In April 1815, one of the largest known volcanic eruptions occurred — a catastrophic event, utterly without precedent in modern times. It might surprise you to learn that this wasn’t Krakatoa. Krakatoa erupted in 1883.

Many have not heard of Mount Tambora or Sumbawa Island, which is part of the Indonesian ring of fire. The Mount Tambora eruption measured 7 on the volcanic explosivity index (VEI) and devastated the island — Krakatoa, by comparison, measured a 6. Tens of thousands were killed by the eruption and by famine and disease in the following weeks. Millions more are thought to have died from cholera and typhus as these epidemics tracked westwards. In 1817, 800,000 fell ill with typhus in Ireland alone.

1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer, and in North America as Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death. The northern hemisphere is thought to have cooled by approximately 1-2C and the British summer was approx 2-4C cooler than average, with profound effects also experienced in China, India, North Africa, Europe and North America. As weather patterns were disrupted, crops failed. In fact, as Gillen d’Arcy Wood makes clear in his study, Tambora: the eruption that changed the world, severe effects were felt for three years following the eruption and he credits the pressure for social and political reform throughout the nineteenth century to the eruption.

It was these later events that had first brought the Tambora eruption to my attention. I had been reading about the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, subject of Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo, and I wondered if the events in Manchester had had a knock-on effect here, in the Fens. I discovered not that, but reference to the Bread or Blood riots of 1816 in Littleport instead, which is just up the road from where I live. As the price of bread soared in 1816, riots broke out across the East of England. In post-Napoleonic war Britain, there was little for the common man to return to: a ruling class occupied with protecting their own interests: in tax cuts for the wealthy, land-owning class, and protectionist measures to keep the price of grain artificially high. Lord Liverpool’s government was hostile to any sign of unrest. In their mind, and with the French Revolution still in touching distance, any protest was seen as a threat and was brutally suppressed. In Littleport, five were hanged for their part in the riots; many more were transported or jailed. The events at Littleport should absolutely be understood as a precursor to Peterloo.

The Tambora eruption caused more than a bit of bad weather: it lead to Europe’s last subsistence crisis and precipitated the ‘great move westwards’ in North America. Whilst many suffered, not everyone was affected equally. The events of 1816 laid bare and intensified existing inequalities in ways we can recognise and which resonate in calls for social justice and reform today.

Over the past year or so and certainly since the Australia bush fires of 2019-20, there has been a marked shift in language away from climate change as something forever far away and removed — a luxury, let’s face it, of distanced western societies that have often turned a blind eye to the suffering of communities bearing the blunt end of climate breakdown — to a language of crisis and emergency. Climate crisis speaks of urgency.

My second novel The Year Without Summer fictionalises the events of that year. It is a story of then but it is also a story of now.

Summit caldera, Mount Tambora.

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Here is the outline for my second novel, The Year Without Summer, based on the events of 1815 and 1816. It will be published by Two Roads Books in early 2020.

The Year Without Summer

Guinevere Glasfurd

1815 – and on Sumbawa Island, Mount Tambora erupts. A cataclysmic eruption, it will go down in history as larger than Krakatoa. Sent to investigate, Henry Hogg, ship’s surgeon on board The Benares, can scarce believe what he finds. The island, once a green gem, is now ash – the sea around it turned to stone. Thousands have died. But as the dust cloud tracks north, shrouding the sun, the seasons on which so much depends, will fail.

1816 – Britain is racked with riots and revolutionary protest. Snow falls in August. Weeks of incessant rain seem to foretell the end of times. Sarah Hobbes, a farm labourer, not knowing day to day if she has work and always hungry, has had enough of farmers and their fancy fa-lals. Hope Peter, back from the Wars, finds his family home demolished and a fence gone up in its place. On the run after a poaching offence, he befriends little Willie Hutchen and they flee to London. In Vermont, Wesleyan preacher, Charles Whitlock, exhorts his followers to keep faith as drought dries their wells and their livestock starve. In Switzerland, Mary Shelley, confined indoors by weeks of rain, chafes against boredom. Famine refugees trudge by her door. This was not the summer she had hoped for. Caught between the past he loves and a future he desperately wants, John Constable, is jolted out of his complacency. If all art is feeling, should he paint the misery he sees?

The Year Without Summer tells the story of a fateful year when temperatures fell and the summer failed to arrive. It is a story of the books written, the art made; of the journeys taken, of the love longed for and the lives lost. Six separate lives, connected only by an event many thousands of miles away. Few had heard of Tambora – but none could escape its effects.

A new novel from Guinevere Glasfurd that deals with the urgent issue of our climate, to remind us how relatively small shifts in temperature can have profoundly devastating and wide-reaching effects. By turning our attention on six very different characters, she examines the purpose of art and literature, of religious belief and protest at a time of undeniable crisis – a crisis that was not borne equally by all.

available from bookshop.org

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September 6th, 2018.