In Our Time - 1816, the Year Without a Summer

Episode Date: April 21, 2016

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the impact of the eruption of Mt Tambora, in 1815, on the Indonesian island of Sambawa. This was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history and it had the highest death toll, devastating people living in the immediate area. Tambora has been linked with drastic weather changes in North America and Europe the following year, with frosts in June and heavy rains throughout the summer in many areas. This led to food shortages, which may have prompted westward migration in America and, in a Europe barely recovered from the Napoleonic Wars, led to widespread famine. With Clive Oppenheimer Professor of Volcanology at the University of CambridgeJane Stabler Professor in Romantic Literature at the University of St AndrewsAndLawrence Goldman Director of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in April 1815, the volcano Mount Tambora erupted on the island of Sambawa in what we now call Indonesia. It was one of the largest eruptions in the last 80,000 years, killing more people than any other volcano and releasing millions of tons of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. The effect on the immediate area was killed. clear and devastating. What was less well known until now is the effect Tambora had on global weather and arguably global events. The following year, 1816, became known as the Year Without a Summer

across Europe and Eastern America. June and July storms and frosts inspired creative imaginations, but devastated crops and brought more hunger to a Europe short of food and work as its struggle to recover from the Napoleonic Wars. Women to discuss Tambora and the Year Without Summer are Clive Oppenheimer, Professor of Volcanology at the University of Cambridge. Jane Staberer, Professor in Romantic Literature at the University of St Andrews, and Lawrence Goldman, Director of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. Clive Oppenheimer, can you describe the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815? Volcanologists have a technical term for eruptions of this scale and size.

It's colossal. It was a huge, huge event, larger than anything we've seen in the modern period. period, we have a magnitude scale a little bit like the Richter scale, which is a measure of the energy, the thermal energy released by an eruption. And we measure that by trying to estimate the volume or the mass of pumice, lava and ash that have been ejected in eruption. So Tambora weighs in with a magnitude of seven. and that would mean that something like 150 cubic kilometres of pumice and ash were rejected. That's enough to cover the whole of Great Britain about knee-deep in volcanic debris. So it's a lot of material.

It's something like 100 times larger than the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. It's more than 10 times greater than the pituitab eruption in 1991. it's a thousand times bigger than the eruption in Iceland in 2010 of Aia Fiatlyok that caused so much disruption to aviation. So a truly colossal event and an explosive event. So the eruption began probably with an episode of unrest lasting two or three years. So from about 1812, we have some indications that the volcano is becoming a bit lively. And until that point, no one has recognized this as a potentially active mountain.

And then on the 5th of April in 1815, there's a very large event, which would have been a large eruption in its own right. The explosions were heard across Indonesia and the detonations everywhere. And what's everywhere? What's the distances we're talking about? We're talking a range easily of 1,000 kilometres and probably beyond, but we have reports of, I mean, it seems very often in these cases of large explosive eruptions that the first reaction people have is that they're under siege from the sea. The cannons are being fired, so the troops or the Navy is dispatched,

or perhaps people are in distress. And also everywhere that people hear these detonations, they think they're close at hand, even though they are 500,000 kilometres away. So there were very large explosions that were ejecting huge quantities of ash and pumice, which also had a lot of thermal energy. the ash cloud climbed up into the atmosphere, into the stratosphere. And with these kinds of eruptions, the main reason that you have these towering columns of ash is because they're behaving a little bit like hot air balloons. They're buoyant from all of the thermal energy and all of the air that's

entrained into this ash column heats up and just lifts the ash column up to heights of 20, 30 kilometers, so two or three times the height of the commercial aviation. And this goes on for a couple of hours, and then things subside. But on the 10th of April in the evening, around 7 o'clock in the evening, 1815, there is another colossal eruption. And this time, it continues to such an extent that The eruption is so violent, there's so much material coming out that actually it doesn't really become fully airborne, and it casts the material, the pumice and hot ash, cascades back to the flanks of the volcano,

and then forms ground-hugging hurricanes of debris that incinerate everything, that have large blocks that are destroying structures. And these travel more or less radially around the volcano and devastate all the settlements, within a radius of 20 kilometres or so. I think that'll do for the moment. Right, we'll absorb that and go on. Lawrence, how robust.

