora, the following period was named the

“Year without a Summer” and experienced irregularly cold weather, failed crops, rampant disease, and riots. In the summer of 1816, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley met in the Alps and wrote “Darkness,” “Mont Blanc,” and Frankenstein respectively. This thesis focuses on these works’ depictions of nature in light of how these features may have been impacted by the climate. It argues in Chapter

One that the volcanic eruption caused global climate changes that affected these writers.

In Chapter Two, it illustrates differences in nature’s representation between first generation and second generation Romantic works. The conclusion synthesizes the arguments made in Chapters One and Two, suggesting that 1816’s climate affected these writers in such a way as to produce an environment from which science fiction could emerge in Frankenstein.

ROMANTIC SCIENCE: NATURE AS SCHISM BETWEEN ROMANTIC

GENERATIONS AND AS CATALYST BETWEEN ROMANTICISM AND SCIENCE

FICTION

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1: THE WEATHER AS ROMANTICISM AND SCIENCE FICTION

KNOW IT ...... 4

Historical Background ...... 4

Global Effects ...... 6

The Alps ...... 13

Social Effects ...... 25

CHAPTER 2: THE SECOND GENERATION’S NATURE ...... 31

“Descriptive Sketches” ...... 32

“Book Sixth” of The Prelude ...... 38

“Darkness” ...... 46

“Hymn Before Sunrise” ...... 56

“Mont Blanc” ...... 61

Frankenstein ...... 65

vi A CONCLUSION UNCONCLUDED: A TALE OF TWO GENRES,

ROMANTICISM AND SCIENCE FICTION ...... 73

NOTES .. …………………………………………………………………………………75

WORKS CONSULTED ...... 77

vii

INTRODUCTION

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, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air -George Gordon Byron, “Darkness”

The goal of this thesis is to posit a relationship of weather to the development and evolution of literary genres. I seek to first suggest that the severe meteorological fallout of the Mount Tambora eruption in 1815 affected second generation Romantic authors, specifically Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord George

Gordon Byron; I will attempt to show that the representation of nature in their writing,

Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus, “Mont Blanc,” and “Darkness” respectively, reveals a reaction to the weather and the social climate of the summer of 1816, especially when compared with depictions of nature in several first generation Romantic works by

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. I would like to propose that these visible reactions to the environment contributed to the creation of a then emerging genre, science fiction, a genre whose first work is credited with being Mary Shelley’s novel

Frankenstein.

Thus, I am going to talk about the weather, but it is not because I have nothing more and less offensive to talk about that I wish to discuss the weather; rather, I want to talk about the weather because although it is certainly one of the most constant elements of our environment, it is also one of the most overlooked, especially as it pertains to

literature. Certainly, there has been no dearth of artists or authors ready to allow that

nature, especially in the guise of weather, has played a role in the production and style of their work, but what can be said for the power of weather to instigate more than a singular mood change or an individual response in an artist or author, especially when such a catalyst is of a more substantial and powerful nature?

Although few would deny the power of severe and extreme weather anomalies to alter history, little research has been conducted on the subject as to how weather and climate change have affected and currently affect literature. Seen by some as a reflection of the people, culture, and society of the time, literature in terms of its growth and evolution and not only its content and origin should be investigated for such moments. In sum, these three works represent literature produced from a singular time in the summer of 1816. All written within close proximity to each other, some only a few days apart, these works all reflect a trend toward describing nature, particularly weather phenomenon, in terms of the sublime; however, the sublime present in these works seems to be different from the sublime explored in previous Romantic works by Coleridge and

Wordsworth

In addressing the topic of weather then, this thesis also attempts to synthesize the research from two different fields, the sciences and the arts and humanities, to show how these frequently divorced fields are interrelated, with each affecting the other.

This thesis focuses on one work from each of these three second generation

Romantics’ works written in the summer of 1816, though references to their journals and correspondence are also used to support analyses of their works. Mary Shelley, Percy

Shelley, and Lord Byron were chosen for this paper due to their arguably longer-lasting,

greater impact on the genre as a whole as well as due to their unique circumstances that

summer. This thesis concentrates specifically on these works’ depictions of nature in

light of how this feature may have been impacted by the social and physical climate of the time.

This thesis attempts to show in Chapter One that the eruption of Mount Tambora likely affected these three authors, half a world away and a year later. It then suggests that this effect explains differences, which are examined in Chapter Two, in the representation of nature between the early works of first generation Romantics and early works of second generation Romantics. In the conclusion, this thesis synthesizes the arguments made in Chapter One and Two to suggest that the eruption of a little discussed, but globally affecting volcano produced an environment from which science fiction could emerge—specifically, what is arguably the first work of science fiction, Frankenstein.

Consequently, this thesis offers a much stronger relationship between

Romanticism and science fiction than what previous literature has suggested. This thesis

draws connections between two widely divergent fields, the sciences and the arts, as well as widely divergent literary genres, Romanticism and science fiction, in order to reveal new, exciting, and provocative areas of inquiry that have the potential to open communication and discussion in the literary field.

CHAPTER 1: THE WEATHER AS ROMANTICISM AND SCIENCE FICTION

KNOW IT

She would not have been surprised if I had talked of the burning sun and delicious fruits of December, or of the frosts of July. - Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour

Historical Background

My investigation of the power of nature, in the form of weather, to instigate change in cultural artifacts such as in the arts, specifically literature, takes me to the time period that this thesis examines, the cusp of the late Romantic Era and the beginning of the Victorian. It is well-known that Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron spent some time together with Byron’s doctor, John Polidori, and Mary Shelley’s step-sister,

Claire Clairmont, during this point in history, the summer of 1816, in the Swiss Alps beside Lake Geneva.

While traveling to Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley contrasts the French female servants she had seen on her journey from England with the Swiss female servants she currently has serving her; her thoughts are not complimentary to either group. She finds the French girls to be graceful, but complaining about the difference in status and equality and the Swiss girls ineffective and slow. She remarks, “I know a girl of twenty who although she had lived her life among vineyards, could not inform me during what month the vintage took place, and I discovered she was utterly ignorant of the order in which the months succeed one another. She would not have been surprised if I had talked

of the burning sun and delicious fruits of December, or of the frosts of July” (Shelley and

Shelley 104). It is ironic that her criticism of the young woman should that very summer,

only weeks later, be proven false, and frost would appear in July.

Normally, Mary Shelley would be accurate to claim that winter keeps to its

domain the cold and snow and summer holds to heat and harvest, but the summer of 1816

was different; thus, this thesis needs to begin its investigation earlier, a year earlier to be

exact, when the climate changes that would affect these authors first emerged.

On April 10 and 11 of 1815, “the largest historic volcanic eruption” occurred a

world away from England and Europe, wherein this thesis is largely based, at Mount

Tambora in present day Indonesia (Stothers 1; Lorenz, Timmreck, and Jungclaus 1). In

fact, many volcanologists believe that before the eruption, Mount Tambora, a composite

volcano (Wickens 4), had “the highest peak of the East Indies,” but the “cone was

toppled … by the largest eruption of recorded history” (Oppenheimer 231; Cao, Li, and

Yang 588). As composite cone volcanoes have a conical structure that allows them to

become larger than other types of volcanoes—though they may produce less magma than other types of volcanoes—they produce more tephra, which includes ash, dust, cinder, lapilli, scoria, pumice, and fire fragments, due to very strong pressurized eruptions

(Wickens 5).

For Mount Tambora, the resulting explosion led to the largest known death toll credited to the eruption of a volcano (Oppenheimer 231); the effects of the explosion are recognized for causing, within hours, the extinction of the entire Kingdom of Tambora

(Wilford n. pag.; Sigurdsson and Carey 22) and the Tamboran language (de Jong Boers

43; Wilford n. pag.). It is estimated by different sources that 11,000 people were directly

killed by the explosions and whirlwinds of the volcano (Tanguy, Ribière, Scarth, and

Tjetjep 141; Sigurdsson and Carey 21-22); additionally, 92,000 (Sigurdsson and Carey

16) to 117,000 were killed on nearby islands due to immediate large ash fall that smothered crops, produced health concerns, contaminated the water supply, and starved livestock as well as human inhabitants (Cao, Li, and Yang 589; de Jong Boers 43-44;

Wilford n. pag.; Sigurdsson and Carey 36).

The volcano became active as early as the 5th of the same month, causing such unfamiliar rumblings that the local citizens of Sumbawa thought they were hearing distant cannon fire and not telltale signs of an impending eruption from a seemingly dormant volcano (Rampino 12; Oppenheimer 233-234). According to Thomas Stamford

Raffles, the Lieutenant Governor of Java (from England), who circulated a letter asking outlying provinces about their accounts of the occurrence (Rampino 12; Stothers 1191), the resulting eruptions lasted until the 15th, producing hurricane-force whirlwinds; fire, ash, and stone fall; and solar blackout (Rampino 12; Oppenheimer 238; Raffles n. pag.).

These meteorological changes affected more than just the immediate vicinity, however.

Global Effects

Although the explosion of ash and lava was so far away from other continents, the

long-term and short-term consequences of the natural disaster were innumerable; in fact,

it is believed that Mount Tambora caused “the world's greatest ash eruption (so far as is

definitely known) since the end of the last Ice Age” when it spewed more than “25 cubic

miles of debris into the upper atmosphere” (Stothers 1; Ferris n pag.). Much of the debris

fell into the nearby Pacific, but what did not “stayed aloft for months as high altitude

clouds of dust and sulfuric acid circled the globe and dimmed the skies of much of the

Northern Hemisphere” (Ferris n. pag.); records report that Mount Tambora continued this

behavior until the August of 1819 (Oppenheimer 241).

What exacerbated the effects of the eruption was that it was poorly timed; records

(from personal accounts and official/public records, tree ring data, glacial level testing,

etc.) indicate that the Earth had already begun to experience a cooling effect in the early

1810s due to reduced solar activity (a low sunspot mean for these years); this cooling effect is also attributed to “The Little Ice Age” the entire globe experienced until 1850

(Sigurdsson and Carey 38; Ball 198-200; Jacoby and D’Arrigo 262; Guiot 301; Bednarz and Trepińska 418; Cao, Li, and Yang 594; Wickens 8; Rampino, Self, Fairbridge 827;

Pfister 416). Other scientists have attributed the cooling effect to a lack of El Nino events

in the 1810s (Chenoweth 2089). No matter the cause, the results of such sustained

weather conditions as solar dimming affected the immediate climate and agriculture,

causing crop shortages and blight.

The entire summer of 1816, over a year after the eruption, was bleak not only

because of heavy cloud and ash coverage that had an incredibly strong “climate-cooling

effect” but also because of “the enormous amount of gas from the eruption that reduced

solar radiation reaching the earth” (Perkins n. pag.; Sullivan). The volcanic winter, as it

has been termed, immediately began noticeably to alter the climate, and the year after the

explosion, 1816, became known as “the year without a summer” (Oppenheimer 230;

Vupputuri 46). The resulting climate changes, which induced periods of darkness and

extreme drops in temperature, had far-reaching regional effects (Cao, Li, and Yang 587,

605).

Mount Tambora’s awakening after 5,000 years of rest is thus attributed to causing

“the last great subsistence crisis in the Western World” (Oppenheimer 231; Post cover),

which later became known as “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death” in North America and Western Europe (D’Arcy Wood n. pag.; Hoyt 118; Munger 34). The warmth and light that were necessary for subsistence agriculture, the process of creating and consuming what is needed for the population until the next crop cycle, were not available in these regions due to the high amounts of ash and debris that had, by this point, circled the globe and traveled north.

Record temperature lows, active storm weather, and unusual precipitation were recorded around the world, specifically in Peru1, Brazil2, New England3, Canada4,

Iceland5, Poland6, China7, Korea, Japan, Tibet, and India8.

Most relevant to this thesis is the state of weather in Western Europe, particularly

England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy. England, Scotland,

and Ireland are of special notice as they were the regions most familiar to Mary Shelley,

Percy Shelley, and Byron. Similarly, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy were the

countries these same authors were traveling through or near on their way to the location

that is at the focus of this thesis—the Alps shared by France and Switzerland beside Lake

Geneva. Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Byron would have, like any traveler, been

interested in the weather conditions of these countries as they were travelling through and

would have sought this information to avoid any trouble on the road. Therefore, it is

probable that they would have learned some of the following.

Sullivan claims, “When Mount Tambora did blow, it ... led indirectly to the deaths

of hundreds of thousands ... a half a world away in Europe.” These claims seem to be

well-supported. Most of the negative weather irregularities seems to have occurred in the

British Isles and France (Guiot 304) after first occurring within three months of the eruption (Stothers 1195). For the summer of 1816, precipitation levels in southwestern

Ireland, southern Wales, southwestern England, most of France, parts of Belgium,

Holland, and Germany are believed to have exceeded 200% of the normal levels

(Kington 368-370; Wilson 534; Stothers 1196; Chenoweth 2087), with southern Italy and northwestern Scotland representing the only dry (almost drought stricken) regions (Briffa and Jones 375, 384; Oppenheimer 245). In Italy, the weather so worried the inhabitants that a Bolognese astronomer made the prediction that the sun would burn itself out on

July 18th of 1816, creating the Bologna Prophecy that resulted in widespread panic and numerous newspaper articles attempting to curtail alarm in Europe, but especially Italy and England (Vail 183-184). The prophecy originated from an astronomer’s observation of an abnormally large number and size of sunspots during the summer of 1816, some being noted as large as the Earth in size (Vail 183-184). As Byron was staying in Italy, where the prophecy originated, immediately after leaving House Diodati by Lake

Geneva, Lovell finds that “Byron’s own sensitivity to the gloomy summer weather of

1816 while writing ‘Darkness’ is reflected in his comment to Thomas Medwin that he composed the poem ‘at Geneva, where there was a celebrated dark day, on which the fowls went to roost at noon, and the candles were lighted as at midnight’” (qtd. in Vail

184).

