The Last Man

By Mary Shelley and Stefan Mattessich

The first year of the story is 2073 in England. Lionel Verney and Perdita Verney are siblings who struggle to survive after the death of their parents. Adrian, the Earl of Windsor, discovers them and gives them a place to live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atopon Books
• Release date: Dec 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798986690735

Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in 1797, the daughter of two of the leading radical writers of the age. Her mother died just days after her birth and she was educated at home by her father and encouraged in literary pursuits. She eloped with and subsequently married the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but their life together was full of hardship. The couple were ruined by disapproving parents and Mary lost three of her four children. Although its subject matter was extremely dark, her first novel Frankenstein (1818) was an instant sensation. Subsequent works such as Mathilda (1819), Valperga (1823) and The Last Man (1826) were less successful but are now finally receiving the critical acclaim that they deserve.

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The Last Man

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

with an introduction by

Stefan Mattessich

Atopon Books

907 15th Street

Santa Monica, California 90403

United States

Copyright © 2023 by Atopon Books

All Rights Reserved.

Reprint of the 1826 first edition

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Names: Shelley, Mary, author.

Title: The Last Man / Mary Shelley.

Description: Santa Monica, CA: Atopon Books, 2023.

Identifiers: LCCN: 2022943831 | ISBN: 979-8-9862104-5-2 (paperback) | 979-8-9866907-3-5 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH Twenty-first century--Fiction. | End of the world-Fiction. | Plague-- Fiction. | English fiction--19th century--Fiction. | Essays. | BISAC FICTION / Classics | FICTION / Disaster | FICTION / Science Fiction / Apocalypic & Post-Apocalyptic | FICTION / Dystopian

Classification: LCC PR5397.L33 2023 | DDC 813.6--dc23

Cover Image: Zombie Hands Rising / chaiyapruek / Adobe Stock

Printed in the United States of America.

Mary Shelley’s Prophecies

Frankenstein is a remarkably generative novel. By this I mean it supports quite different interpretations without appreciable contradiction. This has something to do with the way Mary Shelley identifies with her characters. They really aren’t characters so much as aspects of herself or stand-ins for people she knew and the roles she played with them. The effect is a narrative unreliability that allows the story to stretch in the surprising directions its many retellings have taken it over the two centuries since it was published.

One impressive example in this regard is the 1998 movie Gods and Monsters, which turns Victor Frankenstein into the gay film director James Whale, who hires a lusty but homophobic handyman at his Los Angeles mansion to serve as a model for him to draw, represent, or, in Frankensteinian fashion, create. The pretext in this is revealed when Whale makes a pass at the handyman and he reacts angrily, threatening to kill Whale while also feeling abused (or sexually harassed). The ensuing clash between them brings out a deeper experience both men have of being nobodies and outsiders. Their monstrosity consists in the hardening effect of this experience and the opportunity they miss (in the two senses of the word) for mutual recognition across sexual and class lines.¹

Another reason why Shelley’s novel continues to strike so productive a chord for us today is her conscious interest in grappling with a modernity she was uniquely able to diagnose at a key transitional moment in its history. As the daughter of two first-rate intellectuals, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the friend (also, allegedly, polyamorous partner) of Lord Byron, she learned from the sidelines, as it were, of intimate life a great deal about the courage, risks, and costs of cutting edge engagement with one’s time. Her closeness to these charismatic figures left her both skeptical about and committed to the autonomy that mattered to Romantics like Kant, for whom knowing and thinking for oneself were paramount.² Personal circumstance compelled Mary Shelley to make autonomy itself into a problem, indeed into the problem of a modern world crossing up politics, economics, science, sex, the public and the private as never before.

This autobiographical dimension forms a basis for the generative power of Frankenstein. It allows us, for instance, to read the novel this way:

1. Victor Frankenstein = a poet (Percy Shelley) and the Monster = a poem

One detail that warrants this analogy of a callow scientist bent on creating life to Mary Shelley’s husband is that his family nickname as a child was Frank. Another was his passion for sciences like geology and chemistry. But the analogy is there as well in her repeated figuration of Frankenstein’s technoscientific desire as a journey to cold, inhuman, and otherwise sterile (or white) extremes like Percy Shelley’s Mont Blanc. That the poet, looking up in his monumental poem of the same name at its granite peaks from the banks of the River Arve, was meditating on similar problems of man’s pride, vanity, and insignificance before a terrifically indifferent nature did not preclude his composition of the poem, and the poem itself, being for Mary Shelley emblems of a similar desire to discover the springs of life, to penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places.³ Her critical target was a kind of rationalism, or idealism, to which Percy Shelley was certainly prone and which, even, if not especially, at its most reflexive, its most self-implicating, constitutes for Mary Shelley the monstrous thing, bound up with a sublimity that attracts scientists no less than Ozymandian kings and the poets who see through their will to power. Hence Frankenstein speaks for her in melancholy expostulations like this one: Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen to a rock (81).

Not that Mary Shelley is less reflexive, self-implicating, or otherwise in range of the same epistemophilic desire she critically targets—however masculine the desire may be. This is why one can also read the novel this way:

2. Frankenstein = a novelist (Mary Shelley) and the Monster = her novel (the monster of my creation [127])

The challenging conditions under which she wrote—exile from England under the cloud of scandal that formed with her relationship to an already married Percy, a cold winter in Geneva, a difficult pregnancy followed by the death of her infant child, a self-obsessed lover who nonetheless pushed her to write, to take herself seriously as an artist—come through in descriptions of Frankenstein’s life project that might easily apply to the ordeal of writing a long text like Frankenstein. Here he is in the thick of making the Monster a female companion: as I proceeded in my labour, it became every day more horrible and irksome to me. Sometimes I could not prevail on myself to enter my laboratory for several days, and at other times I toiled day and night in order to complete my work. It was indeed a filthy process in which I was engaged. During my first experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my employment; my mind was intently fixed on the sequel of my labour, and my eyes were shut to the horror of my proceedings. But now I went to it in cold blood, and my heart often sickened at the work of my hands (113).

Moreover, the sexual connotations attaching Frankenstein’s procreative drive to labour, conception, and confinement (My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement [32], he tells us) suggest another interpretation:

3. Frankenstein = a mother (Mary Shelley) and the Monster = her child

The Monster’s infamous sense of being an abortion supports reading into her novel the pain and grief of losing a child so soon upon giving it birth. It also hints at the ambivalence Shelley could only have felt about a motherhood that tied autonomy and dependence, engagement with the world and a privatizing familial care, into impenetrable knots. Such ambivalence resonates in the novel with the implication that, through the Monster as a kind of proxy, Frankenstein kills his little brother, his best friend, and his fiancée—undermining the domestic tranquillity (along with happiness a frequently repeated word in the novel) he is at the same time effusively praising.

