“THIS END OF THE WORLD WEATHER” - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 22

that he—well-traveled aristocrat that he was—had ever seen. He memorialized that tumultu-
ous night in his wildly popular poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage :
The sky is changed—and such a change! Oh night,
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong …
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among
Figure 3.1 and 3.2 . On the left, a sketch portrait of Mary Shelley at age eighteen, while she was living in
Geneva. Several full portraits of a young Mary Shelley were taken in this period, but this tantalizing sketch
is the only image to survive (though doubts linger as to its authenticity). It reminds us of how young the
author of Frankenstein was in the summer of 1816. (Russell-Coates Gallery, Bournemouth; © Bridgeman
Art Library.) On the right, Percy Bysshe Shelley as he was in 1819, at age twenty-eight. (By Alfred Clint;
© National Portrait Gallery.)
Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue …
How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,
And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!
And now again 'tis black,—and now, the glee
Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth,
As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth. 6
In Byron's imagination, the Tamboran storms of 1816 achieve volcanic dimensions—like an
“earthquake's birth”—and take delight in their destructive power.
What caused the terrible weather conditions over Britain and western Europe in 1816-18?
Why so much rain and so many destructive gales?