It had effects and it had global effects, which you've studied, which I found very exciting, interesting about the global interactions from this worn natural event. So let's sort of set the scene a bit in Europe. Let's use Europe as a focus. How robust was Europe?

in this time, 18, 16 and so on. How ready for it was to meet the effects of a volcano? Not very is the answer, because if you think about the timing, April of 1815 sees Napoleon Bonaparte in Paris, raising an army, and in a matter of weeks, you're about to find the Battle of Waterloo, June the 18th.

In other words, Europe is struggling to the end of a generation of warfare, which has begun in 1793, the Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. And as one can extrapolate at the end of such a long period of continental warfare, the continent is not in particularly good social and political shape to cope with the impact of an environmental crisis, which hits it in 1816.

If you think about the economic problems, you have the problem of reintegrating trade. and manufacturing, focused on war, material for war and so forth, and turning those, as it were, into plowshares and getting people, as it were, to work in peacetime employment. You also have, of course, problems of trade, reorganising international trade. There is high unemployment, as you'd expect. Then, in addition, there are political problems.

These don't directly impact on the average person, life in 1815 and 1816, but there are tensions in Europe to the east, the rulers of Russia, Prussia and Austria want to try to, in a sense, bring back the old regime, the Anzegn regime before the French revolution. And the French revolution itself and the ideas that it's let loose are beginning to affect many different populations. And so in the years after 1815, there is a good deal of political tension as well. And also, because we're relating this to the the effect that this eruption had, which has been so meticulously and vividly described by climate. So, and there's great hunger, there's starvation in certain areas of Europe.

How initially, before we go into the global, how initially is this eruption supposed to have affected that situation? Right. Well, in fact, I mean, 1815 sees rather a good harvest. I want to know what happened. Yes, but 1816 is much more serious. you have cold and rain through the spring. The growing season is much reduced. And then you get things like frosts through June and July and August. There is snow in the middle of summer.

Now is there a direct relation of that to this eruption, eruptu. Well, it would be difficult. I'm not the volcanologist or the meteorologist. I can't, as it were, give you direct relation. But I think it's very clear. when you find snow falling in central Europe, in June of 1816, coloured sort of orange and brown, we can extrapolate that this is the ash from some remarkable volcanic event.

And there's every reason to believe that it's tambora, spreading its gases and ash through the international or the world, the global wind system. And I'll ask Clive to pick up that stich later. but if it did, and if that's the case, we're talking about hunger strikes, we're going from Waterloo to Peterloo, the massacres of Peterloo,

hunger strikes all over you. We're talking about a big social, tectonic shift in Europe at that time. Yes, I think, I mean, I think that's true. There are some nations, and we're actually one of them, that managed to get through that more easily than others. In 18, 17, 18, 18, 18,

the price of bread more or less doubles in the course of 12 months in this country. But we don't have a subsistence crisis in the same way that Central Europe has because we have a very well-developed maritime trade. And we're able to import flour and grain from those parts of the United States and the West, which are grain growing and which are not so badly affected. Something like half a million barrels of flour come into Liverpool in 1818. In that year, Britain imports more foodstuffs than in any other year thus far in British history.

But if you're in a place like central Germany, one of the German states, for example, it's very difficult with very rudimentary transportation systems and commercial networks to get hold of food. And so it's much worse in places like that. So that's one effect we might look at. There are various sources of evidence for this, Jane Say, but I come back to Clive on there and the meteorological evidence and so on and so forth. And there were diarists and there are people there and so, not there, but near there.

But there were a group of writers, which we all know, the romantic writers, some of the romantic writers, in Switzerland. And they do you, can you tell us in what way they might be thought to have been influenced by the effect of that eruption? The main way in which they're influenced is that they're sailing on Lake Geneva is curtailed by the onset of extremely bad weather.

