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FRANKENSTEIN AND THE REFUGEES
But it would not do to dwell on the macro-implications of post-Tambora chaos without giving
proper memorial to its principal victims: the common people who faced the slow torture of
death by starvation. Devastated by famine and disease in the Tambora period, the poor of
Europe hurriedly buried their dead before resuming the bitter fight for their own survival. In
the worst cases, children were abandoned by their families and died alone in the fields or by
the roadside. The well-born members of the Shelley Circle, of course, were never reduced to
such abysmal circumstances. With credit to spare, they did not experience the food crises that
afflicted millions among the rural populations of western Europe in the Tambora period. That
said, chroniclers of Mary Shelley and her friends have been wrong to imagine their European
existence as a charmed bubble of poetry, romantic villas, and sexual intrigue. The Shelleys'
celebrated writings were very much enmeshed within the web of ecological breakdown fol-
lowing the 1815 Tambora eruption, when a subsistence emergency weakened the European
population and famine-friendly contagion took hundreds of thousands of lives.
Byron and Percy Shelley were companions on a weeklong walking tour of Alpine Switzer-
land inJune 1816, during whichthey debated poetry, metaphysics, and thefuture ofmankind
but also found time to remark on the village children they encountered, who “appeared in
an extraordinary way deformed and diseased. Most of them were crooked, and with enlarged
ation assumes a similar grotesque shape: a barely human creature, deformed, crooked, and
enlarged. As remarkable a feat of literary imagination as
Frankenstein
is, Mary Shelley was
not wanting for real-world inspiration for her horror story, namely, the deteriorating rural
populations of Europe post-Tambora.
On the thunderous night in Geneva that first inspired her ghost story, Mary Shelley pic-
tured Frankenstein waking from a nightmare to find his hideous creation at his bedside,
of Percy Shelley's encounter with “half-deformed or idiotic” beggar children, presumably de-
ranged with hunger. Numerous similar impressions could be cited. Another English tourist,
traveling from Rome to Naples in 1817, remarked on “the livid aspect of the miserable inhab-
itants of this region.” When asked how they lived, these “animated spectres” replied simply,
ations had not been exhausted by the creation of Frankenstein and the vampire, someone in
the Shelley Circle would surely have invented the zombie.
Mary Shelley's imaginative conjuring of her famous Creature thus bears the mark of the
famished and diseased European population by which she was surrounded that dire Tambora
summer. Like the hordes of refugees spreading typhus across Ireland and Italy during Shel-
ley's writing of the novel, the Creature is a wanderer and a menace to civilized society. At his
merest touch, healthy people drop dead like flies. In the novel, this murderous capability is
attributed to the monster's preternatural strength. But the terrifying atmosphere of his ram-
page, and his ability to strike at will across thousands of miles, seems more like the spread of
a famine or contagion.
Like the hordes of refugees on the roads of Europe seeking aid in 1816-18, the Creature,
when he ventures into the towns, is met with fear and hostility, while the privileged families
of the novel, the De Lacys and the Frankensteins, look upon him with horror and abomina-
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