with superstitious awe, at the red, louring aspect of the sun; and indeed there was reason for the most enlightened person to be apprehensive; for, all the while, Calabria and part of the isle of Sicily, were torn and convulsed with earthquakes; and about that juncture a volcano sprung out of the sea on the coast of Norway. (265)
Up to this point White has maintained his educated distance from the superstitions of country people and has advanced solid objective reports. He appeals here to Romantic discourse that appreciates the wonder of natural forces and delights in their irreducible mystery. Inspired by the same event, William Cowper noted in his journal, “We never see the sun but shorn of his beams, the trees are scarce discernible at a mile’s distance, he sets with the face of a red hot salamander and rises with the same complexion” (quoted in Grattan and Brayshay 128). Alternatively, 1783 was known as the “sand summer” in England because of the lingering atmospheric ash, as described in White’s account of the blanched midday sun. The Laki eruption infused a massive volume of sulfurous ash into the stratosphere, which had the effect of reflecting some sunlight back into space and cooling the atmosphere; but the ash also dispersed admitted light and created a milky-white luminosity like a frosted incandescent light bulb. As Laki continued to pump ash and gases into the atmosphere for eight months, widespread famine, stifling air pollution across Europe, and a particularly severe winter into 1784 condemned most of Iceland’s livestock to death, and one-quarter of its human population followed. Local parish records across England from 1783–84 suggest that the accumulated effects of the Laki eruption killed twenty-three thousand British men and women, which makes it one of the largest natural disasters to beset modern England. An estimated 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide were emitted, or three times the total industrial pollution of Europe in 2006 (Walker).
The Laki eruption had the kind of apocalyptic qualities that led the religious to believe that they were experiencing a form of divine retribution, and made secular-minded Enlightenment thinkers question the perfectibility of human society through reason and science. Religious, folk, and scientific perspectives preserved in eighteenth-century periodicals demonstrate the high levels of anxiety and troubling portents swirling in various social circles (Grattan and Brayshay 129–32). The virulent heat in July 1783, the violent cold throughout the winter of 1783–84, and the confusion of the alternately blanched and ensanguined sun raised serious doubts about the human ability to understand or control chaotic elements of nature. Rather than dismiss the “superstitious awe” of country people, White feels on an epistemological par with them. Even the educated had little scientific explanation for the horribly surreal scenes during those years.
Benjamin Franklin was more analytical. Not knowing whether a volcano was involved, he called the phenomenon a “universal fog” and forthrightly rendered the mystery a useful predictive mechanism. If dry summer fogs were to become a new reality, “men might from such fogs conjecture the probability of succeeding hard winter, and of the damage to be expected by the breaking up of frozen rivers in the spring; and take such measures as are possible and practicable, to secure themselves and effects from the mischiefs that attended the last” (377). Franklin wished to secure a useful indicator from a confusing event, and the lesser ecological effects in America may have permitted his more stoical reaction.
White allows the chaos of this sublime year to remain mischievous. He turns to literature to make a lasting image of 1783: “Milton’s noble simile of the sun, in his first book of Paradise Lost, frequently occurred to my mind; [. . .] it alludes to a superstitious kind of dread, with which the minds of men are always impressed by such strange and unusual phaenomena” (265). The passage he quotes abuts a description of Satan as the “Arch-Angel ruin’d [. . .] th’excess of Glory obscur’d” (Paradise Lost 1.593–94). Having fallen, Satan’s full angelic sun is occluded by his moral corruption, and his legions are filled “with fear of change” (1.598). Satan’s band of fallen angels organizes in ranks, and they emit “A shout that tore Hell’s Concave, and beyond / Frighted the Reign of Chaos and old Night” (2.542–43). The revolution itself is a principle of disorder set against divine cosmic harmony. White’s allusion to Milton is suggestive: it figures the ensanguined sun following Laki’s eruption as a principle of corruption and error. The Laki eruption cannot be ignored, nor can it be explained away; it is one of the chaotic raw elements of the cosmos. As Milton’s Satan has only begun in Book I to cause trouble in the balanced hierarchy of God’s creation, White perceives a nagging sense of imbalance and future calamity surrounding these “horrible phaenomena” (265).
Recent volcanic events have stimulated new interest in Laki’s 1783 performance. When Eyjafjallajökull (AYE-yah fyat-lah yir-kutl) erupted in Iceland in April and May 2010, its ash filled the atmosphere over Europe in a morphing cloud that covered the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, and eastern Europe, and extended as far south as Spain and the heel of Italy. As measured by both the Volcanic Explosivity Index and total ash weight, this eruption was a minor event compared to Laki, but it caused the highest level of air traffic disruption since World War II (Sydney Morning Herald). The estimated $200 million per day in lost airline revenue and the major economic disruptions for Europe and its trading partners (primarily in Africa, Asia, and Australia) are stark reminders of a global society’s economic reliance on long-distance air transportation (Wearden). An eruption today on the much greater scale of Laki might have fewer repercussions for human health because of better technologies, but its economic effects would be dismembering. Eyjafjallajökull was a reasonably polite reminder of how environmental events disrupt modern business as usual. The chaotic narrative sporadically quashes the sunny ideal of steadily growing economies on a supportive ecological stage.
White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne is more ecologically complex than critics have allowed. The text indeed has extended passages that epitomize economic balance. But the work is innovative for other reasons. Its use of monography allows a microcosmic vision that is echoed in the ecosystem concept that would emerge in the twentieth century. The microcosm is subject to damaging changes in composition. White observes extinction due to human activity, which he imagines as gaps in an interconnected web of life rather than a hierarchical chain of being. Some of his careful observations raise questions that ecological scientists are still actively researching in the twenty-first century, such as the ecology of chaotic population fluctuation, the minimum viable populations of stressed species, the impacts of deforestation, and the multivariate dynamics of natural disasters, including thunderstorms, landslides, and volcanoes. White’s a priori expectation to observe economy in nature by no means blinds him to the importance of extreme, unpredictable weather and its downstream effects over many seasons and across species. There is no indication in the text that White is particularly disconsolate as a result of his uncertainties, but there is a sense that the phenomena are beyond the state of his science. His epistolary narrative is precocious and should be appraised as an important early work in the comparison of ecologies of balance and chaos.
The Last Man
Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man (1826) may appear to be a fiction far removed from White’s natural history chronicle. Divided by genre and composed within different cultural climates, the two works nevertheless find common ground in their concern for nature’s patterns of disturbance. Both Shelley and White look to the Romantic sublime in nature’s chaotic plots. Last men enjoyed a literary vogue after the Indonesian volcano Tambora’s eruption in 1815 and the economic depression of the 1820s. In 1823 Thomas Campbell published a poem with the same name as Shelley’s novel, which Campbell claimed had inspired Byron’s “Darkness,” a poem written in July 1816 under the dark skies of “the year without a summer.” These two lyrics convey the visceral feeling of apocalypse that fell over Europe in those surreal summer months. Byron’s work envisions volcanic chaos as a barren landscape:
The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
(69–72)