We're talking about Keats and Byron and... We're talking about... Sorry, Shelley and Byron. Yes, yes, it's the Byron Shelley Circle. So Lord Byron, his personal physician, John Pollydori, Percy Bischelli, Mary Godwin, and her step-sister, Claire Claremont, have all gathered on the shores of late Geneva to get away from what they see as London and winter. When they first arrive in Geneva, the weather's fine and sunny, but soon afterwards the weather changes and they are confined indoors. and so the causality here is quite clear. Mary Shelley states that because they're confined indoors,

they have to fall back on telling ghost stories and then eventually writing their own stories, and that's the genesis of Frankenstein. So I think Frankenstein might have come up, partly might have partly have come about because of the eruption of Tambora over in Indonesia. I'm fascinated by this. I mean, did you believe that?

Yes, I think the causality is clear. Two things bring them together. The will of a woman, so Claire Claremont's determination to meet up with law, Byron again and the weather bring that group together on the shores of late Geneva and if the weather had been fine and sunny they would have spent much more

time boating and touring about Mary Poppins instead possibly but because the weather's bad they are confined indoors they exhaust conversation and the literature that's to hand and they start writing ghost stories

Is there any reference in diaries and is there any reference is there an evidence that they they talk to each other about the excessive weather, about the unusual weather. Are they witnesses in any sense that we could take as serious witnesses to the effects? Yes, they give us local details. So we know, for example, that when the Shelley Party crossed France, they're told that the spring has been much delayed.

There's much more snow than normal, so they have to hire 10 men and four horses to get their carriage over the mountains to Geneva. And then once they're there, they talk about, The thunderstorms, they actually enjoy watching the thunderstorms, although occasionally they get drenched by them soaked to the skin. So there's an experience both of the aesthetic spectacle of thunder and lightning, but also the discomfort. And they're in Switzerland, which suffers very badly at that time, doesn't it?

Particularly badly in its crops, its agriculture and so on, which Lawrence was alluding to before. Yes, yes. Persia Shelley notices that when they visit the Arve, that the cornfields are underwater. So he talks about the flooding, although they don't talk much about the way in which Geneva itself was flooded very seriously at that time. Clive and Oppenheimer.

So can you talk a bit more? That was a very clear and succinct exposition of the eruption itself. Now we're trying to talk about it globally, which is fascinating really, because it's quite a long time ago, a couple hundred years ago. So what evidence are you collected? that make sense of what you're going to say? Well, the first link in this chain of causality

after the eruption itself, which is on a remote Indonesian island, so a long way from all of these effects we're talking about. And people at the time made no relation between the short-growing seasons, the harvest failures, the unrest and so on, and this event. So the first link in this chain

is actually the climate change that is wrought by the eruption itself. and we used to think that this was related to the ash that was dispersed around the atmosphere from a large event. But it's only more recently that we've realized that it's sulphur, but is the key agent. There was a significant eruption in 1963, Mount Agung in Bali,

and there were atmospheric measurements aircraft, converted spy planes and so on that collected some of the dust and analysed it, and it was found to be sulfurous. And then the eruption of Pinatubo in 1991 occurred in the era where we had a lot of satellite remote sensing instruments. We could make very comprehensive observations of what was up in the stratosphere.

So what happens to the sulfur gas, which is a rather minor component of the magma that's expelled on eruption, makes its way up into the stratosphere, and it oxidized to manufacture, to generate tiny particles of sulfuric acid. and these particles are much, much smaller than, say, pollen grains. And they're in the stratosphere, so they're above the weather systems, they don't get washed out rapidly.

And an eruption in the tropics, the way the atmosphere works, that this sulfurous dust can be dispersed into both hemispheres and effectively form a veil over the whole planet. Gosh, is that what happened then? Absolutely. So if you can imagine this veil of dust, which the size of particles... How long do you take to clear up? Years.

Years. What years? Five, six years, probably for it to be more or less getting back to the background level. So volcanic eruptions are the main perturbation to the stratosphere in terms of dust. They're episodic, of course, but it can take a period of five, six years. And so these particles settle, and from the evidence, even 200 years later, you can begin to build up the accurate sounding picture you presented us with at the start of the program. That's right. I mean, what these particles do is to intercept some incoming sunlight.

