Visions of volcanoes

This article explores written and visual representations of volcanoes and volcanic activity in the long nineteenth century, with the particular perspective of writers from the non-volcanic regions of northern Europe. I show how the language of fire was used in both first-hand and fictionalized accounts of people’s interactions with volcanoes and experiences of volcanic phenomena, and how the routine and often implicit linkage of ‘fire’ with ‘combustion’, as an explanation for the deep forces at play within and beneath volcanoes, slowly changed as the formal scientific study of volcanoes developed. We will see how Vesuvius was used as a model volcano in science and literature and how, later, following devastating eruptions in Indonesia and the Caribbean, volcanoes took on a new dimension as contemporary agents of death and destruction.