The Season That Had No Summer: London Ballrooms in the Cold Year of 1816 | History for Sleep

Regency London in 1816 was the capital of a kingdom governed by George, Prince Regent, on behalf of the ailing George III, a city of roughly a million people fed by a farming economy still recovering from the end of the Napoleonic Wars. That year became known as the Year Without a Summer, after the April 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa filled the upper atmosphere with volcanic ash, bringing cold, endless rain and failed harvests across Britain and Europe. For a Mayfair household of the gentry, the London Season still ran from spring to July, with rented town houses, ladies' maids, mantua-makers and a full calendar of balls.This episode of History for Sleep covers the fashions, the weather, the food, the servants and the marriage market of the 1816 London Season. Regency gowns were made of fine white Indian muslin, so sheer and light that warmth was sacrificed to the high-waisted neoclassical silhouette. Domestic servants in damp, poorly heated houses suffered from chilblains, while coal grew dear and grain prices climbed after the Corn Law of 1815 kept out cheap foreign wheat. The year also brought the royal wedding of Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg at Carlton House on 2 May 1816, and bread riots and protest meetings later in the year.At the center of the marriage market stood Almack's Assembly Rooms in King Street, St James's, where Wednesday-night balls were controlled by a small committee of aristocratic lady patronesses. Admission required a voucher granted personally by those patronesses, and a strict dress code applied, so that entry to Almack's could decide a young woman's standing in Regency society.The cold summer of 1816 is remembered not only for hunger and unrest but as the season that produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and John Polidori's The Vampyre at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva.