In April 1815 the eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, in the Indonesian archipelago, triggered a global climate disaster. In Southeast Asia more than 100,000 people were killed in the explosion and the massive tsunami that followed. The effects of the eruption were to be felt far beyond its devastated epicentre. Clouds of ash filled the sky, obscuring the sun and causing rapid temporary global cooling. Across the world crops failed, livestock died in the fields and natural cycles were thrown into chaos. The disastrous consequences of the eruption would unfold over several years, causing widespread confusion, suffering and death. For Europe, still recovering after decades of war and their bloody culmination at Waterloo, the dark skies and frigid temperatures of 1816 seemed to portend a troubling future. The effects of this environmental calamity can be seen in the cultural productions of the period, in some of the most significant works of the movement we call Romantic.

More than two centuries later, the ‘Year Without a Summer’ offers us a starting point from which to reconsider both how the Romantics responded to the changing climates of their day and to think about how these climatic events shaped the development of Romanticism itself. Climate, be it political, literary or meteorological, is what we live in, or live through; it is whatever we take for granted. Only when the atmospheric becomes the catastrophic—as it has so obviously in our own times—do we allow it space at the centre of our culture and of our thinking. The Year Without a Summer brings the disruptive possibilities of climate changes into sharp focus, but even more powerful, if less spectacular, forces of environmental transformation had been at work long before 1815. Regardless of volcanic activity at the equator, in Western Europe anthropogenic climate change had been accelerating in the Romantic period as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. Contemporary debates around the identification of an ‘Anthropocene’—a new geological age marked by human environmental damage—often take 1800 as its starting point.¹ As Tobias Menely points out, however, the ‘epochal switchover to fossil energy was substantively underway in the eighteenth century’, with the ‘amplifying feedback between coal, capital investment, and technological development’ traceable to the Restoration period.² The impact of the unprecedented transformation of the carbon cycle caused by the burning of fossil fuels from the Industrial Revolution through to today has yet to be fully felt, although we are coming to think of mass extinctions, climatological turmoil and rising sea levels as unavoidable. In the Romantic period, such changes were more subtle still. The sudden catastrophe of Tambora’s eruption makes legible those slower processes which would come, in our own day, to have such devastating effects. Mass industrialization and deforestation, exponential increases in the human and livestock populations and ever more widespread imperial ventures that globalized the practices of Western European industrialized capitalism were all features of the Romantic world, and their consequences are still unfolding. The Romantics themselves understood at least part of what was at stake in the mutually supportive ideologies of empire and marketplace. Kate Rigby identifies a ‘pervasive Romantic resistance’ to the discursive frameworks that justified the ‘treatment of the earth and its ‘natural resources’ as freely available to be appropriated, traded and made-over by merchants and manufacturers’, where the ‘liberty of human property owners’—including, we would add, owners of enslaved human property—‘is to be enlarged at the expense of the colonization, commodification and exploitation of those (ever expanding) portions of nature they claimed as theirs’.³

Like the Romantics, we too live in a time of rapidly changing climate, and like them we are preoccupied by fears of extinction, by questions of how our species does and should interact with our environment and by the devastating strangeness of our unpredictable world. Like them, we face a political sphere changing at an unprecedented rate, where the pieties and absolutes of our youth can be overturned in an instant. Like them, we must face the reality that far-distant events can affect our daily lives in unexpected ways and that our own actions may have unintended, far-reaching consequences. By understanding the impact of climate on Romanticism, we seek also to understand how we might, as students of literature and critics of culture, intervene productively in the challenging climates of our own time.

As the events of 1815 and its aftermath make clear, climate is a planetary phenomenon with myriad local consequences. The world-wide impact of Tambora’s eruption demonstrates the ways in which Romanticism must be located not in a particular corner of Europe, but as a global movement disseminated through networks of trade, empire and exploration. This collection grew out of events held in two cities—Sydney, Australia, and Wellington, New Zealand—that have been shaped by Romantic-era colonialism. The lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and that of Te Ūpoko o te Ika a Māui on New Zealand’s North Island, have now survived the impact of this colonialism for more than two centuries and face new challenges today as the climate of the southern hemisphere becomes ever more unpredictable.