So the link between volcanism and climate is the way this stratospheric dust interacts with the Earth's radiation budget, with incoming sunlight and outgoing long wave radiation from the Earth surface. And the net effect is a cooling at the surface. And so we've understood since the more recent events, Mount Pinatubo, we've got a fairly clear picture of what happens after a large eruption with a lot of sulfur, especially if it's in the tropics, which means the dust can be spread across both hemispheres, is that we see a significant summer cooling

in the continental regions of the northern hemisphere, so parts of Europe, Scandinavia, parts of North America. And if we average the effect over the planet over a year, it might be about half a degree of cooling. But if you look at the regional scale, you see that the coolings compared with average temperatures are more like 3 to 4 degrees. So these are significant in terms.

terms of harvests and so on. Lawrence Goldman, what stack of evidence do you bring from people recording it in, obviously, at the time, we're talking about 200 years of hindsight here, in diaries and letters and whatever? What are you, as you were relying on? Yeah, there's a massive evidence, really. The news, at least of the eruption, reaches London at the end of 1815. It's reached America by the summer of 1816. Meanwhile, there are, in the press, in the journals of the day, much discussion of bad weather, as you'd expect. In the summer of 1816, the Times is full of discussion of what it means,

and even talks about fears of, you know, God's wrath, providential explanations of this and that. It's noticed by many that in Britain and France more people are going to church and chapel in the summer of 1816 as it becomes clear that the harvest is being ruined. and so forth. So it's not as if the effects of this are unknown and unlooked for. The problem of course is that they can't put

together the very poor weather they're experiencing and the actual cause that Clive was. They don't know about Tambora at this session. Well, they know Tambora has gone up. I mean that has come through but they don't see the causative relationship between Tambora and the very poor weather

that they're experiencing with all its effects. Now there's a good deal of really quite detailed temperature collection in this period. There are lots of gentlemen, natural scientists, savant and so forth, who regularly go out and collect all sorts of detail about the weather. Very great kind of correspondence between them and interest in natural philosophical societies in weather and so forth. So it's not as if they don't know that something very irregular is going on.

But what they lack, because it's purely observational this kind of collection and so forth, is actually the physics that might explain to them how the higher atmosphere works and this idea of a global circulation that could explain what is actually causing this changing climate. And in this country, there are all the society got involved in a lot of vickers got involved with the measurements and so on. So you're convinced, you're persuaded that there's enough of this evidence at the time to... persuade you that something dramatic was happening? Yes, absolutely. I mean, if you look at textbooks written by British historians or historians on this period, it doesn't really figure. We know that harvest were bad. We know that the price

of food goes up. We know there are economic problems and social disturbances. Nowhere does anybody, as it were, join it up and note the relationship to this volcanic activity halfway around the world. But now, I think, we have the evidence and we have, the physics, and that allows us as historians to begin to say here is a further cause of problem in this period. Jane Stable, we're talking about these romantic poets, Shelley and Byron, and romantic writers. It's peculiarly apt, isn't it, because all of them, whether they liked him or not, and they liked him and not, were in the, I was about to say, shadow, why not, of Wordsworth.

And so we're having poets concentrating on nature and landscape and switching away. from the wit and courtly and social things to close observations of that, almost scientific observations of that. So does that mean that the people we're talking about in Lake Geneva were more able to get more accurate, more convincing evidence from what they saw around them?

Certainly they're reacting against wordsworth in some ways. Byron talks about being dosed being dosed by Shelley with Wordsworth during that summer. Yeah, he turned against him, but he, you know, he was a voice on the mountain deep as well. But never mind. I mean, the fact is that landscape is part of their,

is now part of their poetic property in a way that it hadn't been before. Yes, exact, exact observations of, the landscape and the weather form the, the base rock of the poetry in the period. So Byron's manuscript of Child Harold Cantow 3 is punctuated with, observations of what was going on on the shores of late Geneva.

So he'll write a date, he'll say something like June the 2nd. This was written in the eye of Mont Blanc, which even at this distance dazzles mine, or June the 13th. The storm in these lines took place at midnight on June the 13th. So the poetry is almost akin to diaries in some form, in that it keeps a close record of exactly what was happening in the atmosphere of the time.

