We’ve all heard the name.  I doubt
most of us associate it with the Victorians, but it erupted during the
era.  August 27, 1883 in fact. It’d been giving warning since the middle
of May, 1883, but people didn’t take a whole lot of notice of it other
than as something of interest.  No one lived on the island anyway, what
could possibly be the big deal?  Even when it did erupt and destroyed ¾
of the island, . . if no one was there, what was the harm?  

It wasn’t the eruption itself that did the damage, it was the tsunami
that ensued.  It came slowly and killed approximately 40,000 people. 
We know that much of the island debris went into the air, but what
didn’t go into the air slid into the ocean.  Add the lava to it and the
earthquake and, well and you get tsunami.  Sadly, 2004 I don’t think
there’s anyone who doesn’t know how an earthquake can result in
that.    

Still this all happened in a part of the world we rarely associate
with the Victorian Era.  I suspect many of our regular readers, though
interested, might not see how it would affect their view of the era,
either in writing or research about North America or Europe or even
Australia.  I sure never thought of it.  But it did have a huge effect. 
For one thing the sound of the eruption could be heard 3000 miles away,
all the way to Australia.  The waves could be felt as far as France. 
But more than all that it was the effects of the millions of dust and
materials that entered the air, eventually circling the entire planet.

 One of the most vivid things the dust did was color the sky.  Dust
was thrown between 120,000 to 160,000 feet into the air, where the pull
of gravity is so light it can stay up there for years.  The refraction
brought unusual colors to sunsets, which is reflected in the art of the
period, and inspired poets.  Tennyson particularly, in St.
Telemachus, may have been inspired by how Krakatoa may have caused
of the spectacular skies.

 Had the fierce ashes of some fiery peak
Been hurl’d so high they ranged about the globe?
For day by day, thro’ many a blood-red eve,
In that four-hundredth summer after Christ,
The wrathful sunset glared against a cross
Rear’d on the tumbled ruins of an old fane
No longer sacred to the Sun, and flamed
On one huge slope beyond, where in his cave

  It also spawned groups of scientific thought such as The Royal
Society’s Krakatoa Committee which catalogue the effects starting to be
seen around by the close of 1883. Additionally  there were blue and
sometimes green moons, along with occasional coronas around the sun and
other planets in the solar system.  The beauty of the skies, could also
be disturbing, though.  In Poughkeepsie New York, firefighters responded
to a reported fire, which turned out only to be the “sky on fire”
courtesy of dust from Krakatoa.

 And then there was the temperature.  It lowered for 5 years around
the globe by as much as full degree. Scientists still ponder whether or
not the dust lowered the earth’s temperature or if somehow the lowering
temperature of the earth spawned the volcano.  Personally the former
seems to me most plausible.  The 1815 explosion of Tambora appeared to
be the cause of New England’s “year without a summer” in 1816, when
frost and snow stay into June and July  (Tambora was, incidentally, a
larger eruption, but not part of our era).  

  That being the case, could Krakatoa be responsible for the blizzards
in the late 1880’s , like New York City’s great Blizzard of
1888? http://lighteningstorms.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_great_blizzard_of_1888
 ) Maybe the blizzard that hit Maryland
in 1885 and 1889? Or perhaps the famous blizzards that ravaged the
U.S’s Midwest in 1886-1887?  If so, a volcanic eruption half way across
the world, three years earlier could be responsible for the sudden
ending of the cowboy Era in U.S. history, because so many ranches went
under the spring of that year.  But that’s fodder for another blog post.
 One way or another, Krakatoa effected lives around the world, from
artists and poets, to the everyday man watching the sky for beauty—and
snow.

 Krakatoa, The Day the World Exploded,  Simon Winchester