In many regions of Europe, after an abnormally long winter, May began the rainy season, only to end in August (Bednarz and Trepińska 419; Vupputuri 46), supporting reports of increased stormy weather in many parts of Europe (Oppenheimer 247). In

terms of temperature, Scandinavia, the British Isles, and central Europe are estimated to have experienced the most anomalously cold weather (Briffa and Jones 375; Hoyt 130;

Guiot 303-304).

In England alone, there was much reported in regards to irregular climate.

Records indicate that there has been no colder summer to the present day than 1816 since

1750 (Briffa and Jones 390). To illustrate, in the summer of 1816, temperatures lower than -2˚C were reported (390); additionally, the average temperature in London was at least five degrees below the mean and had only 16 days when temperatures were above the mean (Hoyt 130). The Hudson’s Bay Company’s ships from England heading to

Canada reported unseasonably late ship arrivals for trade due to ice congestion and impassable routes, and return to England was further delayed until the following summers from 1815 to 1817 because of the early formation of ice barriers (Wilson 171); one merchant ship was even recorded to have sunk after encountering excessive ice

(Chenoweth 2087). This increase in ice both near Canada and England and in shipping routes during normal trade periods is understood to have affected fish crop as well as trade (Ogilvie 350).

In Ireland, reports indicated that rain fell for 142 out of 153 days (Wickens 8), in some areas measuring 31 inches (Oppenheimer 246). Thunderstorms, large hail, and multiple floods were reported in summer as were large clouds obscuring the sun (Kington

368-369), which led to temperatures on average three degrees below the previous year’s mean temperature (Oppenheimer 246). These conditions caused the outright destruction of crops or led to the formation of blight that killed many crops before harvesting (369).

Nearby, Scotland maintained snow on the ground in some areas into the middle of July,

and like England, reported defective crops, especially in potato, hay, wheat, and corn, dietary staples of all socio-economic classes (369).

France and Germany experienced failed or delayed grape and corn harvests

(Henry n. pag.). Switzerland’s summer of 1816, like nearby countries, reported an unusually cold and wet season with snow remaining on as low an altitude as 1,000 meters into the summer and the lakes Neuenberg, Murten, and Biel remaining one body of water throughout the year and not drying into separate bodies as usual (Pfister 416). Multiple instances of flooding where entire portions of land were covered were also recorded

(Kington 369). As the passes remained obstructed and avalanches still fell, much of the cattle could not be herded to higher grazing grounds as per normal seasonal rotation

(416).

The global effects were far-reaching and frequently devastating. Many accounts of these weather anomalies and weather occurrences as well as their repercussions were recovered by contemporary researchers in old newspapers, such as the Norfolk Chronicle; government records, such as The Census of Ireland; and personal journals (Chenoweth

2080-2081). In fact, W. Milham in 1924 describes the abnormal weather of 1816 as

“probably the most written about weather event in American history” (as cited in

Chenoweth 2077).

Since the abnormal weather was quite well covered in the press, it seems likely that information about other countries’ experiences would have been available to Mary

Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Byron. Nevertheless, their journals and correspondence from this time period (from 1815 to 1816) do not strongly suggest such knowledge, though hints do appear in some journal entries; worth noting, however, is that their journal

entries frequently focused on short descriptions of daily activities, conversations, and relationship concerns, not on global or national affairs. In one such suggestive entry,

Percy Shelley relates in a letter to Byron on September 11th of 1816, after he and his party have vacated the Alps, that the harvest in Bath and potentially the surrounding areas of England concern him: “The harvest is not yet cut. There are, however, as yet no very glaring symptoms of disaffection, though the distress is said to be severe. But winter is the season when the burthen will be felt. Most earnestly do I hope that despair will not drive the people to premature and useless struggles” (Murray 17). There are two important points from the passage worth nothing; one, Percy Shelley reveals through his wording of “is said” that he had been listening to or reading something that told him of the region’s agricultural issues, brought on by the unusual coldness of the year, and two, he anticipated social strife, though he hoped it would not come to pass.

Percy Shelley and his party were no doubt informed of the severity of the issues the globe was facing due to reports of weather and other concerns circulated throughout the globe by an active economy built upon trading relationships; many of the regions affected by the severe weather changes had an active relationship with England, which would have made such knowledge more accessible; for instance, Canada and the British

West Indies had well-established trade agreements (through British owned companies) with England, New England maintained a relationship with England not only in trade but also in politics, and as Java in Indonesia was a British territory, this region also maintained relationships of trade and politics. Therefore, if within four months the tephra had circled the globe, by 1816, the world would have been experiencing abnormal and alarming weather phenomenon, and local and national newspapers were publishing

accounts of these occurrences and their repercussions, the English people and the people

inhabiting the regions through which Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Claire Clairmont,

Byron, and Polidori were travelling would have been aware of these occurrences to some

degree.

The Alps

Of particular interest is the evidence that suggests that of all the regions to

experience severe conditions in the summer of 1816, it is the northern Alpine regions in

Europe that reported the coldest temperatures (Briffa and Jones 384; Bednarz and

Trepińska 418; de Jong Boers 51). Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Byron spent their summer beside the Alps in 1816, and inspection of their journals yields vastly different reports of the weather and environment that what had been written only two years before.

Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley note in their work A History of a Six-Weeks Tour,

written while they were touring the continent in the summer of 1814, two years before

their return in 1816, that “we left London July 28th, 1814, on a hotter day than has been

known in this climate in many years” (A History of a Six-Weeks Tour 1). On the journey

across the English Channel, Mary Shelley writes, “The evening was most beautiful; there

was but little wind, and the sails flapped in the flagging breeze” (2). Though she recounts

a violent storm that shook the ship that night, she continues on by describing Calais,

France as “rural and pleasant” (7) although after leaving Calais, she describes the heat as

intense (8). They pass “fields ... flourishing with a plentiful harvest,” (10) but she again restates that the heat was so strong as to make travelling during the peak of the day impractical (11). The party also passes “highly cultivated” lands abundant in “waving ...

golden harvest” (16) before passing through a lesser developed area. Upon leaving

Chaumont, Langres, Mary Shelley observes “gentle rivers” where beautiful summer

insects skim above the water. About halfway through the journey, she recounts that they

experience their first day of rain during the journey (30) before later seeing the Alps rise

in the distance (40) and seeking “in that romantic and interesting country some cottage

where we might dwell in peace and solitude” (45). However, after finding a peaceful and

balmy area beside a lake to rest during their journey, their hopes to rest longer are

doomed to be disappointed as the party’s money runs out, and they are forced to return to

England with haste (53-53). Their desire to see more of the Alps and explore the region is delayed another two years until they can return in the summer of 1816, when the environment they found would be much altered.

When the Shelleys return in 1816, they find a changed France. Percy Shelley

notes in a letter that entry into the country is much more controlled due to Napoleon’s

recent escape (A History of a Six Weeks’ Tour 85), and they are confined to an inn in

France until their travel paperwork can be verified (86). After gaining permission to

continue on, they follow the same path they took only two years earlier (87); one

evening, Percy Shelley writes that they proceed “by the light of a stormy moon” past a

large mountain gulf “filled by the darkness of the driving clouds” (88) and begin to

ascend another mountain “amidst a violent storm of wind and rain” (89). After passing

scenery described as wonderful and sublime (89), their party presses on into a shockingly

cold forest:

[T]he branches of the trees are loaded with snow, and half of the enormous

pines themselves buried in the wavy drifts. The spring, as the inhabitants

informed us, was unusually late, and indeed the cold was excessive; as we

ascended the mountains, the same clouds which rained on us in the vallies

poured forth large flakes of snow thick and fast ... [T]he snow, which we

had beheld whitening the overhanging rocks, now encroached upon our

road, and it snowed fast as we entered the village ... where we were

threatened by the apparent necessity of passing the night in a bad inn and

dirty beds. (90-91)

This passage reveals the interesting fact that through the local grapevine, the traveling party was able to ascertain that the spring had come late to the region. Percy Shelley also writes that the weather was so poor as to greatly affect their journey. It is worth stressing at this point that while traveling by carriage and horse had vastly improved, for instance in their safety and durability, traveling was still an adventuresome, in the true sense of the word, and dangerous enterprise. Like today, some roads and paths were well marked while others were not, resources of assistance, such as the military and law enforcement, did not always have publicized locations or a presence in such rural regions, and assistance in the case of an accident or vehicle failure was not guaranteed. Returning to the passage from Percy Shelley’s journal, it is also clear that not only is the party forced to cease traveling due to dangerous weather conditions, but when the party members finally do make it back on the road the next day, they encounter more snow and wind, so much so that their first view of the Alps upon their arrival is anticlimactic: “the sun had already far descended, and the snow pelting against the windows of our carriage, assisted the coming darkness to deprive us of the view of the lake of Geneva and the far distant

Alps” (92).

Upon Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley’s arrival, they are delighted to find the area

sunny, warm and the opposite of their previous stay, more social and less isolated (94-

95). They spend their days sailing and relaxing in the sunshine with summer birds and

insects while reading to each other (96-97). Mary Shelley writes, “You know that we

have just escaped from the gloom of winter and of London; and coming to this delightful

spot during this divine weather, I feel as happy as a new-fledged bird ... though clouds shut out Mont Blanc from my sight” (96-97). These clouds seem to foreshadow the changes they will experience when they move closer to the Alps.

No longer enjoying the warm and sunlit days of camaraderie and exploration,

Mary Shelley describes the changed environment in her letter:

Unfortunately we do not now enjoy those brilliant skies that hailed us on

our first arrival to this country. An almost perpetual rain confines us

principally to the house ... The thunderstorms that visit us are grander and

more terrific than I have ever seen. We watch them as they approach from

the opposite side of the lake, observing the lightning play among the

clouds in various parts of the heavens, and dart in jagged figures upon the

piney heights of Jura, dark with the shadow of the overhanging cloud. (99-

100)

What research reveals, Mary Shelley’s letters support. The rain and cold in the summer of

1816 were markedly different from the previous year, and the storms were remarked upon by the authors of interest as being extraordinary—so extraordinary in fact that they were confined to the cottage they had rented for the summer; Mary Shelley recounts one particular storm that impressed upon her its power: “One night, we enjoyed a finer storm

than I had ever before beheld. The lake was lit up—the pines on Jura made visible, and

all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the

thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amidst the darkness” (100). Her notes on

this particular occasion stress the fact that the large thunderstorm was enjoyed by those who experienced it together, most likely Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley, but potentially

Claire Clairmont as well. Being so close to the mountains, thunderstorms were grander and more explosive than she had witnessed before, and research suggests that they were also more powerful due to the weather conditions of 1816. Mary Shelley stresses that especially fascinating was the play of light on the lake, the instant illumination in the dead of night of the landscape around them, and the subsequent, immediate return of utter darkness, a feature that appears several times in Frankenstein. The resulting crack and bang would have been resounding in the mountains, where noise has a tendency to amplify and echo.

Not to be outdone, in a later letter, Percy Shelley also remarks on his experiences with the unpredictable and abnormal weather while traveling with Byron to explore the

Alpine region:

We arrived at this town about seven o’clock, after a day which involved

more rapid changes of atmosphere than I ever recollect to have observed

before. The morning was cold and wet; then an easterly wind, and the

clouds hard and high; then thunder showers, and wind shifting to every

quarter; then a warm blast from the south, and summer clouds hanging

over the peaks, with bright blue sky between. About half an hour after we

arrive at Evian; a few flashes of lightning came from a dark cloud, directly

overhead, and continued after the cloud had dispersed ‘Diespiter, per pura

tonantes egit equos:’ a phenomenon which certainly had no influence on

me, corresponding with that which it produced on Horace. (115)

Amazed by the rapid changes in weather from cold and wet to warm and bright and

finally back to dark and stormy, Percy Shelley refers to an ode from Horace that suggests

that lightening that appears from thin air, and not from a cloud, must prove the presence

of the gods, a point that Percy Shelley does not agree with (Brooks n. pag.). What is worth noting though is that this reference readily came to Percy Shelley in seeing the landscape transformed, that the weather seemed to suggest a supernatural presence outside the realm of the ordinary; thus, the changing landscape around Shelley not only was worthy of recollection in his notes, but it was also a reminder of a spiritual concept he disavowed as an atheist.