Therefore, we can rely on them to a certain extent. Yes, although they're also viewing the weather through the lens of sublime theory so they're looking for thunderstorms as well and enjoying them. They're falling back very much on Eden Burke's theory of the sublime. Sublime being the terrible and the beautiful being the feminine is. The strongest emotion that the mind is capable of feeling,

Burke says, which is dependent on terror and experience of vastness, infinity, obscurity, darkness, loudness, everything that's a thunderstorm is and a volcano, although Burke doesn't mention volcanoes. So they're in what Lawrence is saying and what Clive is saying, they're part of this circle of evidence and observations in a reliable way. Yes, yes. I think we can take their observations of the weather as much a record as the diaries of Vickers in England.

Although it's interesting that when you look at those diaries, the experience of the summer of 1816 is very varied. So some people talk about the weather a lot, and other people seem wholly preoccupied with other things, with political matters. William Wordsworth, for example, doesn't mention the weather very much in 1816, although Dorothy his sister does. Clive Oppenheimer, was Tambora isolated? Was it a time of eruptions?

Whether that's a question. There was a very interesting event six years before in 1809. We know about it because we can find the same sulphur that's emitted in eruptions. It goes up to the stratosphere. We can find it as a deposit in polar ice cores, Greenland and Antarctica. Why did it land up in polar ice cores? It's the way the atmosphere works. So if you have a large tropical eruption,

the dust that's formed in the stratosphere will be conveyed by the air currents towards higher latitudes. It's gradually falling out, and there'll still be a little bit of it left falling out over the polar regions a year or two or three later. So we know from these ice core records that there was a very large eruption, perhaps something like the more famous 1883 eruption of Cracketau. And we know it was sulfur rich because we find this sulfur. We have no idea where this eruption took place other than that it should have been a volcano in the tropics because we find this sulfur record in both polar regions.

So this eruption could well have been significant because it should also have been capable of forcing the global climate system. and the fact that it's within about six years of the Tambora eruption, there may still have been a memory in the climate system from that 1809 event when Tambora then hit. So one of the things that we find is that multiple events can lead to more prolonged impact on the global climate system. And there's even an idea that the Little Ice Age might have been triggered by a machine gun detonations of volcanoes

in the mid-13th century. Lawrence. Well, it's just to say that the decade, 1810 to 1820, is one of the coldest in the past 200 years. And those years from 1810 onwards, even before Tampora, are cold in the northern hemisphere, particularly in the United States, the northern states of and what became Canada. And, you know, there's a sense in which perhaps that earlier eruption also caused that as well. One can only guess and there's not a great deal of evidence, but there's no doubt that even before 1816, there is bad weather in the Northern Hemisphere

and plenty of evidence of that. So that's what I want to talk about. No, the Atlantic seaboard in the United States, what reaction did people there have to the weather that came in and the effects of the weather that came in then? Because I think the summer the phrase was, One question is enough, right. 1816 and terrible weather throughout or something like that, the Americans said.

Yeah, I mean, basically, the most fundamental response is westward movement. There's more westward migration across the Atlantic from the British Isles following 1816, from Britain and Ireland to the United States. And then within the United States, there's more westward movement than there had been up to that point. Can you make that significant in your notes? Well, I think it is significant. I think it's significant. I mean, again, we're stretching a bit. We haven't got full proof evidence, as it were. But it's clear that the numbers go up. You can see that from emigration records in Liverpool, for example. And clearly there is a kind of folk memory in New England that the winter of 1816 and then the consequent bad weather forces more people.

You can walk around parts of Massachusetts today and you can find homesteads that were left at that time. But the point I'm trying to get at is that people from the Eastern Seaboard moved west. Now, the people who moved were Presbyterians, but they were also abolitionists, which had started in the 60s and 70s, not on the East and Seaboard, but in the east.

Thomas Paine had a great deal to do with that. So they moved into, let's call it, the Bible Belt. And there was a fusion there, which had a tremendous impact, according to you, on American history, which came about from the volcano. I like that. So we've got Indonesia, we've got the East of the border of America, and we've got Middle America, and we've got anti-slavery.

