Iceland, 1783: The Laki Eruption

On 8 June 1783, lava and sulphuric gas began to spill from a volcanic fissure in the Icelandic Laki mountain. The eruption, while unremarkable on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, would prove exceptionally disastrous over the coming eight months, during which it produced amounts of acid aerosols that surpassed most volcanic events of the Holocene. Across Europe, extreme weather conditions were observed throughout the summer: hot, dry fog covered swathes of land, veiling the sun in a red haze for days at a time, and excessive heat set in, interrupted only by lightning storms with gale-force winds. Harvests were thinned by the unpredictable weather, and mortality rates in England in the 1783/84 harvest year rose to 16.7% above trend.

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Concurrently, in the autumn of 1783, English poet William Cowper began to write a blank verse poem about a couch. Initially embarked upon by Cowper on a friend’s whim, the project soon began to surpass its initial bounds, and Cowper found himself adding to his contemplations on the sofa poetic reflections on gardens, godliness, trade, the state of the British Navy, art, and earthquakes. Upon the poem’s completion and publication, one discursive aspect of The Task struck a particular chord with the British public. In Book II, The Time-Piece, Cowper condemns the slave trade and recruits a markedly patriotic rhetoric to advocate for abolition:

Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs

Receive our air, that moment they are free,

They touch our country and their shackles fall.

That’s noble, and bespeaks a nation proud

And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then,

And let it circulate through ev’ry vein

Of all your empire. That where Britain’s power

Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too. (ll. 40-47)

The cultural impact of these lines can hardly be overstated. Published in 1785, The Task caught the British abolition movement at its highest point of public engagement; the poem’s evangelical ardour paired with its evocation of compassion, liberty and sociality as British virtues had immense popular appeal. In the cultural consciousness of the 1780s, abolitionist enthusiasm provided an appropriate rhetorical vessel for imperial enthusiasm. It permitted for the rewriting of the imperial project along idealistic lines of enlightenment and liberalism, as captured in the above excerpt: colonial expansion, acknowledged to be a demonstration and proof of power, is in equal measure imagined as an instrument of mercy.

 

Yet The Task is not an uncomplicated text, and its framing of abolitionist urgency not purely one of untroubled expansionism. Cowper suffered from depression throughout the entire period in which he worked on the poem, and the strange climate phenomena of 1783 and 1784, too, left their mark on the text. The above excerpt continues on a decidedly more sombre note:

Sure there is need of social intercourse,

Benevolence and peace and mutual aid

Between the nations, in a world that seems

To toll the death-bell of its own decease,

And by the voice of all its elements

To preach the gen’ral doom. When were the winds

Let slip with such a warrant to destroy,

When did the waves so haughtily o’erleap

Their ancient barriers, deluging the dry?

Fires from beneath, and meteors from above

Portentous, unexampled, unexplained,

Have kindled beacons in the skies, and th’ old

And crazy earth has had her shaking fits

More frequent, and foregone her usual rest.

Is it a time to wrangle, when the props

And pillars of our planet seem to fail,

And Nature with a dim and sickly eye

To wait the close of all? (ll. 49-65)

In this imaginary of disaster, the question of abolitionism and imperial strife becomes not only one of political positioning, but additionally a matter of, to enter terms as extreme as Cowper’s, global salvation. As denoted by the term “portentous”, environmental experiences are presented as a semantic framework encoding divine messages which Cowper, here, takes on the responsibility of interpreting. The extreme weather conditions that followed the Laki eruption – along with a meteoric procession that could be seen from Britain on 18 August, adding further to the sense of strangeness which pervaded the year 1783 – give occasion to express a deeper spiritual and moral anxiety about imperial conduct.

 

The trepidation expressed in The Task was no cultural outlier. Millenarian expectations were on the rise in late eighteenth-century Britain and would only increase with the advent of the French Revolution. Faith in Providence was commonplace, and interpreting otherwise unexplained events in religious terms standard practice among large parts of the populace. That such interpretations would encompass imperial action simply as a matter of course is unsurprising: it made up a part of the everyday, and the everyday was subject to spiritual interpretation.

 

Yet by examining the specific instances in which unusual events, cultural quirks, cataclysms, or other experiential elements are imbued with political meaning, something can be learned about those aspects of imperiality which especially preoccupied the Romantic-Age mind and heart. It was not by coincidence that the slave trade, rather than a different political hot-button issue, came to Cowper’s mind when he considered the totality of strange events that shaped the year 1783. A volcanic eruption, a personal struggle with depression, a profound religiosity, and the fact of colonial domination collide in the above excerpt of The Task to give us insight into how British imperiality, at a crucial moment of imperial self-definition, was felt by a metropolitan subject.

 

My research project refers to these instances of individual interpretation and experience as affective negotiations of imperiality. Building on critical theory from affect- and cultural studies, it aims to analyse literary writing as a space in which emotional attitudes to imperial action are developed, expressed, and worked through. This can occur in equal measure in texts which explicitly address imperial concerns, such as the large body of abolitionist writing produced in Britain from the 1780s onwards, and in texts which merely graze aspects of the imperial experience and contain no explicitly politicised meaning. The latter case is a particularly interesting one: how do emotions about the Empire feature in texts that have, ostensibly, fairly little to do with it?

 

In order to investigate this question, my research project analyses three text corpora compiled of poetry, prose, and political writing. It examines these corpora in a survey method which first isolates semantic fields held in common by the texts, and then proceeds to conduct close readings of examples from each semantic group. By thus pointing out similarities in the ways in which these texts represent imperial action and convey emotive meaning, a structure of feeling begins to take shape which characterizes the complex and often contradictory processes of negotiation prompted by the seemingly simple fact of imperiality. The knowledge and experience of being at the head of an empire is shown to be entangled with the more individualised modes of feeling and self-positioning found in literary writing.

 

Cowper’s apocalyptic excursus in The Task exemplifies one of many such negotiations: elsewhere, Mary Prince recalls a flood that occurred on the Turks Islands after she’d long been enslaved by a salt pond owner there, and surmises that the flood must have been sent to colonists “for their wickedness” (Prince, p. 23). Having seen barren landscapes around Margate, John Keats imagines how, were they now revived, medieval folk heroes like Robin Hood would lament having lost their English forests to the expansion of the Navy. In Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, the mysterious plague which spreads across the globe in a pandemic is proliferated by imperial warfare. Be it as a means to make sense of strange weather or as a lens through which to envision the future: imperiality is an affective feature of such texts, and making it visible helps us gain an understanding of its entanglement with the personal and the mundane.