Frankenstein, the Baroness, and the Climate Refugees of 1816 ⇒

Gillen D’Arcy Wood has an article over at The Public Domain Review that is a reminder that history and literature are not as finite they may seem. They grow and change with the times.

In Frankenstein’s Creature, Mary Shelley offers us the most powerful possible incarnation of the loathed and de-humanized refugee. The “Year Without a Summer”, with its ghost story competition by the lake, remains one of the best-loved biographical vignettes of the Romantic period. But now, as we commemorate that direful year, it is no longer the story it was.

Fantastic piece of historical journalism. Adding Wood’s Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World to my “To Read” list.

(via Joe Dawson at Coudal.)