The Year Without a Summer, Famine and a Writter's Contest

 

In the shadow of the recent covid19 lockdowns,  house restrictions and world pandemic its intresting to see how famous writters of the past reacted to more or less similar situations. The result was the creation of marvelous novels, poems and stories.

"The extraordinary worldwide meteorological events of 1816 resulted in that year being christened the "year without a summer". A close succesion of major volcanic eruption occured across the globe from 1811-1814. This series was then capped by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies - The largest known eruption in over 1,300 years. Occuring during the middle of the Dalton Minumum ( a period of unusual low solar activity), it added to an existing cooling trend that had been periodically ongoing since 1350. The summer of 1816 saw average global temperatures by 0.4 - 0.7 celsius (0.07 - 1.3 F), resulting in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere and the worst famine of the 19th century in many other parts of the world. In July the incessant rainfall of an unusually cold, wet summer obliges Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and other friends to remain indoors for the balance of their Swiss holiday. As a form of entertainment they conducted a contest to see who could write the scariest story, leading Mary Shelley to write the novel Frankenstein and Lord Byron to write the short story "Fragment of a Novel." In addition, Lord Byron also wrote a poem, "Darkness," at the same time. Polidori would later use Byron's "Fragment" as the basis for his tale The Vampyre (1819), which was the first vampire story in the English Language."

Taken from James Pontolillo's THE BLACK SUN UNVEILED book (Chapter: Mary Shelley and the Black Sun 1826) 

SEE ALSO:

The Villa Diodati 

THE YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER on Wikipedia