Shelley also identifies with the Monster who feels both dead and abandoned by his creator, and not just as a mother might imagine the consciousness of her dead child but as herself a child whose birth, conversely, ended the mother’s life (Mary Wollstonecraft died shortly upon giving birth to her daughter). In this light,

4. Frankenstein = a mother (Mary Wollstonecraft) and the Monster = her daughter (Mary Shelley)

All the emotional registers of pain and grief in the novel here shift accordingly. The Monster’s thwarted desire for recognition (above all from his creator) takes on further poignancy in the context of Mary Shelley’s upbringing by a distant father who was too busy writing his books and managing a new family to give her much notice. This evokes another variant—

5. Frankenstein = a father (William Godwin)

Godwin was, like Percy Shelley (over whom he exerted considerable influence), a rationalist thinker. The human mind, with its capacities for reasoning and moral judgment, had for Godwin a universal character that required only its private exercise to actualize a virtually unlimited (even god-like) potential for knowledge. Its radical antecedence to social determinations (like birth or rank) led him to embrace French republicanism, but on a deeper level he was a philosophical anarchist (in fact one of its first proponents) suspicious of government and, indeed, any imposed structure that would impede the mind’s self-directed development, which was by itself a social good and, indeed, the principal source of social improvement. This led to highly progressive stands on women’s rights, marriage, monogamy, and the traditional family, although when his daughter acted upon the free love ethic he advocated by eloping with Percy, his strong disapproval harkened back rather to the strict Calvinism in which he had been raised. This revealed an inconsistency in his attitudes toward women, sexual pleasure, and happiness that his daughter would never forget. It also opens onto an adjacent interpretation:

6. Frankenstein = the Father (God) and the Monster = His Son (Christ)

That the Monster compares himself to Satan—I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me (92)—in no way clashes with other comparisons to Adam or, distantly, to the Christ who, on the cross, anguished over why God had forsaken him. This nexus of associations puts us squarely in the Copernican Revolution and the suspicion that God is either absent or dead. But it also settles into a more mundane love of the father whose inability to love back inspires both rage and a painful sense of worthlessness. The feeling Mary Shelley had for this sort of experience gave her special insight into the dialectical relationship between authority and rebellion, signalled by a startling inversion of the narrative, according to which:

7. The Monster = the Father and Frankenstein = the Son

As the Monster succinctly puts it when blackmailing Frankenstein into making him a mate (or put his family and friend at risk of death): You are my creator, but I am your master—obey! (116). Frankenstein does not in the end obey, but that he, too, harbors submissive feelings toward authority comes through in his relationship to his own father, whose demands for proper conduct along paternal lines Frankenstein can no more deny than meet. And he fails to meet these demands not just because he succumbs to the obsessional neurosis of scientific investigation; there is in him, again, that unconscious animus against conventional family life which touches on the most pregnant analogy of all:

8. Frankenstein = the Monster (a split-off part of Frankenstein’s self)

Here, the Monster’s feeling of being unsympathized with, and his correlative wish to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to [sit] down and enjoy the ruin (92), is the index of an aggression in Frankenstein that lends to his praise of the family life he is unable to embrace its overtone of bad faith. This is no less true when the aggression is directed at the Monster himself, which, when the feeling is described, sounds oddly like the Monster’s aggression toward him: When I thought of [the Monster], Frankenstein tells us, I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed, and I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly bestowed. When I reflected on his crimes and malice, my hatred and revenge burst all bounds of moderation (60). That the Monster’s crimes and malice are, on another level, Frankenstein’s own makes his words here into a kind of disavowal. Hatred and vengeful desire are turned round upon the self and lead him on to his own destruction in the Arctic, which it is not too much of an exaggeration to call a suicide.⁴ And the best signifier of this death drive in the novel is less his final end than his acceptance of those paternal demands, his yielding to paternal judgment: I thought that my father would be unjust if he ascribed my neglect [of the family values his father extols] to vice, or faultiness on my part; but I am now convinced that he was justified in conceiving that I should not be altogether free from blame. A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures…then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind (33).

Shelley is, I daresay, again speaking here through her protagonist when he criticizes himself. Given her experience as a neglected daughter who survives a mother, a mother who has lost a child, and the wife of an artist who (taking his cues from her father) has little use for a tranquillity that would blunt passion or even transitory desire, she remains attuned to the pathos of lost sympathy, broken connection, and loneliness that the Monster so eloquently articulates. She agrees with Frankenstein when he goes on to claim for the perfection he praises in the passage just cited that if [its] rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece [would not have] been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru [would not have] been enslaved.

The problem is that what drives the process of European modernization (or globalization) here neatly summarized is not just the morbid desire for knowledge that clings to the mind, but the underlying homesickness that makes this desire one of securing conditions for belonging, for being inside, included, safe, and even sacred. This is why Max Horkheimer long ago rounded on the nice phrase ideal of domination to describe how a modern project conceives of the imperialist violence it perpetrates on the rest of the world.⁵ One thus senses in Frankenstein when he speaks about his own deviation from normal domestic affections that he hasn’t quite gotten free of a certain perfectionism that Shelley otherwise intuits is the more profound difficulty.

It is this intuition, in any case, that gives her novel that power to generate other stories and interpretations. In the words of feminist theorist Barbara Johnson, it keeps the contact with what one doesn’t know in the Kantian imperative to know oneself that lies at the heart of the modern project—an imperative she glosses in Frankenstein as a humanist desire to give oneself a total representation of man, to master the origins of man to the point of being able to create one.⁶ Johnson goes on, If Mary Shelley’s novel constitutes a critique of humanism, that critique is directed not against the hubris of the humanist who takes himself for God, but against the blindness of the humanist who can’t see himself. One might add that this blindness operates as much in the moments when Frankenstein does see himself as when he doesn’t.⁷ His eyes are, one might say, wide shut.

⁂

If Shelley’s account of modernity in her own time is why Frankenstein has the generative power it does today, spawning other stories if not a whole genre, science fiction, it takes on a quality of eerie prescience in her fourth novel, The Last Man. She seemed even to understand that her feeling for the future course of things was exceptional. This comes through in a brief introduction, where she tells us that the novel is based on fragmentary texts written (or painted) on oak leaves by the Cumean Sybil, a priestess who oversaw the Apollonian oracle at Cumae, a Greek colony near Naples. Shelley claims to have found these leaves in a cave and edited them into a man’s first-person narrative about the end of humanity in the last decade of the 21st century, after a species-decimating plague (pandemic?), massive climatic disruptions (climate change?), and a war (clash?) of civilizations that culminates in a battle for Constantinople. It is hardly a persuasive frame narrative, but it is easy to see why Shelley wanted the reference to a prophetess who, in Virgil’s Aeneid, bridges not only past and future but also, in her other role as a guide through Hades, the worlds of the living and the dead.⁸ One might well imagine that Shelley identified with the sybil Ovid writes about in Metamorphoses, who, upon refusing Apollo’s sexual advances, was condemned by the god to a slow withering away; her body shrank and eventually was kept in a jar, until at last only her voice remained.⁹ Something about this peculiar fate fits for a woman whose critique of Western rationalism was so attuned to the derealizing violence it does to the living being.¹⁰

Shelley indeed vanishes from her novel after the introduction, but in the voice of her narrator, Lionel Verney, we very much hear the writer of Frankenstein’s echo. We hear it particularly in the allusions to Verney’s alienation. As a young man at the beginning of the story, he is one of two orphaned children, both outcasts, paupers, unfriended beings (39). Where his sister Perdita copes with their misfortune by withdrawing into herself, he is defiant and proud, animated by a sense of injured merit. He hates the rich and privileged who make him feel inferior, but he also hates himself. I clung to my ferocious habits, yet half-despised them. I continued my war with civilization, and yet entertained a wish to belong to it (44). And at the end of the story, after the liquidation of every human being on earth but for him (he inexplicably recovers from the disease), he is the quintessential solitary being (477), a monstrous excrescence of nature (478) railing at a pitiless universe and wanting nothing so much as a companion for my desolation (473).