This volume seeks to uncover how our own thinking about climate and catastrophe has been formed by the ideas of Romantic writers and thinkers and how these same ideas might once more be harnessed to assist us in the new climate challenges facing us in the present. As Timothy Morton notes in the introduction to his Ecology Without Nature (2007), ‘the literature of the Romantic period, commonly seen as crucially about nature … still influences the ways in which the ecological imaginary works’.⁴ We cannot help but think Romantically when we think about Nature. We are as apt as Jane Austen’s Anne Elliot to ‘fall into’ Romantic quotation when confronted with seasons of mist, lonely clouds and seas, whether sunless or silent. The conceit of ‘Nature’ is itself a troubling Romantic fallacy, especially insofar as it is contrasted with civilization, or seen as fundamentally distinct and distant from human life. Personified as a feminine ‘mother’, Nature partakes of patriarchal assumptions that it is, or ought to be, passively nurturing: any activity unwelcome to humans is interpreted as a threatening aberrance from the ‘natural’ norm (imagined as ‘the contagion of a mother’s hate’ in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound ).⁵ It is these ideas, as inherently self-contradictory and nonsensical as scrutiny reveals them to be, that nevertheless impinge upon our capacity to understand earth’s ecosystem in the twenty-first century. As Morton points out, however, the source of much of what is problematic or confused in our thinking about our world can also be the source of challenges to such ossified thinking. Romantic-era texts, he writes, ‘not only … exemplify, but also … do not accord with the various syndromes and symptoms that emerge from this very period. At the precise moment at which the trajectories of modern ecology were appearing, other pathways became possible’.⁶ The chapters in this volume do some of the work of recovering those alternative pathways, as well as exposing where Romantic thinking has led us astray.

The impact on Romantic thinking of climate catastrophes in general, and of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in particular, has been raised to international attention by Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World (2014), which has led to other investigations of its aftermath, such as Robert Markley’s research into the 1816 British embassy to the Chinese Emperor.⁷ For decades, however, Romanticism has been a fruitful field for ecocritical approaches to literature, such as the ‘Green Romanticism’ established by Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology (1991). The chapters in this volume follow more recent work by Morton, Menely, Clark, Louise Westling, John Parham and others that seeks to ground criticism of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century cultural production in an understanding of both Romantic-era environmental realities and intellectual cultures. Heidi Scott takes a similar approach in Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century (2014), as do the contributors to Romantic Sustainability and Romantic Ecocriticism (both 2016), in order to consider what we might learn from Romanticism and its response to climate.⁸

Ironically, despite its volcanic origins far off in the southern hemisphere, the Year Without a Summer is now most closely associated with the work of a small group of friends who gathered in 1816 at the Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva. The friends included Lord Byron, Byron’s doctor John Polidori, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (who would marry Shelley after his first wife’s suicide later that year) and Godwin’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, at the time pregnant with Byron’s child. Many of the group were in self-imposed exile from England—Byron because of the notoriety of his recent divorce, Shelley and Godwin because of their illicit relationship—but they were also part of the first wave of British tourists to explore Europe after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The Diodati party was a famously productive one: Byron wrote the poem ‘Darkness’ and the third canto of Childe Harold, and a fragment of a ghost story by Byron was reworked by Polidori into The Vampyre (1819), the first vampire novel. The most famous work produced that summer was by the 18-year-old Mary Godwin, whose Frankenstein (1818) would be published under her married name.