In a letter to a friend, Shelley makes another reference to a supernatural influence in the nature around him when he rejects the notion of the world ending due to the overabundance of frost, ice, and snow:

I will not pursue Buffon’s sublime but gloomy theory—that this globe

which we inhabit will, at some future period, be changed into a mass of

frost by the encroachments of the polar ice, and of that produced on the

most elevated points of the earth. Do you, who assert the supremacy of

Ahriman, imagine him throned among these desolating snows, among

these palaces of death and frost, so sculptured in this their terrible

magnificence by the adamantine hand of necessity, and that he casts

around him, as the first essays of his final usurpation, avalanches, torrents,

rocks, and thunders, and above all these deadly glaciers, at once the proof

and symbols of his reign. (The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley 513)

Though Shelley’s goal is to contest the claim that the world will end in some future time due to over-encroachment of frost, what again is interesting is a reference to a supernatural force is again noted; when seeing the landscape around him, which is described in ominous and morbid detail, he is reminded of an apocalyptic theory, one that suggests that the world will end in a manner similar to what Shelley is surrounded by, ice, snow, wind, rain, and frost.

In a letter to Samuel Rogers, a fellow writer and friend, Byron also relates the weather conditions that have dampened his enthusiasm for his journey: “I have circumnavigated the Lake, and go to Chamouni with the first fair weather; but really we have had lately such stupid mists, fogs, and perpetual density, that one would think

Castlereagh had the Foreign Affairs of the kingdom of Heaven also on his hands” (Moore

251). On the first day of pleasant weather that he has seen on his journey, Byron ventures out with Percy Shelley to visit Chamouni, remarking that Lord Castlereagh may have had some hand in the unpleasant weather, no doubt continuing to haunt him in his exile across the continent. Byron comments that he has encountered such hovering mists and fogs that he has been prevented from enjoying the scenery around him. However, the same weather that had prevented him from enjoying his surroundings more were also what led to his ability to finish his third canto of Childe Harold and to write the entirety of

“Prisoner of Chillon” since he and the Shelleys, as well as Polidori, were stuck waiting for bad weather to stop at an inn at Ouchy, near Lausanne (Moore 284-285).

Leaving Evian, Percy Shelley and Byron again face delay due to passport checks,

but continue on to encounter a dangerous storm while sailing across a lake to Meillerie.

They make it safely across, but on the return trip, they face an even more difficult battle

against nature: “The lake appeared somewhat calmer as we left Meillerie, sailing close to

the banks ... But we congratulated ourselves too soon: The wind gradually increased itself

in violence, until it blew tremendously; and as it came from the remotest extremity of the

lake, produced waves of a frightful height, and covered the whole surface with a chaos of

foam” (120). One of the boatmen makes a poor decision and almost floods the boat, and

when the rudder breaks, “one wave fell in, and then another. My companion [Byron], an excellent swimmer, took off his coat, I did the same, and we sat with our arms crossed, every instant expecting to be swamped” (121). The storm calms shortly thereafter, and they survive the crossing without much more anxiety, but this incident seems to imprint itself upon the two men, Percy Shelley especially. The experience of wind violently shaking their ship, tossing the vessel around as if it were a toy, and of waves rising above the bow of the ship and flooding the main deck impressed upon Percy Shelley a sense of his own fragile humanity.

In a short letter to his editor, John Murray, with whom he had a 13 year, complicated relationship (Markovits n. pag.), Byron sets aside a longer paragraph to describe his remembrance of the squall he and Percy Shelley encountered on the lake on the way to Meillerie: “Three days ago, we were most nearly wrecked in a squall off

Meillerie, and driven to shore. I ran no risk, being so near the rocks, and a good swimmer; but our party were wet, and incommoded a good deal. The wind was strong enough to blow down some trees, as we found at landing” (247). Thomas Moore relates

the tale, coyly claiming that the account has been supplemented with recollections by those who had heard the tale from those who had experienced it:

In the squall off Meillerie, which he [Byron] mentions, their danger was

considerable. In the expectation, every moment, of being obliged to swim

for his life, Lord Byron had already thrown off his coat, and, as Shelley

was no swimmer, insisted upon endeavouring, by some means, to save

him. This offer, however, Shelley positively refused; and seating himself

quietly upon a locker, and grasping the rings at each end firmly in his

hands, declared his determination to go down in that position, without a

struggle. (282-283)

Byron’s journal makes note of the event as one where he was alarmed at he and Percy

Shelley’s predicament. Byron was prepared to swim for his life if the boat became too unstable and they were in danger of going down with it, but determines to stay behind for

Percy Shelley’s sake, a decision that Percy Shelley’s journal revealed deeply troubled him. Refusing to allow Byron to sacrifice himself in saving another man as if he were a child, Percy Shelley holds onto the ship, all the while suffering the terror of imminent catastrophe and shame.

In Percy Shelley’s journal, the remainder of their excursion seems to be overshadowed by the presence of death and the realization of mortality. Shortly after the ordeal, he writes, “I felt in this near prospect of death a mixture of sensations, among which terror entered, though subordinately. My feelings would have been less painful had

I been alone; but I knew that my companion [Byron] would have attempted to save me, and I was overcome with humiliation, when I thought that his life might have been risked

to preserve mine” (The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley 494). In this near-death

experience, Percy Shelley writes that he felt both petrified and ashamed. The effect is

two-fold then; Percy Shelley realizes the fragility of his life and how easily nature can act

to alter his fate, and he also realizes that his lack of knowledge and skill could have

resulted in his companion’s death as well. Thus, he experiences out in the wilds of the

Alps the power of nature to destroy, to care nothing for the human lives that cling

desperately to the rungs of the slip; its careless disregard for him causes him to feel all

the more ashamed of his utter reliance on his companion for survival.

While continuing their travels, Percy Shelley reads Julie or the Young Heloise, the

epistolary novel by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that echoes the plot of Abelard and Heloise’s

forbidden and tragic love affair, for several days, delighting in its prose and familiar

backdrop at the foot of the Alps. Ironically enough, Julie’s fate at the end of the novel is

to drown while trying to save a child, no doubt a parallel that Percy Shelley made to his

own circumstances with Byron and his own helplessness and a parallel the reader can

make with Percy Shelley’s drowning death years later. As they continue on their tour of

the lake and nearby mountains, Julie’s story and death feature greatly in his journal.

Their continued journey to the castle of Chillon seems to further instill within

Percy Shelley the continued notion of mortality begun after his survival of the tempest on the lake. He writes at some length about the terrors and atmosphere of the castle’s dungeons. In seeing the engraved names of visitors and prisoners on the columns that support the dungeon, he is at once filled with a sense of historical connection and filled with turmoil at the injustice of human behavior: “Across one of these arches was a beam, now black and rotten, on which prisoners were hung in secret. I never saw a monument

more terrible of that cold and inhuman tyranny, which it had been the delight of man to exercise over man” (497). However, upon leaving Chillon, his thoughts again return to

Julie, and he imagines that he sees her and her lover in the landscape surrounding him;

his thoughts again echo a continued thread of mortality:

At least the inhabitants of this village are impressed with an idea that the

persons of that romance had actual existence. In the evening we walked

thither. It is indeed Julia’s wood .... The trees themselves were aged, but

vigorous and interspersed with younger ones, which are destined to be

their successors, and in future years, when we are dead, to afford a shade

to future worshippers of nature .... Why did the cold maxims of the world

compel me at this moment to repress the tears of melancholy transport

which it would have been so sweet to indulge, immeasurably, even until

the darkness of night had swallowed up the objects which excited them?

(498)

The melancholy of Julie and her lover’s fate combined with the fear and shame that were

the resulting emotions of Byron and Percy Shelley’s near shipwreck seem to affect Percy

Shelley strongly. His thoughts seem to center for several days following these events on

darker musings, no longer focusing his writing on pastoral beauty and gentle

amusements. He seems absorbed in pondering different threads of the presence of death,

remarking on the cruelty of man in killing each other, the cycle of life wherein the young

replace the old, and later on the hardheartedness of man in destroying memory. The latter

he vilifies when he observes the ruins of “the bosquet de Julie,” a wooded thicket above

Clarens, that had once housed a chapel but now lay in ruins. He angrily muses that the

man in solitude would be held back from destroying such a piece of history and beauty that evokes “venerable feelings arising out of the memory of genius” by shame, but that social man, in this case the order at St. Bernard, feels no such qualms (499).

Thomas Moore, author of one of the first and most comprehensive biographies of

Byron, writes in 1854 of Percy Shelley’s fascination with Rousseau’s tragedy:

Luckily for Shelley's full enjoyment of these scenes, he had never before

happened to read the Heloise; and though his companion [Byron] had long

been familiar with that romance, the sight of the region itself, the “birth-

place of deep Love,” every spot of which seemed instinct with the passion

of the story, gave to the whole a fresh and actual existence in his mind.

Both were under the spell of the Genius of the place,—both full of

emotion; and ... they walked silently through the vineyards that were once

the “bosquet de Julie.” (284)

Moore describes Percy Shelley’s intensity of absorption in the landscape as one relating directly to the inspiration Percy Shelley received from the story, potentially exacerbated by his own brush with a drowning death. Byron, though he had read the novel some years before, being Percy Shelley’s senior by a few years, is invigorated by the boundaries between fantasy, Rousseau’s story, and reality, the landscape mentioned in the story presently before them.

Furthermore, although Byron writes at the end of summer on September 29, 2016 in his Alpine Journal of his gratefulness for the pleasant weather he has been fortuitous enough to encounter upon this part of his journey in exile, having made it safely to Italy with little delay or inconvenience, his earlier experiences were less fortunate: “In the

weather for this [emphasis mine] tour (of 13 days), I have been very fortunate—fortunate in a companion (Mr. H.) [his friend, Mr. Hobhouse]—fortunate in our prospects, and exempt from even the little petty accidents and delays which often render journeys in a less wild country disappointing” (Moore 268).

Through Mary Shelley’s and Percy Shelley’s own letters and their work A History of a Six-Week Tour, it becomes plain that the weather is the Alps was irregular. It was not just inconvenient or abnormally fascinating to watch, but also dangerous, dark, and gloomy. The “wet and ungenial weather” could last for days or capriciously change from one minute to the next (Frankenstein 6). It was unpredictable, powerful, and terrifying.

Social Effects

However, the weather was not the only element that elicited uneasiness among these authors’ party; the social effects of the irregular weather impacted the authors as well.Cao, Li, and Yang assert that “Mt. Tambora ... symbolizes the remarkable global impact of nature on human society” (587). This claim seems to be well-supported within the research. The resulting social turmoil in response to these effects was catastrophic.

It is estimated that over 37,825 citizens on the island of Sumbawa near Tambora died from starvation along with thousands more on neighboring islands (Sigurdsson and

Carey 21). The lack of crops for subsistence living meant that there was little food supply in reserve, and with large crop failures for the summer of 1816, people in the affected areas who could not afford food that was not affected by the weather or the food in reserve would go hungry. As food become scare in these areas, the price on these items went higher, making the purchase of food prohibitive for those of lower socio-economic status. Additionally, those whose incomes and livelihoods were affected by the changes

in trade also experienced hardship as they were unable to find employment and earn a living.

Within a short period of time, social unrest became a reality as resources became scarce, and survival took the forefront (D’Arcy Wood n. pag.). Some of the most well- known riots of the period, the Spa Fields Riots, the Ely and Littleport Riots, the Halstead

Riot, and additional Agrarian Riots of 1816, were in reaction to rising unemployment and costs of grain, both triggered by the loss of labor necessary for harvesting and the shortage of viable crops due to poor weather conditions (Peacock n. pag.; Post n. pag.;

D’Arcy Wood n. pag.). In The Last Great Subsistence Crisis of the Western World, John

Post presents first-hand written accounts from survivors of the period; these accounts detail the harsh living conditions they endured; the poor and starving littered the roadways like regimented lines of soldiers in search of food and labor, and landowners and laborers engaged in class warfare and violence in the form of riots over grain.

The weather alone did much damage, to people and animals, as well as to crops, but the social structures built around these enterprises suffered as well. Ball argues,

“Their impact on the socio-economic conditions of that period were severe” (186). He finds that Canada’s fur industry, which traded with England through the Hudson’s Bay

Company, was already suffering from overhunting, and when settlers arrived in a region stricken by weather anomalies and trade decreases, tensions mounted, eventually leading to the Massacre at Seven Oaks in 1817 (Ball 194). His work reveals that the weather conditions played a role in the social stability of the area, precipitating violence in this instance. He argues, “The stress of the impending social and cultural confrontation was

underlain by exceptionally severe weather. Starvation and malnutrition made rational

behavior less likely” (194).

To endure these hard times, it is reported that many people turned to prayer. In St.

Petersburg, Russia, people flocked to services, and Paris’s churches were also full with

people praying for dry weather (Kington 370), similar to the religious reaction to the

Bologna Prophecy.

However, the problems did not end in shortages in agriculture and hiccups in trade. The decrease in temperature and resulting drop in nutrition due to scarcity of food

created an even more serious epidemic—that of the spread of disease, most notably

plague and other highly contagious diseases that flourish in areas of congested

populations and limited sanitary conditions. For instance, cholera emerged during this

time after the eruption as a result of the change in living conditions: “Beyond ground

zero, Tambora’s sulfate dust veil disrupted the South Asian monsoons for three

consecutive years, a sustained weather crisis that created conditions for the birth of

modern, epidemic cholera in Bengal in 1817, which gradually spread across the globe in

the nineteenth century, killing millions” (D’Arcy Wood n. pag.).