In between he sheds his rebellious spirit to become the faithful brother-in-law of the last English king, a decent husband and father whose softness of...nature is almost womanlike (372), and an advocate for Burkean tradition and the sacredness of authority (69), albeit alloyed with republican virtue.¹¹ In this transformation, Verney becomes a vehicle for Shelley’s critique of the same humanism she targets in Frankenstein. What he doesn’t know about [him]self thus appears every time the plague strips away an illusion, hope, or desire qualified as civilized, and not only for him. It scarcely matters if it is the king Adrian’s utilitarian concern for the well-being of his people or the Bryonic hero Raymond’s fanatical commitment to the war he spearheads against slavery and barbarism in the East (198) that is undercut by the appearance of the plague; always it is Verney’s sensibility and attitudes that we take as emblematic of the man the novelist is, as it were, deconstructing avant la lettre.¹²

This means that Verney even at his most self-critical evinces that catechretic blindness of the rational finite ego.¹³ It is there from the start of his narrative when he characterizes himself as an Englishman for whom the insularity but also the parochialism of an islander are essential traits. A tendency to think of England as the center of the world entails for him that the rest of her orb was as a fable, to have forgotten which would have cost neither my imagination nor understanding an effort (35). With this admission he establishes a link, running through the whole novel, between autonomy (with correlative, and very English, notions of property and liberty) and a willful abstraction.¹⁴ Characters are, at various times, all-sufficient to [themselves] (42), entirely made of mind (97), soothed by...sublime fictions (220), drug[ged] with irreflection (297), under the influence of scenic delusion[s] (298). When the plague arrives, some act as if [the] pestilence did not exist (301). Others fall in with an impostor-prophet who claims the power to grant them immunity from the disease. Verney sees such instances of irrationalism for what they are and often voices his disapproval. In Raymond, for instance, despite the courage and conviction that make him an exemplary man when he devotes himself to a Greek war against Ottoman rule, Verney notices an egoism that resembles the same autocratic spirit Raymond denounces in his enemies. In Raymond’s zeal to defend Western values—plant the cross on yonder mosque! (214) he commands of his soldiers—he will deny the reality of the plague, which begins in Constantinople during the final battle, and insist it be braved despite the certainty that he as well as his men will die. Verney reproaches his friend for such reckless behavior. But again he doesn’t question the human reason that both men value. In his mind, Raymond only betrays this value by letting his lust for glory get the better of him.

We once more feel this stand for humanism in Verney when, after Raymond’s death, he warns Perdita, Raymond’s wife, against falling back into her old habits of withdrawn depression. Especially when she threatens suicide, he senses a vanity like that which we have seen Frankenstein reproach in himself and urges her to restrain an excessive passion. ‘[It] is selfish and unworthy of you,’ he says. ‘You have often agreed with me that there is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others: and now, in the very prime of life, you desert your principles, and shut yourself up in useless solitude’ (231). Her retreat into self-sufficiency is given the meaning of a latent transgression, but Verney’s (like Frankenstein’s) perfectionism remains intact.

His criticisms of the errors into which his compatriots fall is, to be sure, often persuasive, not least when seasoned with his own alienation, which gives those criticisms the nuance of a deeper sympathy, a deeper awareness of an unavoidable errancy. But humanism still anchors Verney’s world view at two points: in the necessity of decisive action, albeit for the happiness of others, for the common good; and in the virtues of home and familial affection, which he finds crystallized in Windsor Castle, to which he returns after the war (he had previously lived there with his wife Idris, Adrian’s sister). He writes:

How unwise had the wanderers [his errant compatriots] been, who had deserted [Windsor Castle’s] shelter, entangled themselves in the web of society, and entered on what men of the world call life,—that labyrinth of evil, that scheme of mutual torture. To live, according to this sense of the word, we must not only observe and learn, we must also feel; we must not be mere spectators of action, we must act; we must not describe, but be subjects of description. Deep sorrow must have been the inmate of our bosoms; fraud must have lain in wait for us; the artful must have deceived us; sickening doubt and false hope must have chequered our days; hilarity and joy, that lap the soul in ecstasy, must at times have possessed us. Who that knows what life is, would pine for this feverish species of existence? I have lived. I have spent days and nights of festivity; I have joined in ambitious hopes, and exulted in victory: now,—shut the door on the world, and build high the wall that is to separate me from the troubled scene enacted within its precincts. Let us live for each other and for happiness; let us seek peace in our dear home, near the inland murmur of streams, and the gracious waving of trees, the beauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry of the skies. Let us leave life, that we may live. (238)

The language here recalls that of Rousseau, for whom it was a civilization based on competition and comparison (its scheme of mutual torture) that twisted people’s innate moral feelings into amour propre. Verney has felt the allure, or ecstasy, of social striving—he has joined in ambitous hopes, and exulted in victory—but only with the awareness of its inwardly fraught motives and costs. Home means for him a place where those moral feelings can be nurtured, where caring for each other and for happiness becomes the ambition. But his longing for this place also finds expression in words that resonate with that English insularity he isn’t quite able to shake. He has to shut the door on the world, and build a high wall that is to separate me from the troubled scene outside. And the nature he finds there, cut off this way, feels picturesque more than sublime, sentimental, a scenic delusion in the mind of a detached observer. As such, it is not far removed from what Raymond thinks he is fighting for in Constantinople. It is the source of his glory and the cause for which he willingly sacrifices himself.

"I, and in a few brief years, all of you,—this panic-struck army…will no longer be. But other generations will arise, and ever and for ever will continue, to be made happier by our present acts, to be glorified by our valour. The prayer of my youth was to be one among those who render the pages of earth’s history splendid; who exalt the race of man, and make this little globe a dwelling of the mighty. (215)

His desire to make the world a home for the race of man makes us hear equivocation in Verney’s own concern for happiness. Both presuppose, if not precisely the same mastery (one is active, the other contemplative), at least the same nativist feeling. That the mighty for whom the globe would be a home are white Europeans (with the imperial English at the top) goes without saying.

As the plague becomes implacable, social order unravels, and extinction looms, Verney feels increasingly trapped in his own Eurocentric moral vision. The man who was once at war with civilization begins to fight with his Burkean self. The result is more and more paradoxical expostulations like this one, toward the end of the novel:

But the game is up! We must all die; nor leave survivor nor heir to the wide inheritance of earth. We must all die! The species of man must perish; his frame of exquisite workmanship; the wondrous mechanism of his senses; the noble proportion of his godlike limbs; his mind, the throned king of these; must perish. Will the earth still keep her place among the planets; will she still journey with unmarked regularity round the sun; will the seasons change, the trees adorn themselves with leaves, and flowers shed their fragrance, in solitude? Will the mountains remain unmoved, and streams still keep a downward course towards the vast abyss; will the tides rise and fall, and the winds fan universal nature; will beasts pasture, birds fly, and fishes swim, when man, the lord, possessor, perceiver, and recorder of all these things, has passed away, as though he had never been? O, what mockery is this! Surely death is not death, and humanity is not extinct; but merely passed into other shapes, unsubjected to our perceptions. Death is a vast portal, an high road to life: let us hasten to pass; let us exist no more in this living death, but die that we may live! (425-26)

The effort to remain rational enough to grasp that rationality itself is the ultimate casualty of the plague pulls Verney into paradox. Life and death collapse into each other, affect each other with a negativity that, because it does not also break his attachment to man, the lord, possessor, perceiver, and recorder of the earth, ends up rearticulating the hope for a (both active and contemplative) humanity that would survive its own death.

