Climate Changes: Mary Shelley on Roger Dodsworth

ABSTRACT

In the summer of 1826, melting snows revealed a man frozen nearly 200 years, reanimated by a passing doctor. Reports of Roger Dodsworth, formerly deceased, spread from the French papers to launch a flurry of essays in the English periodicals. While the summer of 1816 has been central to discussions of climate, global politics, and Romantic literature, the thaw of 1826 has been relatively neglected. In this paper, I examine how Shelley's treatment of nature in “Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman” presents climate changes as plural and contingent, simultaneously disrupting historical narrative and entangling natural history with human embodiment. As scientists grapple with evolutionary records revealed by our own “great thaw,” “Roger Dodsworth” offers a philosophical model for grappling with changes that cannot be overcome through human intervention. At the conclusion to the essay, as Shelley speculates that Dodsworth may have died a second time, finding “his ancient clay could not thrive on the harvests of these latter days,” she suggests a fundamental incompatibility of past and present, even as she collapses the distinction between the two. A changed world, she suggests, cannot support the past as it was, but only as it has become.

Notes

1 More recently, the daily mean for 27 June 2022, was 14.1°C—although it rose to an unprecedented 28.1°C on 19 July 2022.

2 The number of similarities between this “Letter from the Gentleman Preserved in Ice” and the essay that Mary Shelley submitted to the New Monthly Magazine suggests that Shelley might be the author of both. Charles Robinson, in his seminal essay on Shelley's essay, acknowledges this possibility, but suggests instead that the authors may have worked together in some way, arguing that “the more ironic tone of the ‘Letter’ suggests to me that it was not her work” (26n).