Well, Fusion is the word, because they move into what's known as the burned over district, burned over so many times by religious revivalism. This is in western New York State and Ohio, in the area bordering the Great Lakes, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario. and you find there this very combustible kind of social movement. You have religious revivalism, some of it in conventional Christian ways, but other aspects of it leading to new developments like Mormonism. Joseph Smith Jr. is taken by his father, Joseph Smith, Sr.

Mormonism starts there. And they bring from New England, these people going west, a profound and already established anti-slavery commitment, making this area the kind of epicentre. of abolitionist politics in America thenceforth, and we look to the leadership of the anti-slavery movement and its centre to the Berndover district. And there is this suggestion.

But one can't be much stronger than the idea and the suggestion that what you've got is the combination of factors that explains why anti-slavery takes root here and then spreads. Jane, to go back to Geneva, where you were lodged for this programme, but it's a great observation station. The great poem, the direct poem that comes out of that is Byron's darkness, written in 1816, to have it on you. But I mean, he does talk about the end of the world, dark, no sun, nothing moving.

It's a terrible dystopian vision that he gets from a day that he's lived through. Yes, it's a day he records as being one where that the fowls all went to roost at noon, and candles had to be lit as at midnight. So it seems to have come from a particularly overcast day. But I think it's also been suggested that it comes from apocalyptic suggestions at the time that the world was about to end. There was something called the Bologna Prophecy in 1816 where an Italian stargazzer had predicted that the sun would be extinguished

and the world would end on July the 18th. And it turned out to be right? The sun actually rose on the 18th, as it did on many of the other days on which the end of the world was predicted in this period. It's something that's very much, as Lawrence was saying, part of the flavour of the time, this anxiety about the end of the world being bound up with tumultuous world events and very bad weather.

Climb, let's go back to the volcano itself, not in terms of its, in terms of what happened to be, tens of thousands of people were killed, and therefore that part of the island was emptied. But that had a social, consequence too, didn't it? That's right. It's in our the records that we have, it's the deadliest eruption

that we know of and the casualties arise from the direct impact of the eruption. So perhaps something like 10,000 people on Sumbawa killed instantly as this whirlwind of dust, hot dust and ashes spreading across the mountain. But a much greater loss of life then occurs in the following

months through pestilence, famine, epidemic disease, dysentery and so on. And this is recorded by an emissary of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who was the lieutenant governor in the East Indies at the time. He sent out a few months later this emissary who took some eyewitness accounts, which have given us some remarkable information of what it was like in the islands on Sumbara and the neighbouring islands at the time. It was absolutely devastated. There were villages were abandoned, people on the road looking for something to eat. Something like half of the population of 180,000 or so of Sumbawa Island is gone, either through starvation. Many also migrate.

People are selling their children of slaves and they move to Sulawesi. And then the Sultan of Sumbawa tries to reassert his authority and establishes a, a deliberate program of migration, again, bringing people in from Sulawesi. And what you see in this period is that there's more settlements of the upland regions, the lowlands are devastated because... Yes, but he's bringing in a particular... Can you just be more specific about who he's bringing in?

Because this is the social change following the meteorological event. I think a lot of the people are really brought in as slaves, and what's happened is... I've read from the notes of one of you that they bring in Muslims and that is the start of a different composition of the population now. I think Islam is already established

in Sambaw before the eruption but I think what's happened is a complete disintegration of village authority and because so many people have had to move and also a settlement of the upland areas where more rainfall has washed away

the ash and actually it's the lowland areas that are still receiving a lot of the when every time in the rainy season there's another load of mud flows that come in. So I think there is an imprint that's seen today in the demography of the island and there are certainly a folklore traditions on Sambaia today that

recall these events. Lawrence, have we said everything that we can say in this context about the effect that it might well have had on this country between 1816 and 1819? Probably not, in the sense that

we know that there are a number of causes of distress in this country and they have the effect of causing social unrest and movements for political change. Now, William Cobbett emerges as one of the great radical leaders at this time. He's famous for one of these phrases

I defy you to agitate a man on a full stomach. That's a rather reductive view of political radicalism. But what one can say is that there's plenty of radicalism around because there are plenty of empty stomachs as well. And this new kind of addition, if you look at these textbooks, they don't really talk about Tambora, nobody writing British history has thought about this.