He is on the verge of raving here, but he has not, for all that, quite lost his marbles. Something like that death drive in Frankenstein turns aggressively back on the man he cannot stop praising and the home he cannot stop craving. At the very end, after he finishes writing the book we read, his history of the last man, in a deserted Rome to which he has come out of nostalgia for the now dead civilization it fostered, he leaves both book and city behind to wander through the world outside that civilization, where its colonial subjects once lived. The implication is that he has learned to accept his own humanity passed into other shapes, unsubjected to our perceptions, or, if it makes no sense to go on calling what survives in this way human, at least to accept his own living death without metaphysical illusions or the urge to master life. This isn’t to say he ceases to be a solitary being like Frankenstein’s Monster.

⁂

It is striking how Shelley was able to get so many aspects of our own 21st-century situation right. That we have suffered through a pandemic, face a planetary climate crisis, and are fighting for Western values in Eastern places like Ukraine, Syria, and Taiwan make reading The Last Man today an all but mind-boggling experience. Even granular details in the novel prompt a strange recognition: devastating floods, mass migration of refugees ending up in camps near Calais, and affluent urbanites fleeing cities for the countryside when the plague strikes, to name a few.¹⁵

Her imaginative choices didn’t come from the blue, of course. Outbreaks of bubonic plague were not unfamiliar in Shelley’s time—they had been happening periodically going back centuries—and epidemics were a fact of life (Shelley herself contracted smallpox in 1827, surviving without the telltale scars but never quite recovering her health either). The clash of civilizations, as old as the Crusades, had a contemporary ring with the French Empire and its spread of Enlightenment values eastward (to Moscow, say). The philhellenic Byron very much felt a Western universalism to be at stake in the real Greek war of independence for which he gave his life in 1824. Shelley had a solid enough grasp of how English liberalism was morphing into British imperialism—she would live through the first Opium War in 1839 and die two years before the Crimean War of 1853—to sense nightmares on the horizon. And she may have been uniquely well-prepared for the neoliberal turn of the 1970s, which shaped a post-Cold War era of globalization in the light of rejuvenated 19th-century attitudes toward markets and people, because of her father. William Godwin’s rationalism mellowed over time, as he came to think he had given the emotions short shrift in his account of that (god-like) human mind. The shift he made from private judgment to private affection as the source of action and value, however, meant embracing a utilitarian happiness principle that reduced subjective experience to a simple calculus of pleasure and pain. One senses that the rational finite ego this implies was another source of the ambivalence with which Shelley treated Verney’s and Frankenstein’s perfectionism. It also has a definite resonance today, especially in conjunction with the anti-statism her father would continue to favor. Both together prefigure an economic rationalism that is central to the neoliberal paradigm Margaret Thatcher had in mind when she famously said, There is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and their families. These anti-social beings do not, as might be expected, take their historical bearings in the organic tradition of Edmund Burke; they are, on the one hand, rational actors (as abstract as the utility functions economists use in their equations and models), and, on the other, free libertarians comparing advantage in complete isolation and requiring (of the state) only secure conditions for the pursuit of their private interests.¹⁶

Without going so far as to posit a direct filiation between Godwin and Thatcher, what can be said is that Shelley put Verney in the kind of crisis situation we also face. She had a feeling, moreover, for the rationalizations it produces and, more subtly, produce it. For instance, in today’s neoliberal order (sometimes also referred to as the free world), justifications of that police function of the state, which requires it acting not only for the sake but on the model of private power, have made a perfect hash of our democratic values.¹⁷ Such concepts as sovereignty, human rights, equality, and the rule of law, among others, make almost no sense at all in contexts of economic austerity, too big to fail bank bailouts, quantitative easing, structural adjustment programs, humanitarian interventions, and regime change operations. We ease the pressure of incoherence by embracing another concept, progress, which denotes an open-ended and unfinished process that works in fits and starts, unevenly, by way of a gradual reform toward an eventual justice. The logic here is regulative in the Kantian sense: our values are aims or goals (on a horizon) to which we aspire that give us an orientation and ground us in a task—that put us in a world. We are thus able to explain and even happily admit to inconsistency and failure. Democracy is the worst of all possible systems, we say, except for all the others. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good. The glass is half-full, not half-empty. And so on. But it has become increasingly obvious in a public sphere given over to defamation, censorship, narrative-based journalism, and outright propaganda that even our regulative ideas have lost their symbolic efficiency to a shocking degree. The normative horizon they provide seems not achievably out of reach but gone; the ground on which we stand for our values, or deliberate over them, crumbles under our feet. This leads to a suspicion that the crisis affects the world itself. We accordingly resort to another strategy: we imagine geopolitics as a civilizational struggle between democracy and autocracy. Now compromise stops feeling so much like equivocation (or hypocrisy) and becomes again firmness of purpose. The irrationality we see in the public sphere has a cause other than the arbitrariness and unaccountability of power in a neoliberal order. It comes from somewhere else and threatens us like an enemy...or hits us like a plague.¹⁸

Both enemy and plague come from somewhere else in The Last Man as well—again, Constantinople during the final battle in Raymond’s war against Eastern tyranny—and Shelley is only able to suggest the problems with this narrative strategy that later literary works will foreground to much more convincing effect. In Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1911), for example, a cholera epidemic serves as metaphor for an otherness that Gustav von Aschenbach is no longer able to sublimate and so remain the prototypical Western man he is. Significantly, Mann has the cholera bacteria travel to the Venice where Aschenbach comes on vacation over a precisely charted course: from its origin in the Ganges River Valley of India through contemporary Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and finally by ship from the Near Eastern ports of the Mediterranean, where we find places like Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian Occupied Territories (a roster of countries that we should have no difficulty recognizing as places where the US has either militarily intervened or meddled in the last decades). Mann had in mind the exploitive relation between Europe and a non-European world on which it had long depended for its own development. The effort of self-control Aschenbach makes with the awakening of his homosexual feelings for the boy Tadzio thus synchronizes with the drama of a European identity that was about to explode in the First World War, itself the culmination of imperialist scrambles for territory and resources among the great powers. We recognize the dynamic at work in this lovesickness as Freud’s return of the repressed: excitations driven down within Aschenbach (and Europe) come back as stimuli (or symptoms) from without. Both together signify a desire that defines Aschenbach when its objects are properly aestheticized or distanced, properly put in perspective the way Tadzio is for him as he voyeuristically follows the boy around Venice; and it defines Europe the way the cholera epidemic negatively does when Aschenbach and the other cosmopolitan guests in his hotel ignore it. This civilized desire breaks down, then, when it does, in two dimensions: that of the love Aschenbach finally admits to himself he has for Tadzio, and that of the death drive he discloses when he knowingly courts and contracts the disease. His death in Venice becomes the emblem of a cultural as well as political mastery collapsing under the weight of its own disavowals.¹⁹