In Indonesia, food became so scarce that migration became a requirement. Some

wandered searching for food, and others sold themselves into slavery for a few pounds of

rice; it is estimated that around 376,275 citizens from the island of Sumbawa abandoned

their homes to search for food on neighboring islands (Sigurdsson and Carey 21). Need

for food as well as labor and the desire to flee areas of infection drove many to migrate:

“In Western Europe, some hundreds of thousands perished from hunger and disease,

while great waves of rural environmental refugees, driven from their homes by Tamboran

weather, invaded the cities or headed east to Russia and west to America,” but the

situation in North American was not much better as farmers “left New England in droves

for the promised lands of Ohio and Pennsylvania ... ” (D’Arcy Wood n. pag).

The fallout of such severe conditions was predictable. Social unrest (stressed even more by the continuation of the Napoleonic wars and other geopolitical concerns), government turmoil, and crime rates showed marked spikes. D’Arcy Wood describes how the food crisis in Europe as well as Asia led to governmental instability, especially in colonized regions, which resulted in increasing criminal and black market economies:

[F]irst, by weakening the European colonial administration and

creating a years-long food crisis for the local population, the Tambora

disaster altered the political balance of power in South-East Asia,

strengthening the indigenous systems of piracy and slavery against

westernizing influences ... . Across the mountains in southwest China,

imperial control weakened during the famines of the Tambora period,

spawning ethnic rebellion against the Qing Dynasty, and allowing the

opium trade to flourish in the narco-state of Yunnan, which later became

the global center of poppy production. (n. pag.)

As the governments in both Europe and European-controlled regions weakened or shifted as factions gained or lost support from a starving populace, piracy and the opium trade, like cholera, found fertile ground for growth. These changes, both violently and non- violently instigated, created an unstable landscape wherein political and governmental demonstration and protest were common.

Many English citizens’ lives changed due to an incident that occurred a world

away, and the resulting trauma was deeply felt by all classes, but especially the poor as

D’Arcy Wood argues.

In the midst of all this seeming chaos, in the summer of 1816, Percy Shelley,

Mary Shelley, Byron, and Polidori become acquainted and proceed to spend a good

amount of time with each other. Frequently housebound, they spent a good of time

indoors philosophizing, discussing writing and politics, writing, reading, gossiping, and

playing games. What resulted from their journeys of that summer and from their extended

stay beside Lake Geneva were some of the second generation Romantic period’s most appreciated and criticized works: “Mont Blanc,” Frankenstein, “Darkness,” and The

Vampyre respectively.

Although there is some debate as to when the Romantic period began and ended, many scholars suggest that the years of 1780-1840 represent the Romantic period (Pirie vii); others would claim the years of 1780-1831 (Muir 1-14), and still others would assert the years of 1785-1830 or 1785-1835 (Stillinger and Lynch 1; Galperin 376). No matter the exact span, the years of 1815 and 1816 fall relatively safely within the latter period of

Romanticism, specifically during the second generation of Romanticism. It could be argued that the second generation Romantic poets were influenced by a natural environment that the first generation Romantic poets were not influenced by. This possibility is especially worth considering with the Romantics, who inhabit one of the shortest spans of literary periods, since their work, more than that of many other epochs, is often associated with themes of nature and the natural world; thus, they may have been more aware of and sensitive to its alterations during a time when there were serious

climactic and environmental changes. Therefore, it might then be possible to suggest that this environment also influenced second generation Romantics’ works in ways divergent from works by first generation Romantics. This topic will be explored more in the following chapter.

CHAPTER 2: THE SECOND GENERATION’S NATURE

Great is the distress, Oh Lord, have pity. -Translation from a German medallion created in remembrance of the 1816 famine. Henry Stommel and Elizabeth Stommel, Volcano Weather, The Story of 1816, The Year Without a Summer

Romanticism has long focused on the works of William Wordsworth, Samuel

Taylor Coleridge, Lord George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and

William Blake. This thesis ventures a little further and includes Mary Shelley with Percy

Shelley and Byron in its discussion of second generation Romanticism. In doing so, this thesis investigates the description of nature in first generation Romantic works by

Wordsworth and Coleridge in comparison to descriptions of nature in second generation

Romantic; in doing so, this thesis attempts to show a wider variety of experience with nature. The first generation Romantic authors discussed in this section are Coleridge and

Wordsworth, and the second generation Romantic authors discussed are Byron and Percy

Shelley.

Coleridge and Wordsworth were chosen for inclusion in this thesis for their very early work in the Romantic era, written when they were around the same age as Percy

Shelley and Byron were when they wrote “Mont Blanc” and “Darkness” respectively.

Much of Coleridge and Wordsworth’s work is considered foundational Romanticism, potentially capturing the essence of Romanticism in its beginning stages (Moore 274-

275).

Like Byron and Percy Shelley, Wordsworth also traveled through France and a

portion of the Alps; he describes these walking tours in “Book Sixth” of The Prelude,

written and revised throughout Wordsworth’s life in remembrance of his 1790 summer

vacation spent with an Oxford peer, and “Descriptive Sketches,” written from 1791 to

1792 while remembering the same walking tour.

“Descriptive Sketches”

In Wordsworth’s very early work titled “Descriptive Sketches,” the presence of

nature is powerful and vast yet comforting and merciful. Recorded while completing a

walking tour through the Alps and France, “Descriptive Sketches” describes the

reflections and emotions of the traveler when wandering through the Alps. The piece

relates the narrator’s journey as he nears the Alps, passing through pastoral villages,

lakeside settlements, and untouched landscapes. He faces powerful meetings with nature

and shares with the reader his reflections on the people who live within the Alps’

expansive and sublime territory. When the narrator encounters nature in “Descriptive

Sketches,” it is overwhelmingly described in a positive light. Nature typically appears as

an element that greets, as a balm to the world of man, as a nurturer, or as a cleansing

force, but rarely as a force that is terrifying or dangerous.

As the narrator travels, he finds that many elements greet and welcome him. To

the lone traveler, “every passing zephyr whispers joy” (line 16) and “he views the sun uplift his golden fire” (line 31). From both the wind and sun, the narrator finds welcome.

The wind whispers welcomes, and the sun blesses him with warm sunlight along his long trail into higher cooler altitudes. However, these natural elements do more than welcome

him; they also serve as a balm to the world of men that he has left behind on his walking journey.

These elements also ease the burdens and sufferings he has obtained while separated from wild and pastoral nature in a human city. The poem opens with the lines

“Were there, below, a spot of holy ground / Where from distress a refuge might be found

/ And solitude prepare the soul for heaven,” then surely God had given that holy ground

to mankind (lines 1-3). It seems to be the narrator’s wish that in venturing into the wild

he might find shelter from the human world where he could cleanse himself. In the lines

following this wish, he finds it fulfilled: “Sure, nature’s God that spot to man had given /

Where falls the purple morning far and wide / In flakes of light upon the mountainside”

(lines 4-6). Claiming that this refuge from distress is not only present, but also a gift from

God, the narrator explains that this holy ground can be found in a morning scene and the

broken fragments of light on the side of a mountain. He places the balm to his soul in

landscapes he sees around himself as he travels, but he also describes other elements as

balms to distress. In another scene, the narrator explains the relief that the aged angler

experiences when the “flood ... sweeps away his tears” (line 62). It seems that the

angler’s world-weariness is even something that nature can soothe, in effect calming his

soul. The narrator elaborates, “Yet are thy softer arts with power indeed / To soothe and

cheer the poor man’s solitude” (lines 141-142). Though the journey is lonely, the traveler

need never feel alone as nature is a comforting, almost physical presence that can raise

the traveler’s spirits, taking on the beginnings of a nurturing presence that he fleshes out

later in the poem

Almost as a Mother Earth character, nature to the narrator cares for him and other travelers he sees upon his journey. “Summer’s kindliest ray” illuminates his road (line

259), and the traveler “rejoic[es] in the glory of her rays” (line 322); making his journey easier, nature is described by the narrator as a caring force that he is grateful for, and nature is described as adjusting to the traveler’s needs. For example, the clouds that move over the noon sun bring him solace from the sun’s intense rays: “Moves there a cloud o’er mid-day’s flaming eye? / Upward he looks—‘and calls it luxury:’ / Kind Nature’s charities his steps attend” (lines 23-25). Grateful to nature for its attention to his needs, the narrator does not describe an ambivalent nature, but one that deliberately seeks to aid his journey. This nature, according to the traveler, goes so far as to shield him from the hot, intense noon sun. When journeying by night, the traveler “blesses the moon that comes with kindly ray, / to light him shaken by his rugged way” (lines 33-34). In other conditions, such as during the night, the narrator again relates the kindness of nature in lighting his way through the jagged terrain. Making the journey easier, God is depicted as sheltering “Nature’s child” from the sun (line 434), and his road is illuminated when all is dark; “faithful Nature guard[s]” not just the records of the traveler’s ancestors, but also him (lines 441 and 488).

As positive as much of the language in “Descriptive Sketches” is about the power of nature to welcome, heal, and protect the wandering traveler, there is no lack of language that positions nature’s power in a more sinister and threatening light. However, the appearances in the poem of a truly sublime nature are undermined in the conclusions of these scenes, when their power to terrify is eliminated or when the men in these scenes take an active role in re-envisioning these landscapes. In one scene, the narrator describes

a scene near Uri’s Lake, where the descent of darkness during the middle of the day seems to bring with it an ominous presence:

Swoln with incessant rains from hour to hour,

All day the floods a deepening murmur pour:

The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight:

Dark is the region as with coming night: (lines 270-273)

The narrator, unlike in previous instances, describes nature as an oppressive force, relentless and consuming. The river of rain is described not just as a tireless force, but also as one that creates an auditory reverberation that continues to swell. The rains even block out the daytime sky at the beginning of summer, subsequently preventing the narrator from deriving any comfort from his surroundings and creating an even more ominous tone with the suggestion that the rain has changed the narrator’s reality from day to night. These dark musings are interrupted though by a swift change in weather:

But what a sudden burst of overpowering light!

Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,

Glances the wheeling eagle’s glorious form!

Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine

The wood-crowned cliffs that o’er the lake recline;

Those lofty cliffs a hundred streams unfold.

At once to pillars turned that flame with gold:

… And who, that walks where men of ancient days

Have wrought with godlike arm the deeds of praise,

Feels not the spirit of the place control,

Or rouse and agitate his laboring soul? (lines 274-280 and 289-292)

At the abrupt break in the rain, golden beams of sunlight break through the gray

atmosphere, illuminating the landscape and the narrator’s wary musings. Excitement

appears again in his tone, and the return of the light is heralded as a victor in battle,

suggesting that the forces of light triumphed over the forces of darkness. In the sunlight, a

majestic eagle spirals in the sky, similar to the birds of prey referenced earlier in the passage which he correlated with freedom, independence, and contentment (lines 260-

263). The eagle’s return to the sky then marks the narrator’s release from fear and

trepidation that the pounding rain and consuming darkness instilled. Looking to the east,

the narrator sees the sunlight illuminate the nearby cliffs, burning as bright as a flame.

Inspired by this observation, he is emotionally moved to reflect on the power of

landscapes to recall history and fill the viewer not with dread, as with the pouring rain,

but with wonder and spiritual arousal. Nature in this piece is both threatening and comforting as well as inspiring. Though the narrator describes being confronted by an uncertain fate in the darkness of the rain, the scene is transformed when the storm abruptly ends and light once again in powerful rays. These rays elicit from the narrator the more powerful emotions of remembrance, awe, and connection; they chase away not just the danger of the storm, but also the danger of dark thoughts.

In a later scene, the narrator again describes a confrontation with nature, but he

now describes the experience a peasant has when leisurely lounging on the side of one of

the Alpine mountain:

And when a gathering weight of shadows brown

Falls on the valleys as the sun goes down;

And Pikes, of darkness named and fear and storms,

Uplift in quiet their illumined forms,

In sea-like reach of prospect round him spread,

Tinged like an angel’s smile all rosy red—

Awe in his breast with holiest love unites,

And the near heavens impart their own delights. (lines 470-477)

The peasant’s restful solitude is interrupted by ominously growing shadows that form from the lessening of the sun’s rays. The sun sinks lower, and his view of the surrounding landscape shrinks, cutting off his vision from everything but the immediate valley. As the day gives way to the night, the mountain peaks, so majestic only moments before, seem to rise higher when illumed from below, promising violent weather. All these elements merge to create a foreboding scene. Nature itself seems to become threatening, almost sinister; however, his immediate feelings are replaced by the more comforting ones of tender love and awe. The peasant looks again around him and sees what surrounds him is not a dangerous force, but a scene of red beauty that suggests a spiritual presence. The sunset causes not a gasp of panic or fear, but a swelling in his breast of sacred love and wonder that are only amplified by the beauty he sees at being so close to the heavens.