But this new kind of addition to our knowledge that explains why the harvests were so, poor in Britain and Ireland in 1817 and 1818. And the price of bread more or less doubles in 12 months. And you get not only urban political unrest and riots, but rural riots. All of this, I think, explains why the years from Waterloo to Peterloo, Peterloo being the famous massacre at St Peter's Field in Manchester in 1819, of a political meeting calling for manhood suffrage.

These four or five years have a kind of unity of unconstitutional. unrest and government repression after the Napoleonic Wars, and Tambora and its effects add a certain soupsaint to our understanding. Jane, does the presence of this extraordinary weather or not, does that have a defining effect on the way that the poets and poetry moves in that period, or is it just a passing thing? Well, the weather's always been part of British poetry, So it's a constant, if you want,

and it has been right the way through the 18th century and into the 19th. I think what happens to weather poetry is a gradual draining of confidence in benign patterns. So in the 18th century, weather poetry is all about the fact that God is probably an Englishman, if you want, that our temperate climate and seasonal variation is part of a benign providential pattern.

and that certainty starts, I think, to drain out in the mid-18th century. You get much more troubled poetry about storms. And feeding into the 19th century, it's all much more uncertain until you get a poet like Coleridge writing about the way in which the weather is something that you create yourself. So the dejectionode starts off with a gentle English musing about the weather, but then goes into this tempest of the mind and concludes that we receive it what we give. So the weather is almost wholly purpose.

personalized and increasingly secularised as we move into the 19th century. Climb, um, was the world, um, was the world intrigued by the global scene of the kinds of this because it's, and it's amazing that we can put it together 200 years on. But, um, wasn't 1816, was the world particularly in a particularly vulnerable place? I think it was for many of the reasons we've discussed in this period after a generation of global conflict. And one could pose the question, what if Tambor had erupted in in 1830 or 1910

or some other time would the effects have been the same and almost certainly not because the vulnerabilities would have been very different. One of the things we haven't discussed, I think, so far is the outbreaks of epidemic disease in various parts of Europe associated with the famine and the malnourishment in Ireland. Some 800,000 people are infected with typhus,

of whom 44,000 perish. And this, I think one of the significant things when we look and try and understand the vulnerabilities is and try and make these causal arguments of volcanic eruption, climate change, famine, social unrest, disease and so on, migration, this whole chain, when we're looking to verify that, we see in contemporary accounts,

they're not talking about the volcano, but people are linking in contemporary accounts the bad weather to the poor harvests. There's a doctor at a fever hospital in Belfast who writes in 1818 that the reason for this typhus outbreak is because of the poor harvest, it's because so many people have been demobbed from the Napoleonic Wars and are out of work

and are vagrant and gathering in soup kitchens where the disease is spread because it's so contagious. Lawrence, you want to come? Well, it's even perhaps bigger than that, more global when one thinks of disease, because one of the theories is that the epidemics of cholera, which affect the whole world across the 19th century, emerges, as it were, in 1817 in the Bengal, as a consequence of the weather disruption of drought followed by an inundatory monsoon in 1817 and 1818. In those conditions, a new cholera strain emerges. It almost

wipes out the British Army, first of all, in India, the following year. And then it spreads through Central Asia. It reaches London by 1831, New York by 1832. And then there are recurrent epidemics of cholera through the 19th century in the developed world. And again, the suggestion is that it comes out of this event and the disruption in Asia in 1816, 1817. Can we move, and last briefly to China for this global coverage. And the effect it had, if it had, there. What was that? Well, that's different again.

And again, you pays your money and you takes your choice, I think. No, no, we're listening to you. Well, if you'll listen to me, my suggestion is as follows. That's not just me. It's from other historians, I should add. But if you look at the far southwest of China, Yunnan province, which is near what we used to call Burma, in that area,

growing area, but its rice crops are wiped out by cold conditions, three years running 18, 16, 17, 18. Mass death, the Chinese empire's grainstock simply can't cope with the sheer scale of the subsistence crisis there. When balance returns, when the climate improves 1819, 1820, what the Peasants then plant is not rice, but opium. Because it's a cash crop, there is a growing market for this globally. They have trade routes that get it out through Indo-China and then onto boats and to Europe. And it becomes the great opium growing area of the 19th century, spreading drugs and death in that manner.