Here we are better able to appreciate why, in North Atlantic democracies today, a citizen no less blind than its humanist forbears to its own inner motivations and drives would want an external enemy to secure its identity, to feel its exceptionalism. Unsurprisingly, this citizen is also at home qua consumer in modern techno-industrial societies that produce their own plague in the rising concentrations of carbon they emit into the atmosphere. A principal source of this crisis is, again, that economic rationalism at the heart of a neoliberal paradigm. The ecologist William Rees suggests why: on his account, this paradigm sees the economy as separate from and essentially independent of the biophysical environment, and it assumes that, supplemented by a virtually deified technological capacity humans have to overcome resource limits, economic growth will go on indefinitely.²⁰ The models generated in the paradigm, he goes on, contain no useful information about the structure or dynamic properties–interdependence, lags and thresholds, discontinuous behaviors, irreversibilities and limits—of the ecosystems, or even the social systems, within which the economy operates in the real world. This abstraction in the models carries over to those of us (rational actors and libertarians) who perceive reality through them. We, like the models, cannot conceptualize or regulate what they exclude; nor, in our abstraction, can (or need) we take responsibility for the real-world effects of running economies with them. That climate change is one such effect explains why it is so difficult to face or do anything about it. Even when the problem is recognized, the solutions, technological and otherwise, are themselves derived from the models and only further support and amplify the growth-based order.²¹ We go along with this self-referential process—Rees compares it to the ‘plague phase’ of a one-off boom-bust population cycle in ecosystems, to be followed by collapse—in a mode of disavowal that once again does our humanist forbears proud.

⁂

Verney offers a distinctly modern gloss on his predicament when, toward the end of The Last Man, he compares himself and the final two survivors of the plague, Adrian and Raymond’s daughter Clara, to a cloud…spread in impenetrable woof over the sky, which…fades and dissolves in the clear ether… (435). Entropy would be a technical term for the forces breaking down a complex physical system in this fashion, but another would be negative feedback, which denotes a self-regulatory process in a system that, reversing outputs into inputs, re-establishes its internal equilibrium, albeit in a different state. Verney seems to find a similar equilibrium at the end, even if he, too, vanishes in the different state. We might say he is less like a cloud than the sun, as source of both life and light, burning itself out as fast as it can.²²

Heat death might not be a very satisfying metaphor for a more ethical approach to life, and Shelley no less than her narrator appears to conclude the novel having written herself into a corner. That it is very much our corner hardly makes matters better. Nonetheless, Shelley does point beyond the rationalism that no longer works for us, for our societies, or for our more dismal sciences. She hints at what literary critic Darko Suvin has called an estrangement effect that jars us out of mental habits no longer in accord with the world as we experience it in the Anthropocene.²³ Kim Stanley Robinson’s well-known dictum that science fiction is the realism of our time presupposes a similar shift, for him into a deep ecological mindset that does accord with our experience.²⁴ Felt reality isn’t about an individual wandering around in their consciousness anymore, he says, like modernist novels often depict. Now there’s the individual and society, and also society and the planet. And these are very much science fictional relationships—especially that last one. He therefore characterizes the genre in which he writes as a modelling exercise, a way of thinking, although the phrase might be usefully amended to remodelling exercise, since it involves more than just a description of how we cope with a world civilization [that] right now is teetering on the brink. As we see in books like his Mars trilogy, where colonization entails the characters becoming indigenous, literally part of the land, and wrestling with their drive to master nature, Robinson’s interest lies in transforming the rational finite ego and the whole technoscientific apparatus it brings to bear on securing its home.

Key to such a transformation would be breaking the spell of autonomy in which this ego is bound. It is pretty clear by now that we have to stop understanding ourselves as isolated from the larger systems in which we are embedded and which shape our bodily as well as mental habits. Shelley understood as much, or as much as she could, in her own time, not coincidentally when modern techno-industrial societies began exponentially increasing levels of carbon in the atmosphere. Perhaps this is why her intuitions were so good, her prophecies so true: she was sensing a crisis it would take some two centuries to become existential. Along the way she hit upon a crucial insight: that crisis stems from the sense-making faculty itself. That was why she imagined its extinction in The Last Man. If seeing reason as the problem in this manner is a step too far for some, one might at least concede that it makes sense to think of the reasoning process as taking an irrational form, and the rational finite ego as becoming monstrous in its self-preservative drive.²⁵ This thought, in fact, may be a critical precondition for the change in our relationship to this drive that any honest reckoning with the climate crisis will have to include.

I think, in this connection, of the Lars Von Trier film Melancholia (2011), which owes much both to Frankenstein and The Last Man. The luminous orb it presents to us, moving toward earth and signifying catastrophe, is one of the most awesome iterations of Shelley’s plague we have. It allows Von Trier to bring out shades of denial in the guests attending the wedding party—notably the host, John, busy turning the rogue planet into a science lesson for his son Leo—with an admirable clarity. And it illuminates in Justine, the reluctant bride for whom denial is the alienating thing—woven so deeply into the heteronormative fabric of her middle-class existence it threatens her will to live—the dignity and courage which were always there in her alienation. When she basks naked in the planet’s glow at night or builds a magic cave with Leo at the end, her composure suggests a changed relationship to that self-preservative drive. It makes no difference to the outcome, and there is no hope of survival; Melancholia is far from a utopian film. But like all good apocalyptic art, it leaves us wondering what is possible when, less gripped by our fear of death, we come to accept that we are limited beings on a finite planet.

Stefan Mattessich

Santa Monica College

The film is based on Christopher Brams 1995 novel Father of Frankenstein, a partly fictionalized account of James Whale at the end of his life. Whale, the director of Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), died in 1957.

Kant provided the clarion call for his age in 1784: "Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’ Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment?", translated by Ted Humphrey (New York: Hackett, 1992), 23.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: Norton, 1996), 28. Subsequent references are incorporated into the text.

Hinted at by Frankenstein himself in a passage like this one: As the memory of past misfortunes pressed upon me, I began to reflect on their cause—the monster whom I had created, the miserable daemon whom I had sent abroad into the world for my destruction (138).

Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University, 1947), 65. He also wrote, a propos this same project, The principle of domination has become an idol to which everything must be sacrificed (105). He was thinking of a drive both to control nature and to discipline human nature in a civilizing process.

Barbara Johnson, The Last Man, in A Life with Mary Shelley, edited by Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014), 6.

Or when he doesn’t see his own humanity in the Monster. Johnson emphasizes the puzzling refusal, even incapacity of Frankenstein (like everyone else in the novel) to acknowledge his Creature without revulsion—he literally loses consciousness upon first looking him in the eye—as a sign, not just of Frankenstein’s lack of self-knowledge, but of a fundamental emptiness in the humanist conception of man as the object of a total representation. "The unknown is not located in the object of humanism, but in the desiring humanist subject. That which the humanist remains blind to in his efforts to know man is the nature of his own desire to know man." This argument entails reading the Monster, paradoxically, as the prototypical humanist subject, reified in depth.

Virgil, Aeneas 6.

Ovid, Metamorphoses 14.

We might gloss one effect of this violence as the littleness of feeling Frankenstein’s Monster hopes in vain will be elevated by some human sympathy (63).

As, indeed, they were for Edmund Burke. Without confounding ranks, he wrote of the Old Regime he saw desecrated in the French Revolution, it produced a noble equality and handed it down through all the gradations of social life. He rhapsodized about that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart [which] kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 76-7. Rhetoric like this didn’t stop Mary Wollstonecraft from noticing the inconsistencies. I glow with indignation, she wrote, when I attempt, methodically, to unravel your [Burke’s] slavish paradoxes, in which I can find no fixed first principle to refute; I shall not, therefore, condescend to shew where you affirm in one page what you deny in another; and how frequently you draw conclusions without any previous premises:–it would be…irksome to refute sentence after sentence in which the latent spirit of tyranny appeared. Vindication of the Rights of Men, in The Norton Anthology of Literature: Volume D (New York: Norton, 2013), 195.

Not all critics are as convinced that Shelley’s ambivalence about humanist values (of expression, self-assertion, autonomy) constitutes a deconstruction (still less a critique). Mary Poovey detects in it something more like approval and reproaches a tacit conservatism in Shelley’s self-mythologizing impulse as a writer. My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley and the Feminization of Romanticism, PMLA, Volume 95, Issue 3, May 1980: 332-347. Johnson concedes that Shelley vacillates finally between mourning and deconstruction. The Last Man, ibid., 12.

Catechresis: a figure of speech denoting a semantic misuse of words for rhetorical effect. Often paradoxical, like a mixed metaphor—the blind eyes of Tiresias or eyes wide shut—it suggests a departure from conventional usage that is impossible, awkward, an abuse of language verging even on the monstrous.

Security of property, wrote Mary Wollstonecraft. Behold!...the definition of English liberty… She went on: The demon of property has ever been at hand [among the English] to encroach on the sacred rights of men, and to fence round with awful pomp laws that war with justice. Vindication of the Rights of Men, ibid., 197. William Godwin considered the right to own property a right of doing wrong and institutional, or structural, like the state or the marriage contract another way of limiting people’s freedom to exercise their own judgment and develop their capacities. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2013), 69.

There were frequent media stories during the pandemic of rich people relocating from San Francisco to Tahoe or from New York to the Hudson River Valley.

It might not be quite fair to tar Godwin with the feathers of today’s neoliberalism. In his commitments to principles of justice and the common good he was a decidedly radical progressive even more than a liberal or a utilitarian (although he had affinities with both). Neoliberalism, however, does resonate with the Godwin who thought society nothing more than an aggregate of individuals and government...an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ibid., 57, 204. Thatcher often glossed her anarcho-capitalist agenda in the 1980s as a mutualism that encouraged personal responsibility and initiative in the absence of government interference.

The neoliberal state takes its bearings as far back as Hobbes, who, contra Thatcher, saw the individual as purely a function of society, since Reason...is nothing but Reckoning and a free Subject, a free Will...[are] Words...without meaning; that is to say, Absurd. This irrational and morally irresponsible subject is judged and ascertains his/her own value entirely in terms of a price...as would be given for the use of his [her] power that is set by the esteem of others in accordance with market laws. There is society, then, but one in which private interest is the same with the publique. For Hannah Arendt, whose reading of Hobbes I follow here, the recklessness that had prevailed in private life, and against which the public body had to protect itself and its individual citizens...[is] elevated to the one publicly honored political principle. Hobbes grounds the liberal bourgeois state in an unlimited process of power accumulation that drives techno-industrial and, especially for Arendt, imperialist expansion through the modern era. The neoliberal state is only the latest avatar of this history, and the subject on the model of which it governs is still what Arendt aptly called a power-thirsty animal. All quotes here taken from The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Books, 1951), 138-39.

Let Western support for Ukraine against Russia after its 2022 invasion stand here as an example of irrationality in contemporary political discourse. In a blog post dated October 22, 2022, Democratic House Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland wrote: Moscow right now is a hub of corrupt tyranny, censorship, authoritarian repression, police violence, propaganda, government lies, and disinformation, and planning for war crimes. It is a world center of antifeminist, antigay, anti-trans hatred, as well as the homeland of replacement theory for export. In supporting Ukraine, we are opposing these fascist views, and supporting the urgent principles of democratic pluralism. Ukraine is not perfect, of course, but its society is organized on the radically different principles of democracy and freedom, which is why Russia’s oligarchical leaders seek to destroy it forever. Whatever truth value there may have been to the claims Raskin made here about the Russian Federation, Ukraine, or us for that matter, they were also presented as reasons for massive military assistance to Ukraine and economic sanctions on Russia. In addition, they served to discredit the idea that the US/NATO response in effect made the conflict into a proxy war with Russia. In this spirit Raskin, a few months later, reversed his initial endorsement of a US-Russia negotiation of an end to the conflict; only Ukraine, he said, could make that sovereign decision. At the same time, he reproached proponents of peace talks for a bad colonial habit that suppose[d]…peace depends upon the wishes of the great powers and the great powers alone. He added that even liberal and progressive people can fall into this colonialist reflex. Cited in Marko Brankovic, No, calling for diplomacy is not ‘Westsplaining,’ Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (online), March 19, 2023. For those he criticized in this fashion, US/NATO provocation of Russia was part of a project to maintain geopolitical dominance over the global economy; concern for Ukrainian sovereignty—or for the human rights of people anywhere, even Russia—was subordinate to this project and functioned as not only its justification but its mystification. Raskin, by not acknowledging this neoimperialist context, therefore betrayed a colonialist reflex of his own (Brankovic alleges as much in his article). What is to be noticed here is how mixed up all the terms of this debate become when mobilized in a civilizational struggle.

In particular, what dies with Aschenbach is an idealism, or a rationalism, that reaches back to Greek origins of Western civilization that Mann makes explicit in the novella with references to Plato’s Phaedrus. I use the word disavowal here in its psychoanalytic sense. Verleugnung for Freud implied a defense mechanism against some reality (typically associated with the mother lacking a phallus) that is too traumatic to admit into consciousness. It is, however, more than a simple denial of castration. One acknowledges what one disavows; one holds two opposing ideas together in what Freud called a negative hallucination. Aschenbach thus knows and doesn’t know what’s happening in him, in Venice, and in the Europe Venice defines or delimits (being often thought of as a symbolic border touching on the non-European world via its trade routes through the Mediterranean). Freud also specified disavowal as a mechanism in the formation of perversion.

William Rees, Too clever by half, but not nearly smart enough, lecture to the Canadian Club of Rome (online), 12 May 2021. Subsequent quotations are taken from this talk.

Not everyone agrees with Rees that contraction (degrowth) is the only effective way to deal with the climate crisis. Economist Jeffrey Sachs, for instance, promotes a sustainable development predicated on cooperative and fair global finance mechanisms and the assumption that, with them, climate change can be mitigated and other problems (like extreme poverty) effectively ended. Sachs does, however, single out neoliberal economic thinking as an impediment to such development.

The second law of thermodynamics may have been in the air when Shelley published The Last Man, since a first formulation appeared in Sadi Carnot’s theoretical analysis of the flow of heat in a steam engine in 1824. But Rudolph Clausius only gave it a firmer mathematical foundation in 1850, and it was not fully expressed until Lord Kelvin’s statement in 1909 and Max Planck’s principle in 1924. Entropy denotes for the universe itself, as the physical system of all physical systems, that its fate is a decreasing availability of energy for conversion

Reviews for The Last Man

[grandpahobo_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A very difficult read. The writing is incredibly superfluous. The first 2/3 of the book is about the personal lives of the main characters and english society, supposedly in the lat 21st century. However, its as if society remained unchanged in every aspect between the early 1800s and the late 2100s. The final 1/3 of the book is much better. The language is still difficult, but the story encapsulates far more interesting issue and themes that make it worth the effort.

