Year Without a Summer (1816): Famine, Frost and Frankenstein

The Year Without a Summer was 1816, when abnormally cold and wet weather ruined harvests across much of the Northern Hemisphere. It followed the enormous eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before, and it caused famine, food riots, disease and mass emigration in Europe and North America. Historians call the resulting food crisis the last great subsistence crisis of the Western world.

Causes

The main cause lay on the other side of the planet. The Mount Tambora eruption in April 1815 sent tens of millions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. There it formed a fine haze of sulphate droplets that circled the globe and reflected part of the sun’s energy back into space.

Average global temperatures dropped by roughly 0.4 to 0.7 degrees Celsius, but the effects were uneven. Changes in atmospheric circulation brought cold air and storms to some regions while others were barely affected. Ice cores also show a large unidentified eruption around 1809, and the years around 1816 fell within a period of low solar activity known as the Dalton Minimum. Both probably made the decade colder. Climate scientists today reconstruct the summer of 1816 from weather diaries, harvest records, grape-harvest dates and tree rings. These show that the coldest anomalies were concentrated in western and central Europe and in northeastern North America, while some other regions had near-normal temperatures.

Nobody at the time linked the weather to a volcano. Observers blamed sunspots, earthquakes or even lightning rods. The connection to Tambora was suggested only in the early 20th century and confirmed by later research on ice cores and tree rings.

Europe: rain, frost and hunger

Europe was already exhausted. The Napoleonic Wars had ended only in 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo, and governments were in debt while tens of thousands of soldiers were returning home without work.

The summer of 1816 brought almost continuous rain and low temperatures to western and central Europe. Grain rotted in the fields or never ripened, grapes failed in vineyards, and potatoes rotted in waterlogged soil. Switzerland, Baden, Württemberg and Alsace were among the worst affected. In parts of Switzerland people were reported eating grass, moss and other famine foods in the winter of 1816 to 1817.

Food prices soared to famine levels, and in many European markets the price of wheat and rye peaked in the spring and early summer of 1817. Bread riots and protests broke out in Britain, France, the German states and elsewhere. In England, the Littleport and Ely riots in May 1816 ended with troops called in and five men hanged.

Ireland suffered particularly badly. Wet weather destroyed much of the potato and grain harvest, and a typhus epidemic between 1816 and 1819 killed tens of thousands of people. Similar fevers spread through hungry populations elsewhere in Europe.

The crisis was made worse by the transport of the time. Grain moved slowly and expensively by cart and river barge, so a local harvest failure could mean starvation in one valley while another region still had food. Some towns hoarded grain, and merchants were accused of speculation, which fuelled popular anger.

North America: Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death

In northeastern North America, the cold came in sharp bursts. A cold wave in early June 1816 brought snow to parts of New England and Quebec. Further frosts in July and August killed crops, especially corn. Farmers called the year “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death”.

The pattern was unpredictable. Warm spells alternated with sudden frosts, so farmers who replanted after one cold snap often lost their second crop to the next. Hay was scarce, and many farmers had to slaughter or sell livestock they could not feed through the coming winter. Even in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson’s weather notes at Monticello recorded an unusually cold and dry summer, and his corn harvest was poor.

The hard year accelerated migration from New England to the Ohio Valley and the western parts of New York, where land was cheaper and the climate seemed less risky. Among the families who moved was that of Joseph Smith Sr., who left Vermont for Palmyra, New York, after repeated crop failures; his son Joseph Smith later founded the Latter Day Saint movement in western New York.

Emigration and political responses

Hunger drove many Europeans to leave home. Tens of thousands of people from southwestern Germany and Switzerland travelled down the Rhine to Dutch ports hoping to sail to America, and many arrived destitute or died on the way. Others went east to settle in the Russian Empire, which welcomed German colonists. Many Swabians from Württemberg travelled down the Danube to the South Caucasus and the Black Sea region, sometimes inspired by religious hopes as well as hunger.

Governments responded in different ways. Some bought grain abroad, banned exports or opened public kitchens. In Württemberg, King Wilhelm I and Queen Catharina founded charitable relief societies and promoted agricultural reform. They established an agricultural school at Hohenheim in 1818 and an annual agricultural festival at Cannstatt the same year, which grew into the Cannstatter Volksfest still held in Stuttgart today.

Elsewhere in the world, the disturbance also had effects. Cold weather damaged rice harvests in Yunnan in southwestern China, causing famine, and the Indian monsoon was disrupted. Some historians have linked these changes to the emergence of the first cholera pandemic in Bengal in 1817, but that connection remains debated.

Cultural echoes

The most famous legacy of 1816 is literary. In June that year Mary Godwin, later Mary Shelley, was staying near Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, close to the Villa Diodati rented by Lord Byron and his physician John Polidori. Kept indoors by storms, the group agreed to write ghost stories. Mary began the tale that became Frankenstein, published in 1818, and Polidori wrote The Vampyre, published in 1819. Byron’s bleak poem “Darkness”, written that summer, describes a world in which the sun has gone out.

The volcanic haze also produced vivid sunsets across Europe for several years. Some scientists and art historians have argued that the glowing skies in paintings by J. M. W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich reflect the aerosols in the atmosphere. Another popular theory holds that the death of horses from lack of fodder encouraged Karl Drais to build his Laufmaschine, an early bicycle, in 1817; this is plausible but not proven.

Timeline

• 1815, April: Mount Tambora erupts on Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies, then under British rule.
• 1816, May: Food riots break out at Littleport and Ely in eastern England.
• 1816, early June: Snow falls in parts of New England and Quebec.
• 1816, June: Mary Godwin begins Frankenstein during a stormy stay on Lake Geneva.
• 1816, July and August: Further frosts destroy crops in New England; rain ruins harvests in western Europe.
• 1817, spring and early summer: Grain prices peak and famine is worst in Switzerland and southwestern Germany.
• 1817, 4 August: Crowds celebrate the first harvest wagons arriving in Ravensburg, Württemberg.
• 1818: Württemberg holds the first Cannstatt agricultural festival; Frankenstein is published.

Why it matters

The Year Without a Summer showed how closely human life depended on a single harvest, and how a volcano could shake societies thousands of kilometres away. It produced the last major famine in much of Western Europe, accelerated migration to America, and left a lasting mark on literature. Today it is studied as a warning of how sudden climate shocks can disrupt food supplies worldwide.