When returning to his home located further down the mountain, the narrator claims that the peasant is no longer influenced by nature in a way that would make him fear it:

There, safely guarded by the woods behind,

He hears the chiding of the baffled wind,

Hears Winter calling all his terrors round,

And, blest within himself, he shrinks not from the sound. (lines 488-491)

At his back, the peasant is guarded by the forest he just descended as he looks at his

home, where his father and child wait for him. The wind speaks to him, warning him of

Winter’s coming. Winter brings with it all its terrors: Hunger, deprivation, cold, and

death. The peasant is not, however, intimidated by the warning; having conquered his

fear earlier on the mountaintop and felt wonder at the nature that surrounded him, he feels

within himself at peace with the inevitable change of the seasons. Unlike the buffeting

rain that pounded the earth earlier, this sound of warning from the wind does not strike

fear in the heart of the listener; again, the peasant has faced down two darker moments of

trepidation and re-seen the beauty and wonder of the landscape around him. Rather than

feeling intimidated by the powerful forces around him, he feels both beauty in them and

safety from them.

“Descriptive Sketches” then portrays nature in a positive light; to the narrator and

the characters in the poem who encounter nature, it is not terrifying or intimidating;

rather, it is beautiful, caring, sheltering, and welcoming. These depictions of nature are

also present in “Book Sixth” of The Prelude.

“Book Sixth” of The Prelude

Discovered after Wordsworth’s death in 1850, The Prelude came to represent

Wordworth’s most important work as well as one of the seminal and central works of

first generation Romanticism (Stillinger and Lynch 322). Divided into multiple books that traced Wordworth’s educational progress as a poet, The Prelude identifies keys moments and reflections from his life. In “Book Sixth,” he describes the same walking tour outlined in “Descriptive Sketches,” but focuses instead upon different memories of

the journey. In “Book Sixth,” two parts, namely “Human Nature Seeming Born Again”

and “Crossing Simplon Pass,” depict nature in ways similar to “Descriptive Sketches” and in other ways singularly its own, but nature remains a positive force.

Short though it is, “Human Nature Seeming Born Again” takes its name from its last line, the culmination of Wordworth’s reflections when describing his inspiration to travel to the Alps on a walking tour; in the poem, Wordsworth, the narrator, describes how this decision incited disapproval from those who expected him to spend his extended summer vacation preparing for final examinations in his final year at Oxford (lines 323-

333). He is undeterred though, claiming, “But Nature then was Sovereign in my mind”

(line 334), a line that represents much of the two pieces this thesis presents from “Book

Sixth.” Throughout both pieces, the relationship between Nature and the Mind is tangled and untangled, and imagination’s power is explored.

At the end of “Human Nature Seeming Born Again,” Wordsworth explains that his desire at the time to explore the Alps, especially those in France, was no doubt driven by the hope he feels for France’s “golden hours” of its Revolution (lines 337-341).

Though what inspires him is social in nature, it is not Wordsworth’s desire to see the brimming cities in France; rather, he wishes to leave the social world behind, but for his walking companion, and travel to nature, bringing with him his “hopes” of “human nature seeming born again” (line 336 and line 342). His reference to “human nature” is most likely calling upon its standard meaning of human character, but the phrase also represents the combination of the two unique elements “Human Nature Seeming Born

Again” introduces: Nature and humans. It is his situation Wordsworth describes in the

beginning of the poem, and it is nature that he leaves humans for in order to see if it can meet the expectations of his imagination.

This theme of met and unmet expectations is carried over in a later section of

“Book Sixth” titled “Crossing Simplon Pass.” In “Crossing Simplon Pass,” Wordsworth describes nature in more depth, no longer speaking of his desire to see it, but of his experience when seeing it. Throughout the piece, Wordsworth describes nature as an usurper, replacing imaginations of the mind with reality; this theme becomes clear early in the work:

From a bare ridge we also first beheld

Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved

To have a soulless image on the eye

Which had usurped upon a living thought

That never more could be. (lines 525-529)

When seeing Mont Blanc’s summit clearly for the first time, Wordsworth does not relate traditional and expected feelings of awe, inspiration, or amazement; his first impression, instead, is one of disappointment. In seeing the reality of Mont Blanc, he can no longer maintain the fantasy of what it looks like and what it should inspire. This “real” nature is

“soulless,” lacking the living quality of the Mont Blanc that had previously existed in his imaginings. Nature, thus, is secondary to human imagination, to the human mind that spins thoughts of what nature is and how it appears; it is then domesticated by the human mind, a point Wordsworth revisits in his later description of Winter, which he describes as “a well-tamed lion” that “walks” and “make[s] sport” around human dwellings (lines

539-540). This winter, present still in summer in the snow that falls from the Alps’

heights, is not wild, though it still maintains its majestic appearance; it has been gentled in behavior, no doubt by the heat of summer. It “makes sport” among the homes nearby, but Wordsworth’s wording implies less of a malicious sport-making and more of a playful cavorting. Soon, however, Wordsworth’s initial disappointment is appeased by the mountain’s “dumb cataracts,” “streams of ice,” “mighty waves,” and “rivers broad and vast” (lines 531-533), and he and his companion are soon “reconciled ... to realities”

(line 534). These sublime features soon satisfy his expectations of the famous Mont

Blanc of the Alps, though his language suggests that some negotiation on his part is necessary for closure. This usurping nature is not unnatural, and therefore potentially negative, but a less magnificent force than the amazing force of the human imagination and ability to create visions of places never seen. This depiction of nature is then one that is diminished, less than its competitor, human ideas; it is not wild, raw, and abandoned, but controlled and predictable, though still beautiful.

Nature is not just depicted as a domesticated usurper, it is also described in

“Crossing Simplon Pass” as an integral part of a healthy ecosystem:

There small birds warble from the leafy trees

The eagle soars high in the element;

There doth the Reaper bind the yellow sheaf.

The Maiden spread the hay-cock in the sun,

While Winter like a well-tamed lion walks

Descending from the Mountain to make sport

Among the Cottages by beds of flowers. (lines 535-541)

Each line from this section describes a new character; beasts, humans, and abstract

characterizations of nature are detailed. Each plays its role in the described ecosystem;

the birds make their characteristic noises and fly through the sky, the Reaper and the

Maiden work the land, and Winter leaves the wilds of the Mountain for the domesticity of

the human environment. In essence, the birds live their lives unconstrained by humans,

but still existing for the enjoyment the sounds and sight of them give. The human workers

harvest the land and reap its bounty in their rightful stewardship, and the seasons respect

their temporal boundaries, waxing and waning when they should. Finally, the wild

Mountain and the civilized Cottages exist in close proximity to each other, making the

boundaries between the two unclear. Wordsworth thus depicts a nature that can co-exist

with man; in fact, it seems likely that the characters in this ecosystem are tied together,

each fulfilling its necessary role to create a scene of harmony.

As Wordsworth’s journey continues, he presents a nature that acts as a source of

education. This nature teaches its travelers:

Whate’er in this wide circle we beheld,

Or heard, was fitted to out unripe state

Of intellect and heart. With such a book

Before our eyes we could not chuse but read

Lessons of genuine brotherhood, the plain

And universal reason of mankind,

The truths of Young and Old. (lines 542-548)

Wordsworth and his companion find before them a nature that opens to them like a text to be read, referring no doubt back to “Human Nature Seeming Born Again” where he

describes the disapproval of certain people in his decision to abandon his studies for the

lessons he can learn in nature, and he finds nature a willing teacher, suggestively a better

teacher than any book he could read for study. Nature serves as a book that is read in

simply looking upon it, addressing the ignorance of both mind and heart. This nature, however, is not just a teacher, but it is also a teacher that imparts the lessons of “genuine brotherhood,” the “universal reason of mankind,” and “the truths of Young and Old.”

This nature then teaches its kinship to man, its familial relationship to mankind in a sense of united existence. It also teaches of universal and not local reason and thought, the wonder of mankind’s ability to think and theorize. Lastly, it teaches of truths, both Old and Young truths, emphasizing nature’s eternal quality that is later challenged. These depictions of nature are overwhelmingly positive and represent a nature that is wise and caring of humankind.

Like The Prelude itself, “Crossing Simplon Pass,” ends the way it began, emphasizing its cyclical nature. The disappointment and sense of unmet of expectations that Wordsworth and his companion experience when first seeing Mont Blanc are repeated when they attempt to cross Simplon Pass, the place within their walking tour from which the title of the section is taken. Again, for Wordsworth, nature cannot live up to human expectation, as it is formed by imagination. After becoming separated from their guide, Wordsworth and his companion venture on their own to regain their party.

They wander off course, and begin to feel trepidation at the thought that they may be lost.

Encountering a peasant, they are relieved that he can tell them the way back and then amazed at what they next hear: “that we had crossed the Alps” (line 592). Their reason may have told them that crossing the Alps would be no easy journey and that it might

bring with it revelations in the scenery they felt surrounded by, but to their

disappointment, until the peasant traveler told them, they had not realized they had

achieved such a feat with such little effort exerted and such little inspiration at the

experience. Deflated, Wordsworth wonders not at the marvels of nature, but instead upon

the power of the mind:

Imagination …

… That awful Power rose from the Mind’s abyss

Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps

At once some lonely Traveller ...

... to my conscious soul I can now say,

“I recognize thy glory”; in such strength

Of usurpation, when the light of sense

Goes out, but with a flash has revealed

The invisible world .... (lines 593, 595-597, 599-603)

To Wordsworth, it is not nature whose power he revels in and expounds upon, but imagination’s. Like a fog, it captures the lone traveler in its influence, and when imagination’s fancy is disappointed by reality, when Wordsworth realizes they have already anticlimactically traversed the Alps, he understands for a moment the inner world he had constructed and the power of the human imagination to create such a world. Thus, the real world, the real nature around Wordsworth, is nothing compared to the original impression he had of the Alps and the power of his and all human minds to imagine a nature that exceeds the abilities and wonder of the one he is surrounded by. This nature is then subordinate to the imagined world and to the power of mankind to pre-envision it;

again it is depicted as diminished in its capacity to live up to human expectations of it, and it seems to be lacking some fundamental feature that would make it as awe-inspiring as it should be.

These melancholy and yet extraordinary realizations do not hold them long, and soon Wordsworth and his companion catch up to their guide and party and make observations of the scenery that suggest that the nature they see is both coordinated and eternal. Wordsworth, in describing the scenes and natural features around them, including the woods, waterfalls, winds, torrents, rocks, crags, streams, clouds, and Heavens, describes them as:

... all like the workings of one mind, the features

Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,

Characters of the great Apocalypse,

The types and symbols of Eternity,

Of first and last, and midst, and without end. (lines 637-641)

He observes first that this nature is coordinated and seems to have a design, potentially a

Great Design. Like the ecosystem he observed earlier in the poem where animals, humans, and seasons co-existed in brotherhood and shared existence, he sees later within nature itself a collective organization where all the parts of Mont Blanc give it one aspect and unify it into one mind, one face. This depiction of nature normalizes it, making it seem “natural” and as it should be, since it is in harmony with all its aspects.

Additionally, this nature is both apocalyptic and eternal; its features were present at the beginning of mankind, are present during Wordsworth’s reflections, and will continue to be present after man, after the Apocalypse Wordsworth refers to. Its rocks, boulders, and

endless streams and rivers are its symbols of eternity, never living and yet never dead,

soulless as he emphasized earlier; this description of nature would make it seem more

powerful and more intimidating if but for a question the poem implies. What remains

ambiguous at the end of this passage though is the suggestion that this real world is not

eternal, for it has physical form, and physical forms end. However, imagination lacks an

earthly form; it is abstractly housed in the minds of humans, but Wordsworth seems to

imply that it exists in its own right, only to be illuminated by wondering minds. If this suggestion Wordsworth offers is true, then nature is once again mastered by the human mind, and the truly eternal force is imagination, showing once again that Wordsworth’s portrayal of nature suggests that humans can have mastery over it, and what can be mastered is less likely to inspire fear.

These sections of “Book Sixth” from The Prelude suggest that Wordsworth and

potentially first generation Romanticism viewed nature as a place to escape to, a

domesticated usurper of imagination, a necessary part of the ecosystem, a teacher of

ancient wisdom, a subordinate to imagined nature, a designed and coordinated structure,

and a force less eternal than the power of imagination.

“Darkness”

The descriptions of nature in “Descriptive Sketches” and “Book Sixth” of The

Prelude are largely different from several works within the canon of second generation

Romanticism, namely “Darkness” by Byron, “Mont Blanc” by Percy Shelley, and

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Though one scene in “Descriptive Sketches” comes eerily

close to a scene Byron describes years later in his piece “Darkness,” suggesting that

Byron may in fact be alluding to the piece, their treatment of nature in these scenes is

quite different.