[sweetiegherkin · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In a future still decades away, a deadly disease shakes the world and threatens all its inhabitants.This book is broken up into three volumes. In Volume I, the principal characters are introduced using the "tell" method rather than the "show" method. We are told how certain characters are, but we don't get a ton of viewing them in action. Dialogue is limited but long-winded when it appears. There is a lot of almost a drawing-room period piece where we are seeing how a bunch of young people might pair off into marriage or not. However, it would be a bad example of said genre as it's mostly incredibly dull. After reading the rest of the book, my conclusion is that the entirety of Volume I was unnecessary; a chapter (or two at most) introducing the characters would have sufficed. Volume II deals with a war, environmental havoc, and a plague breaking loose across the entire globe. This sounds like it should be adventurous and page-turning, but Shelley somehow makes it mostly tedious. There are some passages that are indeed beautifully written but a lot of it is repetitive. Again, little dialogue except flowery monologues; the rest is mostly the narrator "telling," not "showing" how events are unraveling and characters are reacting. Still, this is undoubtedly the best part of the book.Volume III is basically more of the same of Volume II. The plague is continuing to make its progress, but really the vast majority of this volume is essentially redundant with the previous volume. The inevitability of it all kind of takes away anything that might have been compelling.In short, this book has a promising premise but is mired in tedious, overly wordy passages that amount to not much of anything being said. Personal dramas, politics, and a pandemic seem like the stuff to make a thrilling title but that just wasn't the case here. The characters were bland and/or unlikable, making it hard to care about their fates that the reader knew were coming anyway. In sum, this is a totally skippable title.

[jbd1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This one had a (very) few interesting elements, and the account of the plague overwhelming the world was pretty chilly ... but overall, hardly a surprise this this novel has been largely forgotten.

[toddsherman · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man” showed promise near the beginning:“There is no fruition in their vacant kindness, and sharp rocks lurk beneath the smiling ripples of these shallow waters.”And then took nearly two hundred pages to find another passage worth recording:“She described in vivid terms the ceaseless care that with still renewing hunger ate into her soul; she compared this gnawing of sleepless expectation of evil, to the vulture that fed on the heart of Prometheus; under the influence of this eternal excitement, and of the interminable struggles she endured to combat and conceal it, she felt, she said, as if all the wheels and springs of the animal machine worked at double rate, and were fast consuming themselves.”A main character dies in part one only to resurrect immediately from false rumor in the subsequent section—and I didn’t even give a shit. I could not wait to finish this book. Which saddens me since I enjoyed what I’ve read from Shelley, namely: “Frankenstein”, “The Pilgrims” and an assortment of short stories. I understand that it’s a precursor to what would become standard in the SF tradition, that it was a statement about the female voice (her own, really) in literature in her time, that it had incorporated a host of personal tragedies (the deaths of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and two children, as well as their friend, Lord Byron), and that she had felt herself to be “The Last Man”, cut off from intellectual and emotional support and left in a world scarred with its own kind of plague. But, Jesus, did the whole work need to be so boring? For all the effort expended, the experiences and influences that had informed it, I was unprepared for the work to be largely expositional, emotionally detached (or ridiculously hyperbolic, which felt like the same thing, truthfully) and fraught with awkward phrasing. Any glittering poetic moment was quickly strangled in overlong sentences stuffed with information that neither propelled the narrative nor added substance to the imagery. And the last man of the title? Yeah, that doesn’t fucking happen until the final pages. So you go through this whole tedious ordeal only to be left with a man alone in an unfamiliar world trying to reckon his own humanity in the absence of any humankind. Later, Richard Matheson would explore this idea with unrivaled proficiency in “I Am Legend”.Forerunner or not, classic or not, “The Last Man” failed me in so many ways as to be exemplary. I honestly cannot think offhand when I’ve been so absolutely disappointed in a book. Any social statements that the work may have offered were undercut by being too close to the subject, losing objectivity, staring into a maelstrom in which the ship with one’s entire existence in its holds had been lost, only to start the narrative with the painstaking details of each person involved with loading that cargo. The on-board bill of lading would’ve been more interesting. And, truth be told, the author’s introduction, which had almost nothing to do with the book, was the most engaging bit of writing in the whole damn version that I own.“The Last Man-This-Could-Have-Been-So-Much-Better”. Tragedy doesn’t always make for better fiction. I realize that may be sacrilege for some; especially given that this work is deemed a “classic”. And while Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is iconic, painful and blooded with first-hand tragedy, too, it’s a far more riveting story.

[klmesoftly · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Do not recommend - Interesting as a concept and as a historical document, less interesting as a novel. It's a book Shelley wrote years after Frankenstein, considered the first apocalyptic plague novel (a book about humanity wiped out by disease and its repercussions), and it is really interesting in that sense that even 300 years later our zombie and other plague novels really do still use similar mechanics and models even with our more advanced technology and scientific understanding of disease. That said, it's a hard one to read, especially as half of the novel is more of a gentleman's prolonged coming-of-age story and even once the plague hits most of the interesting developments are dryly summarized; it's a very different style of writing, and one that is difficult for a modern reader to connect to.

[garrison0550 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I love reading classic literature and science fiction as well, so when I stumbled upon this book I thought I was in for a real treat. Wrong. It's very rare that I don't finish a book once I start it, but I just couldn't hang tough with this one. Trying to dig a stubborn splinter out of the bottom of your toe is more enjoyable.

[baswood · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Last Man is indeed a game of two halves. The majority of the first half contains some of the most gushing romantic prose/twaddle that I have ever read. Here is the scenario: It is the year 2073 and Lionel and his sister Perdita are living by their wits in the mountains of Cumbria (England) after the death of their father who was banished from court by the late king of England. Adrian has abdicated in favour of a democratic government and retires to Cumbria where he meets and befriends Lionel and takes him under his wing. Lionel falls in love with Adrian's sister Idris, but must fight for her because Lord Raymond has returned from the Greek-Turkish wars and wants to marry Idris as a stepping stone to proclaiming himself the new king. Perdita falls in love with Lord Raymond who agrees to marry her leaving Lionel free to marry Idris. Lord Raymond's political and personal ambition knows no bounds and he manages to get himself elected as Lord Protector of England. Later he discovers Evadne a Greek lady living in poverty in London who he has known before, he becomes infatuated and when Perdita finds out she vows never to see him again. Lord Raymond goes back to Greece and is soon leading their army on a final assault on Constantinople. It is easy to conclude that Mary Shelley has based her character; Lord Raymond on her friend Lord Byron and that Adrian is Percy Shelley. Here is an example of the prose as Lionel describes his impressions of Adrian:"Nor was it I alone who fell thus intimately his perfections. His sensibility and courtesy fascinated everyone. His vivacity, intelligence, and active spirit of benevolence, completed the conquest. Even at an early age he was deep read and imbued with the spirit of high philosophy. This tone gave an irresistible persuasion to his intercourse with others so that he seemed like an inspired musician, who struck with unerring skill, the "lyre of mind" and produced then divine harmony. In person he hardly appeared of this world; his slight frame was overinformed by the soul that dwelt within; he was all mind "Man but a rush against" his breast, and it would have conquered his strength; but the might of his smile would have tamed an hungry lion, or caused a legion of armed men to lay their weapons at his feet."There is much of this stuff to read through as Shelley creates her fantasy world of Lionel, Adrian, Lord Raymond, Perdita and Idris living an unworldly existence in the castle of Windsor, popping out from time to time to deal with the business of ruling the Country. It could be an early draft for a novel written by Jeffrey ArcherThere are claims that this novel should be classed as Science Fiction, but there is no Science here only fiction. The year 2073 is just like the year 1826 when the novel was published. People still travel on horseback, candles provide lighting, there have been no advances in medicine, communication, etc etc........ This is a novel of high Romance but it does turn very dark in the second half and the high flown romanticism is less obvious; in fact Shelley's prose is much more suited to her subject and the book becomes a fascinating hybrid.Back to the story: Lord Raymond's assault on Constantinople is carried out almost single handedly because there are rumours that plague has devastated the city. Lord Raymond dies in a fire, but the plague starts to take hold of the Greek army. It sweeps through the continent killing all those who become infected. England feels safe for a time but cases are reported and soon it is just as virulent on the Island. Adrian is elected Lord Protector after Ryland (a man of the people) flees the infected city of London. The plague abates in the winter months but at the first sign of spring it continues to scythe down the population. A band of survivors group themselves around Adrian and Lionel and decide to head for Switzerland, but they are decimated along the way. Mary Shelley at last gets into her stride taking her novel out of the rut of some second rate romanticism into something that is quite unique for its time. The trek through the continent takes the form of a nightmare journey as all the survivors know that they are battling against insurmountable odds. There are passages of fine writing here as Shelley contrasts the failure of the human race against the backdrop of the natural world which is unaffected by the plague. The novel is written in the first person by Lionel, who we understand may be the only survivor. He must watch helplessly as everyone else dies around him and this is one of the true horrors of this very gothic novel. Shelley's book has been picked over by many critics for what it might or might not say about; government, feminism, class and society and schools of thought, but I would say you may wish to be careful with this as you may not like what you find. The overriding impression that I got was that noble men were born to rule and while women could make a contribution that was as far as it goes. It is man's over riding ambition and lust for power that somehow leads to a force of nature that will cut him down to size. A long and sometimes tiresome read that is just about saved by the final third which takes it up to another level. Three stars.

