The Darkness Years

This year has been a very uncommon one. The spring was exceeding cold and backward or rather there was no spring, the summer was cold and wet, or rather we had no summer. The Crop was very bad and unproductive. The Harvest was very late, the crop was not well got in. A Scarcity has taken place. The Quartern loaf is 1/6, other articles in proportion.

There never was so many beggars as thee is at present in our streets. Taxes are high and are levied with Severity. Petitions for a reform have been presented to the Prince Regent from London and other Cities, and have not been well received. Neither trade nor commerce are revived. Tradesmen and labourers are out of employ and are in a state of Starvation. The Regent and his ministers do not seem to care for the grievances under which the Nation groans under, and seem to be deaf to a reform of flagrant abuses that universally exist in the expenditure of the Public money.

Diary of Edward Lucas of Stirling, 31 December 1816.

The title of this book is more than a metaphor. The period 1810 to 1820 was one of the darkest and coldest in the last 200 years. The causes are well known now; in April 1815 there was a colossal eruption of Mount Tambora, in present-day Indonesia. It was the biggest explosion on our planet for 80,000 years, pushing ash and pumice into the air, but more importantly, pushing sulphur above the atmospheric level of the weather. The sulphur became sulphuric acid. The earth cooled, harvests were decimated and trade and transport were hugely affected. Between 1809 and 1820 there had only been one really good harvest in Britain, that was in 1815, just before the eruption. 1816 was the worst; it was 'The Year Without A Summer'; forty days of rain in spring in most of the country; frosts in June and July; orange and brown snow in winter; and bright yellow and reddish-brown sunsets, as clearly shown on Turner's painting from this period.

The cause was not known at the time, although it was suspected by some that the weather was outside of normal variations. The Leicester Journal commented in July 1816, 'such inclement weather is scarcely remembered by the oldest person living'.

The temporary cooling was made worse by a cyclical increase in sunspots called the 'Dalton minimum', which also reduced global temperatures. On some days in July 1816 the sunspots could be seen quite easily with the naked eye and some people panicked, thinking the end of the world was approaching. The poor harvests, and the lack of availability of food from the foreign markets which were experiencing the same freak weather effects, increased the price of food, causing riots, misery and repressive measures from the government. The consequences of Tambora can be clearly seen in the early chapters of this book.

These are also the darkness years because of the consequences of Britain's first 'total war'. Britain has experienced two of these in the last century and nobody today is in any doubt about how serious they were. The Napoleonic War is outside our folk memory, but it was a war to the death; a struggle which threatened every aspect of the British state. Britain went to war against a revolutionary enemy, and for most of the time, especially when sympathy with France waned, it was a war of national survival.

The suffering was immense, especially amongst the poor, and the state was nearly bankrupted in an attempt to repel Napoleon and defend the balance of power in Europe. However, the darkness years really started when the war was won; the suffering did not stop when the war ceased.

For almost a generation the war with France had been a national focal point in the same way the Second World War was. Following both world wars of the twentieth century, people expected change and improvement, but after the war with Napoleon, these things did not happen. Indeed the opposite happened. The end of the First World War brought the commemoration of the sacrifices of the many, and a promise of a 'land fit for heroes'; a consequence of the Second World War was a welfare state for all. You will look in vain for cenotaphs and commemorations about the Napoleonic War however. Victory was celebrated but the victors were not. There was no improvement in life after Waterloo. Those lower orders who thought peace would end their problems were whipped up into a fury which disrupted life for a very turbulent five year period.

These were the darkness years because life in Britain was changing and people did not know how to respond. The population had doubled between 1751 and 1821 causing panic and deep pessimism about the future; there was a genuine belief that starvation was on the way – not the near starvation that kept the poor in check, but actual national calamity. Thomas Malthus was the prime source of this fear and uncertainty. His Essay on the Principle of Population was in print every year from 1798 to 1817. It suggested two possible futures: either the population increase would lead to mass starvation as agriculture failed to feed the new mouths, or disease, famine and war would hold back population growth. The government was so worried that it took some action – there was a nationwide head count organised in 1801 and another in the midst of a desperate war in 1811.

Malthus's pessimism encouraged many of the ruling classes to change their attitude towards the poor. Malthus regarded unemployment as just another word for overpopulation, and he believed that the vast increase in the number of poor families with poor children was caused by early marriage and encouraged by generous welfare policies. Like many aspects of life in the Regency, the old ways were not working and nothing new was appearing to take its place. William Cobbett, a radical reformer who used his newspaper the Political Register to attack the government and its actions, and a man to whom hate came easily, told Malthus that he loathed him more than anything in the world.

The population rise led to new urban areas which ushered in new ways of living, disrupting the traditional ways of doing things. Prior to this, people had mostly lived in small units, where problems were locally based and could be solved face to face, and where the rich felt a responsibility for the poor. It was a hierarchical society, but one based on consensus and some...