The critical and scholarly literature available in regards to “Darkness” by Byron

tends to focus on its apocalyptic imagery, its accessibility to an ecocritical reading

(McKusick n. pag.) and its possible expression of Byron’s tumultuous inner landscape

resulting from social exile. Most literature has focused on other works he wrote during

the same time, such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III, “The Prisoner of Chillon,”

“The Dream,” and even “Mazeppa”; however, scientific works focused on discussing the

meteorological concerns of 1815 to 1818, especially in the summer of 1816, have

remarkably made the connection to “Darkness” by incorporating lines if not the entire

text from “Darkness” in the preface of their works (Oppenheimer 1) while Gillen D’Arcy

Wood and Jonathan Bate seem to be the only two literary scholars to argue such a

connection. Therefore, the connection between weather as a force of nature and this work

has previously been made; however, it has not been discussed in depth or connected to

Byron’s relationship with the environment in the summer of 1816.

Written sometime between July 21 and August 25, 1816, Byron’s short poem

“Darkness” portrays a modern landscape sliding into an apocalypse brought about by the

death of the sun, the moon, and the stars (Vail 184). “Darkness” was written after Byron

had left the Alps, finished his “Alpine Journal” with Hobhouse, and arrived safely in

Geneva, Italy; there he was reminded of the larger social nature of the meteorological

irregularities the region had been experiencing (Vail 184, 188-189). As stated earlier,

Vail argues that Byron most certainly would have been aware of the feverish distress that consumed a large portion of the European population, particularly Italy and England,

during the Bologna Prophecy. Therefore, it is not odd that if the inspiration for the poem

really came from a dream that it should be so dark and hopeless. The poem focuses just

as much on the death and betrayal of nature and as it does on the social ramifications of

the end of the world. It is the moments where he describes nature that are of special

interest to this thesis.

Two of Byron’s pieces written during this time period began with an acknowledgement to their inception in a dream, “Darkness” and “The Dream.” One focuses on an apocalyptic world and the other on a relationship destined to be unfulfilled.

There has been no shortage of scholars willing to acknowledge that “The Dream” most certainly refers to Byron’s romantic relationship with his sister, but as yet, there has been too little scholarship suggesting that his other dream may also be based in reality, a reality of terrifying meteorological phenomenon and social unrest. The opening lines of

Byron’s “Darkness” establish the setting for the piece and portray a world with startling similarities to the one he had been experiencing on his journey:

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,

Rayless and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day. (lines 1-6)

In this dream, “which was not all a dream,” but in fact is suggested to be based upon

Byron’s reality, the sources that create light no longer exist. They are not described as

deliberately wishing to harm mankind; rather, the loss of the sun, moon, and stars seems

to be related to their disregard for man, to their lack of concern for man’s survival, a point emphasized later in the passage. The moment where this event occurred is not detailed; instead, the reader and dreamer arrive at the same time to experience the end of the world together. The death of the sun, stars, and later revealed the moon echo eerily in the post-Tamboran landscape. Reports showed that the sun was of a paler aspect, sunspots—some quite large—disfigured the view of the sun, a lunar eclipse blocked out the moon for hours during the summer, and disbursed volcanic ash and debris circled globe for three years after Mt. Tambora’s eruption in 1815. Therefore, the method of apocalypse in “Darkness” is a loss of light, the worst global symptom of the volcanic eruption that converged un-fortuitously with the emergence of large sunspots during the time this piece was written, suggesting that Byron’s writing may have in fact been influenced by the weather.

The last two lines of the excerpted introduction to the poem discuss two other startling features of this apocalypse: the emergence of an artic landscape and the continuation of days that brought no change. In the first, the “icy earth” is a logical result of the absence of the sun; after all, the sun provides the heat necessary for everything from agriculture to social practices; however, as an audience of Byron’s time may be more aware than a modern audience, the year 1816, especially the summer of 1816, was especially cold, and the nexus of much of the meteorological phenomenon centered over the Alpine region Byron had just finished traveling through. In the Alps, Byron noted on many occasions in his journals and letters of the presence of a good deal of snow and ice, glaciers and avalanches, as well as mist and fog. By the time he had reached Geneva,

Italy and ended his Alpine journey, he had seen much ice and snow. This “icy earth” is

clearly not meant to be seen as a comforting source of nature; rather, it is a feature of

nature that is threatening, especially since its long-term consequences imply many more problems. Second, Byron mentions in his dream that each day continued on undisturbed—time did not end—but no change greeted the day. Each day was as the one before, and there was no break in the emerging blackness of eternal night. This repetition of days reads eerily similar to the journals of Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Byron during their stay near each other beside Lake Geneva. Day after day, from July 26th until

August 25th, the three find themselves experiencing the same rainy weather that kept them trapped indoors the day before. They stay up all hours of the day and night, reading, writing, and talking, since the sun’s cues about behavior appropriate for certain times of day were dimmed or obscured. On days when venturing out was possible, their actions

followed a repetitious pattern: Byron and Percy Shelley would go out in the boat, hoping

to avoid rain, and Mary Shelley would stay at home, visiting with Polidori or Claire or reading and corresponding alone. Thus, each day continued largely the same as the one before, and these days were largely absent of a typical warm and bright summer sun

(Mary Shelley’s Journal 53-61).

Later in the poem, Byron makes an eerie reference to those who would have been considered fortunate in this new environment: “Happy were those who dwelt within the eye / Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch; / A fearful hope was all the world contain’d” (lines 16-18). Ironically, in the environment that Byron has imagined, it would be lucky to be near a volcano, but in his own time, though no continent was free of the fallout due to Mount Tambora, the region that suffered the most was the one closest to the volcano. The “fearful hope” that the world still contained was of surviving the

resulting famine, floods, loss of trade, influx of disease, freezing temperatures, and social

unrest, not to mention the Bologna Prophecy (Vail 183). However, this “hope” reads less

like the Christian concept of hope, of trusting in God’s care to see the worst through, than

like the ancient Greek concept of hope, such as when Pandora opened her jar letting out

the great plagues to man, but closed it in time to prevent the worst plague to man from

falling out of the box—hope. The ancient Greek concept of hope emphasizes the frailty

of man in deceiving himself into believing that some saving grace will change reality;

this deception, unlike the other evils that are released from the jar, is inborn, something

man does to himself and is not inflicted upon him, like disease or famine. Thus, this

“fearful hope” Byron claims “was all the world contain’d” is a denial of the reality the

people see coming upon them; it is the deception that the meteorological apocalypse they

see around them can end or be reversed, that nature may listen to their pleas for mercy.

As “Darkness” continues, Byron illustrates the social results of the catastrophe,

paying close attention to the scarcity of food:

All earth was but one thought—and that was death

Immediate and inglorious; and the pang

Of famine fed upon all entrails—men

Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh

The meagre by the meagre were devour’d. (lines 42-46)

Byron traces results from the immediate, such as the loss of light, to those effects longer in the making, such as the loss of food. In the seemingly eternal span of Earth’s life though, the loss of mankind must seem immediate, and to many in Byron’s dream, death would come immediately, especially due to the war he outlines in a previous stanza. The

role that famine plays in this dream reflects the real famine occurring at the time when this piece was written. In 1816, both in Europe and around the world, though some countries and regions were better off than others, famines were increasing and would only grow worse as prolonged effects of the volcanic eruption were felt. Percy Shelley, as shown previously, was also worried about famine due to late harvest and felt that the results of the poor weather they had been experiencing would be faced in the coming winter months of 1816 and 1817. What is not known, however, is how much of a role cannibalism played in the resulting food shortages, food cost inflation, crop failures, and agrarian riots of 1816. Byron clearly references cannibalism in the last two lines of this excerpt, but is it a logical yet ghastly conclusion for famine, or is it a reference to the reality of 1816? After all, 1816 is not just known as “Eighteen hundred and froze to death” (D’Arcy Wood). It is also referred to as “The last great subsistence famine of the western world” (Post). After 1816, many countries’ governments and peoples learned not to rely on agricultural seasons to survive, putting away enough for the winter and waiting for the spring and summer harvests to survive. After 1816, subsistence agriculture began to end, and governments and companies began to stockpile preserved food to have available in case the world or their region suffered from such poor harvests again, and they began to trade more seriously with other areas and countries for foods.

At the end of the poem, Byron’s dream moves from considerations of social conflict and war to return to nature. Thus, “Darkness” begins with nature and ends with nature. The presence of man occupies a fleeting moment in the poem, but what begins as the focus also ends as the focus, long after the death of every last man and woman in the dream:

... The world was void,

The populous and the powerful was a lump,

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—

A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay,

The river, lakes, and ocean all stood still,

And nothing stirr’d within their silent depths;

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d

They slept on the abyss without a surge—

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;

The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them—She was the Universe.

In this world, nature, present in the waters of rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans, is all that remains. Nature, like man, has also had to cannibalize parts of itself—the winds, the waves, and the clouds, but their more primordial ancestors still remain. All of nature seems impervious to the loss of man. Once powerful men and women remain as nothing but piles, and their ships lie rotting in the sea; neither their immortality through blood or through fame is possible. They are thus wiped from the catalogue of memory as each body decays and each ship’s mast falls piece-by-piece into the ocean.

It may be important to reveal here that according to journals, Wordsworth was a favorite of Percy Shelley’s, and his enthusiasm for Wordsworth influenced Byron to read

some of the first generation Romantic poet’s work. Which works they read though, while waiting out the weather in Villa Diodoti, is not much recorded in their journals or letters, but considering that “Descriptive Sketches” was written some years before and would have been available for purchase and that it recounted Percy Shelley’s favorite’s journey through the Alps, where he was also then traveling, suggests it potential as one of the works. Such a connection might explain same similar imagery at the end of “Darkness” with imagery with Wordsworth’s “Descriptive Sketches,” but they portray nature and the circumstances she creates in vastly different ways. Wordsworth about halfway through

“Descriptive Sketches” drafts a scene similar to one later repeated in “Darkness”:

A mighty waste of mist the valley fills,

A solemn seal whose billows wide around

Stand motionless, to awful silence bound:

Pines, on the coast, through mist their tops uprear,

That like to leaning masts of stranded ships appear. (Wordsworth lines

408-412)

“Darkness” later echoes this same imagery, referencing a still waste of ocean, the lack of wind to interrupt the stagnant air, the overwhelming silence of the landscape, and ships whose masts lie crooked or broken and who float stranded in the water. In this excerpt,

Wordsworth paints a desolate scene like that in Byron’s poem. Instead of a solid body of water, he sees in the mists an ocean, and instead of pine trees, he sees ship masts like stranded ships floating on this ocean. Through imagination, he envisions a desolate landscape, and Byron’s is just as imagined, in so far that it is the result of a dream. The mist is described as a waste, like a desert and not like the enchanting mists of fairy and

folk tales. The silence is not peaceful to encourage reflection in tranquility; rather, it is awful, a word both Byron and Wordsworth use to describe something massive, immovable, and imposing, as well as something potentially terrifying. The ships are stranded in the water, not going about their daily duties. Nature here then is illustrated as arresting yet void of life. It has stopped time, visible in the still air and motionless ships, but “Descriptive Sketches” contains a hint of Christian hope not found in “Darkness.”

Wordsworth references a “solemn seal,” but a seal for what? His next lines reveal a much happier conclusion than the finale to “Darkness”:

A single chasm, a gulf of gloomy blue,

Gapes in the center of the sea—and, through

That dark mysterious gulf ascending, sound

Innumerable streams with war profound.

Mount through the nearer vapours notes of birds,

And merry flageolet; the low of herds,

The bark of dogs, the heifer’s tinkling bell,

Talk, laughter, and perchance a churchtower knell. (Wordsworth 413-420)

Reading further, it is clear that the solemn seal was the mist itself, sealing off the valley so that the narrator at a higher elevation can only see the mist and not what lies below it.

However, through a single break in the mist, he can hear the sounds of life—rushing water, bird song, a shepherd’s flute, the lowing of cattle and tinkling of their bells, the bark of dogs, the sounds of people talking, and the sound of a church bell; the previous scene of a desolate landscape created by nature is broken by another imagined scene that the narrator cannot see, but only hear, yet it is a reminder that he imagined the mist as a

sea standing still and silent and trapping ships and that what lies below the imagined

world is the real world of people in the Alps living their daily lives, untroubled by what

he has fantasized. However, this conquering of nature and return to a present that man plays a part in is not present in Byron’s darkness.

In “Darkness,” Byron crafts a nature that both eerily echoes realities of his present

and shapes nature as a destructive and uncaring force that is immune to human despair. It

is not stopped from its path of destruction by a godlike force, nor does it stop itself in

pity. It is not bested by the cleverness of man or by his resilience. It is not revealed to be

a fantasy and thus broken by reality. It begins the ending of the world, and it remains at

the end of the apocalypse, with no “hope” of a return for humanity.

“Hymn Before Sunrise”

Published in 1802, after Wordsworth’s “Descriptive Sketches,” Coleridge’s

“Hymn Before Sunrise,” a poem that praises and wonders at the divinely inspired beauty

and power of Mont Blanc in the Vale of Chamouni, is another work of early first

generation Romanticism, but its later history of controversy grew to overshadow the

work’s initial acclaim; 32 years after its first publication, Coleridge faced criticism for the

piece when Thomas De Quincey wrote briefly of Coleridge’s “unacknowledged

obligations” (Paley 352; Hall 102-103). When compared to the work of German

Romantic poet Frederica Brun, it became starkly clear that not just the entire theme of the poem, but also eerily similar descriptions and exclamations owed their origin to Brun’s work. The evidence was so clear that some claimed Coleridge must have simply written a very poor translation and not given credit to the source (352).

