The Explosive Destruction of the Tambora - Frankenstein Myth
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein tells the tale of a monster created by an obsessed scientist. Since its inception in 1816, the story has haunted scientists, warning against the worst excesses of scientific misadventure and technological hubris.
A 1960s edition of Frankenstein.
However, in an attempt to rescue the profession of science from Mary Shelley’s potent critique, the 21st-century scientific community seems to have rallied around an emerging myth about Frankenstein, that it was inspired by the Tambora volcano in the distant tropical archipelago.
According to the myth, the dust and ash thrown into the atmosphere by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora – located on Sumbawa Island in the East Indies – traveled around the world, dimming the sun in Europe and causing temperatures there to drop, whilst creating storms, producing frosts and floods, and generally darkening the landscape. This extreme weather supposedly decimated harvests as well during 1816, leading to hunger, poverty and displacement.
If you want a short introduction to the myth, have a look at the following entertaining video lecture which outlines the purported links between Tambora, Frankenstein, and another 'monster' of the time, Napoleon Bonaparte.
Video lecture: "Did a climate change catastrophe really lead to the writing of 'Frankenstein'? "
As she traveled across Europe in 1816. Mary Shelley had the chance to witness the misery of the weather firsthand. She and her (soon-to-be) husband, the radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, were heading to the Swiss villa of another English writer of note, the famous/infamous Lord Byron who was hanging out there with his physician-writer-vampire friend, Dr. John Polidori.
The famed 1816 Villa Diodati writers of gothic literature: L to R: Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, & Dr. John Polidori.
According to the Tambora - Frankesntein Myth, the bad summer weather made by Tambora confined Mary Shelley indoors, offering her plenty of time to reflect upon what she had seen and to experiment with ways to put it onto paper. As she wrote, she inflected the foreboding landscapes and human misery of continental Europe into her emerging horror novel.
The Tambora–Frankenstein myth regularly re-emerges from the pens of science writers these days, most notably when a volcano erupts or a new Frankenstein movie is released.
Yet the myth is riddled with problems. To start with, if 1816 was colder and rainier and icier than the years preceding or following, it is not clear the Tambora eruption was the cause. A technical report from Switzerland, where Shelley wrote Frankenstein, casts doubt on the scale of Tambora’s impacts and suggests it would have had a minor role, if any, in creating any extra extreme weather or any extra hunger and destitution.
A far more significant contributor to human misery at this time was the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), which had long degraded European trade and decimated farms and towns.
Napoleon at the Battle of Friedland.
If Shelley was attempting to personify human misery and displacement into the restless character of her monster, the root cause was more likely war rather than a volcanic eruption.
This is not to say Tambora volcano did not inflict human misery. Probably 50,000 or more people died on the islands of Sumbawa, Lombok, Bali and Java, some during the initial 1815 eruption but mostly through subsequent hunger and disease. Another 50,000 people in other parts of the world may also have succumbed to hunger and disease as 1816’s harvests failed under the dimmed sun.
Yet, to get things in perspective, the Napoleonic Wars had killed 5 million people by 1815. Soon after, the Java Wars (1825-1830) waged by European empires against local East Indies kingdoms resulted in more than 200,000 deaths. In the race to cause human misery, wars seem to outpace volcanoes, at least during Mary Shelley’s time.
The last day of the Java Wars, 1830. Nicolaas Pieneman's 1830 painting
Some have suggested that the Tambora - Frankenstein link shows us the power and danger of global climate change, since if humans repeat what Tambora did in 1815 (i.e., spew our vast amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere), then we are going to drive the planet towards the climate miseries of 1815/16.
The scholars of the Frankencities project have a different view however. We think that the link between Frankenstein and climate change is not direct. Frankenstein is neither inspired by, nor a direct comment upon, climate change.
However, the Frankenstein story is still relevant to the study of global warming and climate change since Mary Shelley's story offers us warnings and insights about technological hubris running amok. This is germane when considering the ongoing creation of industrial-scale technologies that are impacting upon the climate of the natural world.
------------------------------
FURTHER READING
------------------------------
For a detailed scholarly critique of the Tambora - Frankenstein myth, including an investigation into its problems, failings, and miscalculations, you can access an academic paper written by the members of the Frankencities project for free at ResearchGate. Here's a view of the cover page of the paper...
Or you may access a shorter 'news media' article about the research by going here to The Conversation.
The mass media in the UK have picked up on this debate referencing our research laid out above. See, for instance, this article at the Daily Express:
The Frankencities project is working to outline the worst-case scenarios of climate-challenged cities worldwide, as they collapse under environmental and economic stress. If all the monstrous dystopian thoughts of the Frankencities project are too gloomy for you to bare, you might like to check out the brighter more optimistic 'sister project' called Ecotopia 2121 which utilizes utopian literature to outline super-green ecofriendly futures across the globe.
