When the Earth Moves

The year without a summer inaugurates Lord Byron’s life of scandalous exile after The Separation, as well as his catastrophist oeuvre: Darkness (1816), which is a prelude to the more sophisticated catastrophism of Cain (1821), itself the belated prequel of Manfred (1817) (‘My Magician’ and ‘the best of my misbegotten’). The year 1816 is one of brilliant misbegottens, electrifying writing of superb cosmic vision and scientific imagination, which engages with futures past and the relativity of time. This chapter explores how Byron’s magical catastrophist writing mediates emotional and social catastrophe. The chapter then moves to the Hampshire countryside, and Jane Austen’s drafting of Persuasion—stalled under the black star of Henry Austen’s bankruptcy in the spring of 1816—to consider financial ruin as another apocalyptic turn that informs 1816 as the perfect storm of Romantic catastrophes. From here the question of connections between Austen and Byron are revisited—a recurring site of magical thinking in Romantic literary history—to engage broader questions about literary studies and periodization, in relation to the rethinking of space-time relations that catastrophism inspires.