This criticism thus makes it unclear if there is much in the piece that Coleridge wrote from inspiration when observing the Alps themselves; Paley’s investigations suggests that he did not find inspiration in the Alps but in a ten-day walking tour of the

Lake District where he was moved by the grandeur of a mountain, the Scafell, but also knew that the wonder he felt in observing its towering form would be nothing when compared to seeing Mont Blanc, which was three times the size of his own native mountain (354-355). It seems likely then that Coleridge relied on previously published works about the Alps and on his own feelings when viewing the Scafell, which would have been available to him, to describe the singular features of Mont Blanc (355). When submitting the piece for publication, Coleridge’s letter to William Sotheby complains about another author’s descriptions of nature being overly moralizing (353-354).

Coleridge sought instead to combine the experiences of his heart and mind when imagining the vision of the mountain: “Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels, that every Thing has a life of it’s [sic] own, and that we are all one Life” (qtd. in Paley 354). Hi conversation with Sotheby then suggests that

Coleridge was very deliberate in the way he chose to depict nature in “Hymn Before

Sunrise.” In critiquing another poet’s use of nature to moralize and positing his own belief in how nature should be integrated in poesy, Coleridge’s conceptions of nature in this piece in particular are worth investigating more closely. Therefore, for this thesis, what is of interest about the work is Coleridge’s description of nature and his tracing of nature’s divine origin, not that he owes much to another author for its inspiration and themes. In “Hymn Before Sunrise,” there is a celebration of nature that is both ominous

and spiritual. Nature in this hymn serves to illustrate Coleridge’s conception of God’s

power and great design.

“Hymn Before Sunrise” opens before sunrise when the Alps would be a snow-

covered mass lightning in the early morning rays of the sun against a dark backdrop of

sky that clings for as long as it can before being swept away. In his opening lines,

Coleridge conveys an ominous and dark impression of Mont Blanc, starkly in contrast

with its name, as well as of the surrounding darkness present before dawn:

... O sovran Blanc!

The Arve and Arveiron at thy base

Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful Form!

Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines,

How silently! Around thee and above

Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black,

An ebon mass: methinks thou piercest it. (lines 3-9)

Establishing Mont Blanc as the highest mountain point with sovereign authority over the other also towering peaks, Coleridge focuses on the impression Mont Blanc has on the viewer. The narrator’s depiction of Mont Blanc and its surrounding pre-dawn darkness is largely monochromatic; no descriptions of colors other than black and white alter the reader’s vision of this battle between land and sky and are only further solidified in later references that the narrator makes to the conflict: “Thou first and chief, sole sovereign of the Vale! / O struggling with the darkness all the night, / And visited all night by troops of stars” (lines 29-31). The all-encompassing darkness that emerges with the setting of the sun is describes as a devouring force that enters into combat with the mountain every

night, but the mountain’s allies, the stars that shine with white light, cast a glow over the

mountain that keeps it from being consumed. Like the coming dawn of sunlight, the

mountain breaks through the sky, thrusting upward, unaffected by gravity and defiant of

forces that attempt to suppress it.

When the narrator imaginatively looks again at Mont Blanc, seeing it anew, he sees that dawn’s rays have settled in a mantle over the mountain, and the battle is over:

... But when I look again,

It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine,

Thy habitation from eternity!

O dread and silent Mount! I gaze upon thee,

Till thou, still present to the bodily sense,

Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer

I worshipped the Invisible alone. (lines 10-16)

Settling around the mountain, sunlight houses the peak and sides of the mountain in what the narrator terms a “crystal shrine.” The dawn light, no doubt reflecting off of the ice and snow on the sides of Mont Blanc, creates a glittering house of spiritual homage.

Gazing at the mountain, no longer overwhelmed by the peak’s immoveable, eternal quality or by the engulfing darkness, the narrator can no longer focus on the mountain itself, but instead centers his gaze upon an internal landscape where a spiritual connection supplies him with wonder for what he determines as proof of God’s existence. He finds his “dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused” in the presence of a force revealed by the grandeur of the mountain (line 21). The mountain comes to represent for the narrator sublime proof that God exists and is present in his creations. Pushing back the darkness and refusing to

bow down to its weight and density, the mountain rejects the threat inherent in the

darkness, and through the narrator’s connection to God at witnessing the power of the

mountain, the mountain becomes a symbol of hope and spiritual connection to all

“Things,’ as Coleridge termed it.

As the passage continues, the narrator further develops this spiritual thread of

reflection in nature, reinforcing the idea of the mountain being a conduit for God as well

as a creation of God. The narrator asks the mountain, “Who sank thy sunless pillars deep

in Earth? / Who fill’d thy countenance with rosy light? / Who made thee parent of

perpetual streams?” (lines 36-38). This thread of questioning continues throughout the

hymn: “Who called you forth from night and utter death ... ?” (line 40) “Who gave you

your invulnerable life ... ?” (line 44) “And who commanded (and silence came), / Here let

the billows stiffen, and have rest?” (lines 47-48). This constant questioning is rhetorical

as the answer is known; God is the actor in question. Thus, Coleridge emphasizes with

each question that God has done these wondrous acts, and God is the one who is

responsible for shaping the mountain. His questions establish the mountain not just as a

powerful force, but also as a powerful force given life by the hand of God, showing that

the mountain has God’s blessing and reducing the likelihood of it being interpreted as a

source of fear and danger. This reasoning is supported by the latter part of the hymn’s

exclamations to God for being the force that created not just the mountain but all things.

To God, the narrator asks the mountains, its rivers, its plains, and its animal residents to

give credit for their creation and to give praise: “God! let the torrents, like a shout of

nations, / Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God! / God! sing ye meadows-streams with gladsome voice!” (lines 58-60). With this relation to God established, the mountain

becomes less a force of pagan and unincorporated might, battling against the dark sky to

supremacy, unmindful of those much smaller than itself; rather, it becomes one of God’s

creations, fulfilling its own purpose in a design only glimpsed in silent reverie. Nature in

the guise of the mountain, thus, is a connecting force between men and God and not,

according to the narrator, to be understood as a force that seeks to threaten and devour,

like the darkness overcome by dawn’s light and Mont Blanc’s peak.

“Mont Blanc”

It is believed that “Mont Blanc” was written after a walking tour that Percy

Shelley and Byron took at the end of July 1816 (Reiman and Fraistat 96) while visiting

the Vale of Chamouni and seeing Mont Blanc together for the first time. It is believed by

some scholars that “Mont Blanc” should be considered a reply to Coleridge’s “Hymn

Before Sunrise,” where Coleridge attributes the wonders around him when viewing Mont

Blanc to God (Hall 103). The critical and scholarly literature available in regards to

“Mont Blanc” by Percy Shelley tends to focus on the poem’s locodescriptive approach,

its cinematic-like framing and panning, and its moment of epiphany as it relates to Percy

Shelley’s ideas on poetry and its source. Focus has centered on his mythmaking (Bloom),

his emphasis on the sublime, and philosophical and technical issues within his writing,

but little has been done to connect the piece to the specific conditions present in the

summer of 1816 and how these circumstances could have contributed to its inception and

themes. Specifically, multiple depictions of nature, which seem to be in response to the

summer conditions of 1816, especially when considering Percy Shelley’s earlier brush

with death near Meillerie and his resulting fascination with life and death, in “Mont

Blanc” suggest that Percy Shelley sees it as an eternal and disinterested, destructive force,

a force that both inspires him and impresses upon him knowledge of his own insubstantiality and ephemeral existence.

Broken into five parts, the poem begins with a philosophical pondering of where imagination originates from and ends with the question what would a mountain without a man to see and imagine it be. This final question is near the heart of the poem, but Percy

Shelley’s descriptions of nature in this poem make this question possible. The narrator of the poem describes nature as a destructive force that exists with no interest in life or as an eternal force that bears no resemblance to the passing lives of men:

... The glaciers creep

Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,

Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice,

Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power

Have piled: dome, pyramid, pinnacle,

A city of death ...

… Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin

... vast pines are strewing

Its destined path, or in the mangled soil

Branchless and shattered stand ...

... The dwelling-place

Of insects, beasts, and birds, become its spoil:

Their food and their retreat forever gone,

So much of life and joy is lost. The race

Of man, flies far in dread; his work and dwelling

Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream,

And their place is not known. (Shelley 100-105, 107-111, 114-120)

The topic of the moving glaciers that occupies this section of the poem is also a topic that

Percy Shelley and Byron wrote about with some fascination in the letters to friends (The

Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley 512-513). Making a repeat appearance here, he stresses not just the fact that the glaciers migrate approximately a foot a year, which he mentioned in his journal, but also that they destroy anything in their paths. At the foot of the glacier, then, Percy Shelley sees not its geological feature, but crushed man-made features: the remains of a dome, a pyramid, and a pinnacle to form a city of death. At its feet lie crushed evidence of human civilization and monuments of posterity. It erased them from the landscape and leaves no evidence of them behind, but what a poet can imagine.

This mountain targets those in its path as it they were prey; animal, plant, and human fall victim to its unstoppable progress, its plodding journey to the ocean. To the narrator, the trees lie shattered and strewn on the ground, the homes and food of animals are consumed by the glacier, and even man understands his powerlessness and runs in fear, leaving behind his creations and home. The narrator claims that due to the glacier’s pitiless disregard, “much of life and joy is lost,” revealing that nature is seen as a force of overwhelming power that deliberately continues its path, regardless of the death and misery it leaves in its wake. It cares nothing for other life, including man, and even goes so far as to remove all traces of man from the Earth to “Vanish, like smoke ... And their place is not known.” This sentiment of nature consumes not just man, but it also cannibalizes other forces of nature; what seems to worse though is that it removes all evidence of man’s existence from the world, echoing themes from Byron’s “Darkness.”

The narrator’s nature is as awful and awesome as Coleridge’s, but Coleridge’s is also glorious, in that it was gifted to the world by God, whereas Percy Shelley’s owes not its existence to God, but to itself; it responds to no moral code or obligation and instead does as it pleases.

In a later section of “Mont Blanc,” Percy Shelley paints a picture of an overpowering and infinite nature. The words used by the narrator to describe the glacier, its rivers, its peaks, its ravines, and other features support that picture: “for ever,”

“ceaselessly,” “chainless,” “unsculptured,” “deep eternity,” “ceaseless,” “unresting,”

“unremitting,” “infinite,” “unearthly,” “unfathomable deeps,” “eternal,” “impregnable,”

“perpetual,” “voiceless,” and “infinite” (lines 9, 11, 22, 27, 29, 32,33, 39, 60, 62, 64, 75,

106, 109, 137, 140). This list of adjectives and adverbs is not exhaustive; rather, they were chosen for their referencing to a certain impression of nature, one of eternal and unrelenting existence. Considering the words the narrator has given, this nature continues constantly, never hesitating or pausing; it is unfettered and completely free, stopped by no walls or chains; it is incapable of being recreated in likeness, lending doubt to the ability of the narrator to have captured its entirety; it is timeless—both unborn and undying, but it also has no voice and apparently has no ears, but it is not mindless, as the narrator described earlier when relating how it seeks out its prey. One passage from

“Mont Blanc” supports this interpretation of nature:

The works and ways of man, their death and birth,

And that of him and all that his may be;

All things that move and breathe with toil and sound

Are born and die; revolve, subside and swell.

Power dwells apart in its tranquility

Remote, serene, and inaccessible. (lines 92-97)

A representation of Power, as Percy Shelley terms it, that the narrator thinks of when he sees the glacier, the glacier is impervious to man, separate and serene. On the other hand, man is caught in the cycle of birth and death as with all other biological nature, but the glacier is to the narrator omnipresent. Even the works of man are not spared from the cycle of life, these creations that are meant to ensure man’s immortality; they also are born and die or are destroyed by true immortal forms of nature, such as the glacier.

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus was begun in 1816 and finished by 1818; almost from its day of publication, the work achieved both positive and negative acclaim. Thus, the critical and scholarly literature available in regards to

Frankenstein is extensive, spanning both literary and performance mediums. The literature has primarily focused on the work’s use of light and dark, its commentary on education, its feminist readings, its depiction of the travel narrative, and its interest in scientific principles. Science fiction author and critic Brian Aldiss has noticeably said that it represents the first real work of science fiction and that science fiction as a genre can trace its roots back to Frankenstein. However, little has been said about the work’s relationship to the specific environment of 1816 and how this climate could have influenced its “monstrous birth” as well as the shaping of the work.

In a later edition, Mary Shelley included an introduction that explained its genesis. Inspired by a ghost story competition, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Byron, and

Polidori compete to craft the scariest tale. This legend of the ominous beginnings of

Frankenstein are common knowledge, but what is less known is that the reason the party

was left to their own creative devices, though they were vacationing in a beautiful locale,

was because they were trapped indoors due to inclement weather. In the introduction of

the revised version, Mary Shelley outlines how the weather changed after they arrived in

the Alps and how this change precipitated the creation of one of the most well-known works of Romanticism and science fiction: “At first we spent our pleasant hours on the lake or wandering on its shores; and Lord Byron, who was writing the third canto of

Childe Harold, was the only one among us who put his thoughts upon paper ... But it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house” (Frankenstein 6). In this claustrophobic environment of darkness, damp, and rain, these authors found the inspiration to tell tales of horror, no doubt influenced by the gloomy and overcast atmosphere that was a result of Mount Tambora’s eruption.

