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.