And it's suggested that, again, the disruption changes the way peasant agriculture works. It becomes commercialised, but it's focused. on a particular crop with devastating consequences. So we've got opium in the east and anti-slaver in the West. Could be. Great hunger in Europe. You want to come in, Clive. I think this, you say you pay your money and take your choice.

I think this is where I would have struggled more to believe in the causality argument in terms of these effects purported to occurred in Asia. Our understanding of the climate impacts of eruptions has really demonstrated these effects in parts of North America. parts of Europe. But when we look at the case of Asia, it's much less certain what the impacts are on the monsoon of these large events. And I think that this causality argument is more tenuous. Thank you very much. Thanks very much, Jane Stable, Lawrence Goldman and Climb Oppenheim. And next week we'll be talking about Euclitz elements over 2,300 years, old and still the building

blocks of mathematics that we do today. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus materials. from Melvin and his guests. I'm always struck that even in the period now, we debate whether the food crisis of 2008 and 2010-2011 precipitates the Arab Spring. And we still can't decide that, even though we have all the data available and modern observations, so on.

Going back 200 years or 1,000 years, to build up these causality arguments, I think you just have to marshal the evidence you have and decide whether you've got a rational case or whether you're really just pushing a boat out for something that's more speculative and frivolous. But speculations, I mean, any speculations turn later into facts, don't they?

I mean, we start by speculating that things might fly and then all of a sudden things do fly. They can turn into facts or they can turn into counter facts. Yes, they can, yeah. Yes, but you scientists have actually, I mean, you've got lots of ways of showing the impacts of these things now and the stuff you talked about at the beginning of the program.

So, I mean, a historian like me, actually, I'm very open to what you say, you know, having some relevance, rather a lot of relevance, to 1816, actually. I mean, I think I have no problem at all, adding a paragraph to the textbooks now, saying, and Mount Tambora, you know. But I don't think it's a sufficient explanation

for everything that went on in Britain and Europe and so forth. But it is, I think, part of the explanation. How far were, Jane, how far were these poets interested in, in volcanology, for instance, was it just the spectacle sitting in front of a thunderstorm, drinking wine and feeling ecstatic, or was it a bit more than that, or a bit different from that?

They were all tremendously interested in science, the science of the day, so they were able to, well, Byron was able to speak with Humphrey Davy, for example, and he remarked rather wryly that he enjoyed Humphrey Davies' account of his 14th ascent of Mount Vesuvius, so there's a sense in which the tours two volcanoes had almost become something of a cliché at the time,

time, although Davy himself sees them as sources of mystery and puzzlement. They can't work out the cause of the heat or the fire. And there's all sorts of different theories about whether it's connected underground, which Shelley picks up in the notes to his poems. He loves the idea of winds under the earth that connect all the volcanoes together and the potential that gives you for metaphors of revolution and natural resistance to tyranny. And they're digging up Pompey at this time and that's really confronting them with the devastation and resetting the clock that can result from a very large eruption. Yes.

Their grand tour experiences has taken them to Pompeii. It's taken them up to see all the fireworks on Vesuvius itself. Yeah. That was part of the sublime experience. And geology is really the key science for so many people in the early 19th century, because everybody can be an amateur geologist. Everybody can go out and look for fossils and look at strata and so forth. And, you know, there's sort of almost a popular geological culture that so many people are writing about and taking part in, as well as quite an interesting debate between uniformitarians who believe that actually it's long-run, slow-changing causes that explain the formation of the earth and so forth.

And catastrophists who believe these sudden kind of, you know, explosions and so forth that create the world, as it were. and that becomes a very interesting way of sort of debating this. And I suppose Tambora might fit into that, or other eruptions in Europe would have fitted into that. There are many more history and discussion programmes from Radio 4 to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.com.uk slash radio 4.