THE OTHER IRISH FAMINE - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 112

ity that would shatter and transform Ireland ashort generation later. Carleton, with the novel-
ist's power of metaphor, offers a graphic image of the deep symbiosis between climate change
and human destiny in the dystopic Tambora period:
The very skies of heaven were hung with the black drapery of the grave; for never since,
nor within the memory of man before it, did the clouds present shapes of such gloomy and
funereal import. Hearses, coffins, long funeral processions, and all the dark emblems of mor-
tality, were reflected, as it were, on the sky, from the terrible works of pestilence and famine,
which were going forward on the earth beneath it. 52
What are the lessons of the “forgotten” Irish famine of 1816-18? First of all, weather deteri-
oration provides only the initial conditions for a humanitarian disaster. Much more depends
in the longer term on the resilience of the communities affected, on their flexible will and
capacity to adapt to drastic environmental changes, and on the resources of government. The
nation-states of Europe—and particularly Britain in its responsibilities for Ireland—largely
failed this test in Tambora's aftermath, and were rescued only by the return of seasonable
weather in mid-1818 and the subsequent bountiful harvests.
In Doctor Frankenstein's ambivalent feelings toward his humanoid creation, we can trace
the same dehumanizing impulse that allowed many among the metropolitan affluent classes
of Europe to abandon legions of the rural poor to their miserable fate in 1816-18:
Figure 8.4. This remarkable hybrid illustration from Carleton's The Black Prophet (p. 27) shows the “sky”
above the lovers' heads filled with phantasmic scenes of human suffering from the Irish famine and epi-
demic of 1816-18. Following Carleton's text closely, the illustrator represents the calamity as meteoro-
logical in origin, where rainclouds shape a nightmarish vision of fever-stricken victims, deathbeds, and
funeral wakes. The contrast with the sentimental image of the hero and heroine is jarring.
I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon
him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings
were altered to those of horror and hatred.
A eugenic loathing characterizes all of Frankenstein's interactions with the Creature. From
that visceral “hatred” engendered by his repulsive appearance, Frankenstein arrives at the