Snowy weather helps James Madison with his legal studies

Following the eruption of Laki in Iceland, the winter of 1783-84 was very cold and snowy.

In Virginia, the Bill of Rights author James Madison tried to make light of the snows in a letter to Thomas Jefferson:

We have had a severer season and particularly a greater quantity of snow than is remembered to have distinguished any preceding winter. The effect of it on the price of grain and other provisions is much dreaded. It has been as yet so far favourable to me that I have pursued my intended course in law reading with fewer interruptions than I had presupposed.

Alexandra Witze & Jeff Kanipe, Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World (New York: Island Books, 2015), ch. 5, p. 110

Krakatau might have even affected Munch!

For months [in 1883] Krakatau's aerosols spread around the globe, reflecting sunlight and creating lurid colours in the sky, just as Tambora had done. The moon appeared blue at times, as did the sun. Sunsets were a spectacular marbling of red, gold, orange and other hues. In New York and Connecticut, people called the fire department because they thought the red glow on the horizon was from a conflagration. The fantastically coloured cloud bands in Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream might have been inspired by Krakatau-tinted skies that the artist had seen in Norway. Even Alfred Tennyson took a stab at describing the spectacle in his poem 'St. Telemachus': 'Had the fierce ashes of some fiery peak/ Been hurl'd so high they ranged about the globe?'

Alexandra Witze & Jeff Kanipe, Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World (New York: Island Books, 2015), ch. 3, p. 84

Downer of a Poem in the World Winter Following a Volcano

Not to be outdone [by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein], Lord Byron generated his own tale of gloom: the poem 'Darkness', which begins with these glum lines:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went — and came, and brought not day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation.

Byron goes on to depict ships rotting at sea, famine preying upon entrails, and dogs turning upon and eating their masters. Suffice it to say, 'Darkness' is a downer. But it accurately reflects the gloom that enveloped much of the world in 1816 — perhaps because of political unrest following the Napoleonic wars, but also in part because of the obscure volcano [Tambora] that had erupted in Indonesia.

Alexandra Witze & Jeff Kanipe, Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World (New York: Island Books, 2015), ch. 3, p. 79, Kindle loc 906

Not until the early twentieth century did scientists finally link the year without a summer to Tambora.

Id., p. 80, loc 928