Frankenstein’s success has largely overshadowed Mary Shelley’s other works and come to dominate our understanding of the Year Without a Summer, the gloomy, gothic world of post-Tambora Europe. It has come to stand in the popular imagination as a cautionary tale about the limits of science and the drive to subjugate natural processes, such as death, to human desires. More recently the novel has come to be read in light of pressing questions of who, or what, counts as ‘human’ and of how to be human in a hostile environment. Many of the chapters in this volume consider these issues from perspectives other than Shelley’s, showing that such questions were part of the atmosphere of 1816.

This is not, however, the only story to tell about the world of 1816 and the impact of climate on Romanticism.

As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, climate is an inescapable aspect of Romantic writing and thinking. Ideologies and experiences of climate inform everything from scientific writing to lyric poetry and novels. Crucially, such generic distinctions do not necessarily hold for a time before the institution of today’s disciplinary boundaries, and Romantic literature cannot be read in isolation from the scientific developments of the period. The then-emerging disciplines of geology, botany, meteorology, comparative anatomy and palaeontology have their bearing on novels and poetry, and vice versa. An understanding of climate is inseparable from an understanding of Romanticism, and yet we are still learning to turn our attention to climate phenomena in Romantic writing, phenomena that have been long overlooked because of their very ubiquity. Chapters in this collection consider the works of Jane Austen, John Keats and William Wordsworth, along with the Diodati circle and less well-known figures, such as the scientist Luke Howard. The chapters in this volume offer new readings of Romantic literature, and literary Romanticism, that seek to assess the ways in which such texts negotiate questions of climate.

Today we are used to thinking about climate as, fundamentally, a problem for the sciences and for disciplines such as law and political science that we hope might hold out answers to what is coming to be seen as humanity’s greatest challenge. The chapters in this volume speak to the ways in which the humanities, and especially literary studies, have their own part to play in understanding and responding to climate. One of the greatest strengths of literature, and thus of literary studies as a discipline responsive to and responsible for interpreting literature, is its ability to draw on and catalyse ideas, ideologies and metaphors from a seemingly infinite range of human experience and expertise. Literature makes it possible to imagine conversations across disciplines, across geographic and political divides and across the centuries. In the dialogue that opens this volume, Heidi Thomson and James Renwick argue for a new, ‘interdiscursive’ approach to considering climate, an approach which draws on the capacious and promiscuous methodologies of literature to bring together insights from a range of intellectual disciplines to meet the unprecedented challenge of climate change. The scientific distancing of the environment as a set of topics to be studied, Renwick argues, has been a boon to measurement and data-gathering, but it has yet to offer feasible solutions to the great problem of how to keep the planet habitable for the plants and animals that currently call it home. Thomson and Renwick argue that the scientific mindset that has dominated our thinking since the Romantic period itself can be enlarged and enhanced by thinking of the environment not just as a series of phenomena to be observed but also as an infinite web of experiences to be lived. This is the hallmark of Romantic writing about that most contested term, ‘Nature’. It may also prove to be Romanticism’s most valuable legacy. Through re-learning the capacity of literature to imaginatively situate us—as individuals, as a species—in relation to our world, we might finally become capable of abandoning the self-destructive anthropocentric worldview that reduces the world to its component parts, its exchange value in global capitalism. ‘Getting and spending’, wrote Wordsworth, ‘we lay waste our powers;/Little we see in Nature that is ours’. Wordsworth believed that the ‘world’—the world of society and economics—‘is too much with us’, but it is equally true that the world on which we live and depend is not sufficiently ‘with’ us, and we are insufficiently ‘with’ the world.⁹ By bringing Romantic literature into the conversation about climate, we hope that this volume will model the kind of interdiscursivity that Renwick and Thomson point to as the last best hope for our species and its place on the planet.

Part of the effort required for such interdiscursivity to work is that of rethinking what we ‘know’ about Romanticism and about a world in which the effects of the Industrial Revolution were only beginning to be felt. Reimagining ourselves into the lived experience of the Year Without a Summer requires considerable ef...