Throughout the novel, Mary Shelley uses devices such as weather to set scenes of suspense, despair, madness, inspiration, and rage. Dangerous and violent weather appear

quite frequently throughout the piece; it is difficult to go a page without seeing some

reference from a character about the weather or about the nature, such as the vast,

towering Alps, the tossing and turbulent sea, or the still and vice-like ice, Mary Shelley

crafts around the characters of the novel. She places Victor Frankenstein in a familiar

landscape, the very landscape, mountains, and weather that inspired the story, the Alps

and its famous peaks of Jura and Mont Blanc. Nature and weather throughout the piece

are both calm and healing and violent and destructive, but weather is depicted in several

pivotal scenes of the novel in telling ways: The scene of Victor’s inspiration, where he

realizes for the first times the power of lightning (36); the scene of grief and loss, where

Victor mourns the death of his brother William, murdered by the fiend (68); the scene of

escape and madness, where Victor flees from his guilt for his role in Justine’s death to

find connection with Mont Blanc in the Vale of Chamouni (83-84); the scene of destruction, where the creature burns the De Lacey’s cottage (123); and the scene of the ship’s imprisonment by ice in Antarctica, where the crew suffers at the hands of nature while waiting to be freed from the ice (188-189).

In these scenes, nature, mainly in the form of weather, presents a force quite different from other depictions of nature in the novel as well as depictions of nature in the previously described works of first generation Romanticists. In the first scene, where

Victor realizes a great clue about the natural world, he claims, “when I was about fifteen

... we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm” (36). Watching the sky, Victor is not scared; rather, he is fascinated with watching the lightning behind Mount Jura and listening to the echoing thunder. Suddenly, an old oak is hit by a blast of fire and is reduced to strips of wood. Victor relates to the reader, “I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed” (36). This spark lights within Victor an unholy fascination with experiments outside man’s domain, impressing upon him the power of electricity, though he sees it only at this point as a power for destruction. Once he understands the force of electricity also as force of creation, his fascination, germinated at a young age, experiences fruition.

Thus, this nature is not just depicted in this scene as destructive, but also as an ungodly temptation, luring men down paths of immoral deeds. It is the lure that snares the inquisitive scientist and encourages him to meddle in what he sees as God’s domain of creating life.

In the scene where Victor mourns the death of his brother while visiting the

location of the deed, he is surprised by a terrible storm the surrounds the entire area:

The storm appeared to be approaching rapidly ... The heavens were

clouded ... its violence quickly increased ... the darkness and storm

increased every minute, and the thunder burst with a terrific crash over my

head ... lightning dazzled my eyes, illuminating the lake, making it appear

like a vast sheet of fire ... The storm appeared at once ... in various parts of

the heavens. (68)

This chaotic and violent storm reflects Victor’s inner turmoil and his budding suspicions

that he may be responsible for the death of his brother, but what is more telling is that from this hellish scene of fire, lightning, and darkness comes the fiend he had begun to

suspect was involved in the crime: “I perceived in the gloom a figure while stole from

behind a clump of trees near me ... A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and

discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect,

more hideous than belongs to humanity ... The figure passed me quickly, and I lost it in

the gloom” (68). Thus, from this violent darkness broken by blinding flares of light, a

“filthy daemon” emerges; it is the scientist’s own creation emerging from the depths of

the night to take credit for the murder of a five-year-old child and then scurry back into

the night to wait for his next opportunity to kill. In this first moment that Victor has seen

his creation since he ran from it upon his operating table, Victor is confronted with the

truth of his fall from a moral path and confronted with his depraved curiosity. In this

scene, the weather becomes tied to the creature and to the truth of Victor’s unethical

experimentations. It is described in violent detail as having surrounded Victor, painting s

scene where he stands alone near a lake of boiling fire that moves in the swirling winds.

The nature Mary Shelley envisions seems demonic, dark, and supernatural, and it almost

seems protective of Victor’s “unnatural” creature.

It is ironic then that in a later scene, when Victor is faced with the guilt of his role

in Justine’s death, Victor flees to the wild, chaotic, and majestic mountain of Mont Blanc

in the village of Chamouni. Though he tried before his departure to alleviate his burdens

and anxiety by boating on peaceful days at the lake and walking around the land of his

childhood home, he finds no peace, but when he flees for the Alpine peaks, he finds a brief relief: “I suddenly left my home ... to forget myself and my ephemeral, because human [sic], sorrows” (83). Trying to lose himself in the vastness of Mont Blanc, Victor is momentarily consoled by the awe-inspiring beauty of the peaks and recollections of the adventurous spirit of his boyhood, but they do not last long: “Then again the kindly influenced ceased to act—I found myself fettered again to grief, and indulging in all the misery of reflection ... I alighted, and threw myself on the grass, weighed down by horror and despair” (84). Thinking to find a balm for his inner turmoil, Victor flees for the Alps, hoping they will help restore in him memories of happier times and forgetfulness in nature’s magnificence, but he is ruthlessly disappointed. The mountain, at first whispering maternal messages, abruptly halts any care it might have offered Victor, seemingly recognizing that Victor is not one of its flock, not one of the creatures over which it takes responsibility, and Victor is left alone to his misery, regret, and consuming despair. Running to the mountain, like a child to a parent, Victor desperately wishes for nature to alleviate his mental and emotional suffering, but it rejects him. This nature then

seems to care nothing for humanity and its troubles, going so far as to reject Victor when he runs to the mountain for assistance.

In a later scene when the creature is overcome with feelings of anger, rejection, and sadness, he sets out to have his revenge on the De Laceys for so violently rejecting him, their benevolent benefactor and unknown housemate. Hearing that the De Laceys are leaving the cottage where he first learned to speak and he learned of the world as well as of the kindness of men all because they discovered the creature speaking with the older

De Lacey, he is enraged and seeks to destroy the home the cottage had come to represent:

As the night advanced, a fierce wind arose from the woods, and quickly

dispersed the clouds that had loitered in the heavens: the blast tore along

like a mighty avalanche, and produced a kind of insanity in my spirits that

burst all bounds of reason and reflection. I lighted the dry branch of a tree,

and danced with fury around the devoted cottage, my eyes still fixed on

the western horizon, the edge of which the moon nearly touched. A part of

its orb was at length hid, and I waved my brand; it sunk, and, with a loud

scream, I fired the straw, and heath, and bushes ... The wind fanned the

fire, and the cottage was quickly enveloped in flames, which clung to it,

and licked it with their forked and destroying tongues. (123)

This nature is the most sinister depiction of nature thus far in the novel as it does not just tempt unknowing youths or hide murderous villains; this nature, in the form of wind, actually incites, encourages, and assists the creature in his destruction. It fans the flame of his anger, responds to his gesturing that signals the beginning of the act of destruction, and fans the physical flames with welcoming wind. Its “forked and destroying tongues”

are devilish and reptilian in nature, no doubt referencing the Christian serpent that led

mankind down the path of evil. This nature assists the “unnatural” creature and takes

delight in burning down a human dwelling, destroying one of the last connections that the

creature has to humanity as well as destroying a human structure encroaching on nature’s domain. In this scene of Frankenstein, it is suggested that nature is sentient and aware, that it is capable of deciding and acting on its decisions to aid those it so pleases. No longer disinterested or apathetic, this nature takes an active interest in the desires of others, but its motive is left ambiguous; it is helping the creature fulfill his own agenda or using the creature to fulfill its own?

There are other scenes worth noting, but the final scene where nature continues to take on a progressively sinister aspect is when the Antarctic ship finds itself trapped for

weeks as ice has formed around the ship, making exit impossible and only escape by foot

a possibility, though that choice can yield far deadlier results. Mountains of ice surround

the ship, and it is daily in danger of being “crushed in their conflict” (188). “The cold is

excessive,” Walton, the ship’s captain, reports, and already some of his crew have succumbed to the freezing temperatures and conditions. He is in danger of a mutiny, but

caring not for him or his crew, nature ignores their plight, killing more sailors the longer

the ship stays lodged. This nature is not passive; it is not overtly violent, yet it traps the

humans on the ship and kills them through exposure one-by-one. As can be expected, the

only one capable of surviving nature’s environs is the creature. Only he ventures out in

the ice and snow safely, seeming to come and go as he pleases. Both nature and Victor’s

creature seemed to be allied in the purpose of killing those they will and in doing so

without detection, silently, and stealthily. This nature at the end of Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein is truly frightening; it is no longer just the creature that is feared, but it is also nature that becomes a more visible and present actor; it seems to have become the creature’s accomplice and his ally, wholly disconnected from a force tied to God, a force of maternal nurturing, a force of beauty and delight. Nature has become another enemy.

A CONCLUSION UNCONCLUDED: A TALE OF TWO GENRES, ROMANTICISM

AND SCIENCE FICTION

This thesis has examined the severe climate changes brought about as a result of the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. These climate changes were investigated in both scientific and literary texts. After examining the research, it seems likely that Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Byron experienced an irregular summer in the Alps near Lake Geneva. Their journals and letters supplement their creative works to suggest that their pieces, Frankenstein¸ “Mont Blanc,” and “Darkness,” were influenced by the weather around them.

When comparing these three works of second generation Romanticism to three works of first generation Romanticism, namely “Descriptive Sketches,” “Book Sixth” of

The Prelude, and “Hymn Before Sunrise,” it seems that nature is depicted quite differently. Was the climate change due to the volcanic eruption the only source of this alteration? An affirmative answer to this question is unlikely, since many forces no doubt contributed to any change that may be present, including the war with Napoleon, but it is one factor that the literature had yet to consider in detail and in close examination; therefore, this thesis has attempted to address this absence in the literature.

In considering this thread of thought, of nature playing a role in the changes within a genre, it is worth re-looking at relationships between Romantic and science fiction texts. What is singular about Mary Shelley’s novel in particular is its uniqueness at its time of publication. Science in no way was alien to the Romantic environment,

which responded to the Age of Enlightenment, when scientific innovation and thinking

experienced a revival and rebirth, but Frankenstein is considered by many critics to be the first real work of science fiction (Aldiss), a field that has received little or insufficient attention since its inception. Mary Shelley’s work of Romantic science fiction, when

compared to the works of two other authors who wrote not only at the same time but also

in the same location, suggests that nature links two literary traditions; additionally, in

science fiction’s beginnings of Frankenstein to many modern (and frequently

apocalyptic) works, there seems to be a continual grappling with a changed depiction of

nature that may be worth exploring further.

This conclusion suggests that connections to later Romantic works and works of

science fiction, both early texts and modern texts, can be made; more discussion should

be present between the fields of Romantic studies and science fiction studies to realize a

stronger relationship between the often disassociated canons. This conclusion suggests

that threads may exist between apocalyptic or dystopian futures in science fiction and

later works of Romanticism, where literary depictions of nature seemed dark and

disturbing.

NOTES

1. Oxygen isotopes collected from the Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru suggest that

there was significant cooling in Peru, a cooling that remains unmatched by

any other year in the entire 1,500 years preserved in the ice core (Thompson

and Mosley-Thompson 485).

2. In the northwest region of Brazil, abnormal drought during the regular rainy

season was recorded as were the repercussions: a lack of available potable

water, livestock death, and crop failure (Chenoweth 2086).

3. In New England, reports indicate that winter ran long, and spring came late,

but it was abnormally divided into a period of extended drought and excessive

wetness that prevented an adequate growing season (Hoyt 119). Into the early

summer month of June, again in late June, in early July, in mid-August, and

again in mid-September, snowstorms, wind, and frost came irregularly, killing

much of the planted spring and summer crops as well as domestic sheep and

birds (Hoyt 121-123; Oppenheimer 250).

4. As far north as central Canada, there was drought, and like New England,

spring came late from 1815 to 1818, and summers were short and cool with

1816 marking the coldest summer in the last 300 years (Ball 191; Guiot 301).

5. In Iceland, the summer conditions varied with the region, but many areas in

the north reported wet seasons and poor growing conditions (Ogilvie 335);

furthermore, sea ice was recorded lasting in harbors until June (Wickens 8).

6. In the Tatra and Carpathian Mountains of Poland, it was reported that heavy

rainfall and unusually cold weather destroyed much of the crop, causing

Poland and other regions of Western Europe to seek food imports from Russia

and North America (Bednarz and Trepińska 419).

7. Similar to the New England area of North America, Yunnan, China

experienced low temperatures, cold spells, and heavy precipitation during the

crop growth season, but the period was of longer duration, lasting three years

from 1815 to 1817 (Cao, Li, and Yang 599; Chenoweth 2083).

8. In Korea and other regions of the Far East, such as Japan and Tibet, as well as

India, monsoon patterns were abnormal, contributing to crop failure in

multiple regions (de Jong Boers 52, 54; Chenoweth 2083).

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