Climate Change, Inequality and Romantic Catastrophe

Byron’s ‘Darkness’ (1816), Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826) understand catastrophe in environmental, political, and epistemological terms. They were all influenced by the stormy weather of 1816, one of the after-effects of the Tambora eruption the previous year, which triggered reflections on the vulnerability of human communities, including the possibility of human extinction. However, Byron and the Shelleys were privileged expatriates largely sheltered from the post-Tambora subsistence crisis that afflicted most Europeans. Investigating how these texts understand the relationship between politics, inequality and environmental catastrophe, this chapter claims there is a parallel between their elite perspectives on apocalypse, and present-day responses to climate change. That is, ecological optimism and pessimism have a long lineage, and, then as now, are most attractive to those least affected by climate disruption.