The ‘Year Without a Summer’ and the Politics of Climate Change

Abstract

This final chapter focuses on periodical writings about the ‘distresses’ of the Regency, revealing the interplay of the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ that makes an environmental catastrophe. It shows how reformers like William Cobbett sought to argue that poverty and famine, rather than part of the order of nature, were politically produced. However, through a reading of the Examiner’s republication of Coleridge’s poem ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’, it also reveals the emergence of a more complex idea of agency in which environmental and political factors are seen to work in tandem. This analysis provides a platform for some final considerations about the difficulty of assigning agency in relation to present-day climate change, and the ways in which the Anthropocene both aggrandises and humiliates humanity.