[amydross · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A strange, unsettling story, supposedly a "lesser" work by Mary Shelley but I vastly preferred it to Frankenstein. Possibly because one of the characters consists of MWS doing her best Byron impersonation, which is pretty entertaining. All in all, not a brilliant book, but densely packed with images, themes, and contradictions that make it a treasure trove for analysis.

[clair.dlune · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I'd been looking forward to reading this for a very long time. Now I can honestly say I have read it. Delighted to have done so? Not so much.

Very, VERY verbose and I couldn't help thinking through much of it, WHY is she going into so much detail over this? I was waiting for the part of the book wherein the focus would be on THE LAST MAN, it didn't happen until the absolute end of the book and in my opinion was fairly anti-climactic. I wasn't expecting big action, and I was not disppointed.

I think there's a reason why she's best known for Frankenstein. This story is set in 2090s with no thought to what mankind might have achieved by then. There were a couple of mentions of traveling in a balloon which I rather liked, but the chief method of conveyance was still horses and horse drawn carriages. The world hadn't changed at all from the times in which it was written and this caused me to feel let down, but I'd have forgiven it all if there'd been more depth of FEELING from or toward the characters. In my opinion this is a rather cold, dry book.

[alcracka · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Shelley needed an editor on this puppy. She had one on Frankenstein - Percy Bysshe Shelley - but he added 5,000 words to it, and (I hear) some of the more florid passages. Maybe she thought those worked, so she should write more. (Much of The Last Man is very, very florid indeed.) Or maybe she just figured, with the success of Frankenstein - it was very successful - she could - or must - write more this time. Or maybe she was just getting into character: toward the end of the book, Verney explains that as he was trying to write this last testament, he meant to focus only on the plague but was caught up by reminiscence in his loneliness. That's totally legit; if I was the last man, my last book would be super fucking boring. I would write everything. Shit would be like Infinite Jest.

It would have an awesome plot, as this does, because being the last man, I automatically get a great story that dudes would read whenever the next apes took to reading. But it would kinda suck, and this book kinda sucks.

[scenik1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Notes on THE LAST MAN, by Mary ShelleyJanuary 18, 2013After Shelley’s tale of the manmade monster of FRANKENSTEIN and not long after the death by drowning of her husband, poet Percy Byshe Shelley and her return to England from Italy, she wrote, beginning in 1824, THE LAST MAN. It is a beautifully written and carefully and lovingly crafted story of the end of mankind. There is much I admire here. Shelley has set it in, what for her, was the future: 2072 until 3000. In 1824, Shelley’s work would reflect the fully felt impact of the Industrial Revolution, but her vision of life in the 21st century would still be severely limited by the absence of flight, high tech engineering and the digital age. Although travel by air balloon is possible, life is not all that different from the 19th century. This in no way inhibits the tale, human nature being timeless, and the future age is marked by political change and the end of the monarchy.This is not about what the future will look like, and the world created doesn't bear close scrutiny for realism. What Shelley has done so richly is explore the big questions, what would become important to us if we were to lose the world, society, community, family and friends we've always known until we are left entirely alone in the whole world. At the outset, there already has been a big adjustment and that is the ending of the monarchy in England. A distant war is nothing new, but it is at the site of the war that the plague is born. It spreads gradually across the globe, gaining its power in warmer climes. Eventually it makes its way to England where each summer it rises up again to decimate the populace. The novel is structured in three parts. The first part introduces Lionel Kersey, the son of a charming lover of the high life and hanger-on of royalty. Kersey's father becomes a close friend of the last King of England but eventually loses his standing with the aristocracy when his gambling and spending leave him broke. He has deserted his family and Kersey and his sister, Perdita, grow up orphans after the death of their mother. Kersey grows up a wild sheep herder until the son of the late king, Adrian, returns to Cumbria where Kersey lives. They become friends and Adrian sets about to make up for the late king's abandonment of Kersey's father. He takes Kersey under his wing and introduces him to education and philosophy. Kersey and his sister become gentlefolk.In the second part, there is the greater development of two other important characters, Lord Raymond and Idris. Idris is Adrian's sister. The main development is that of the war between Turkey and Greece out of which comes the devastating Plague. Finally, in part three, the world of humanity falls under the progressive power of the Plague.Throughout, The Last Man paints a descriptive and rich picture of the core nature of human society, its priorities, characteristics, relationship to nature and weaknesses. It is a deeply satisfying example of writing of the Romantic Period with its poetic language, focus on the natural world and examination of all that separates Man from the animal world and binds him to his fellow man.

[lisamaria_c · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Looking at my review of Shelley's Frankenstein, I noted I had written that the "flowery, melodramatic style sometimes made me roll my eyes." But I also remember by and large enjoying that book, and being impressed by the play of ideas and imagination. Enough I had wanted to read this other book by Shelley, the other one that could also be called science fiction (her other works of fiction mainly being historical fiction.) After all, Mary Shelley is often hailed as the mother of science fiction, or maybe the grandmother, with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as the proud papas. And here is this tale of the end of the world, or of humanity at least due to a pandemic, set centuries after her time (though in our current century.) I thought it suggestive that the great work of Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, (which I have yet to read, but is considered one of the great and influential science fiction works) had a similar title. Well, this was wretched. I doubt it had much influence on later science fiction or post-apocalyptic works. Apparently the idea of "the last man" or "lastness" had been common in the decades before publication and was nothing new. The Last Man was badly received when published in 1826 and went out of print for more than a century. Sometimes even bad books are worth reading for the influence they've had on culture, literature or history. Unlike the case with Frankenstein, I doubt that's the case here. Intrinsic value? Oh dear God, I don't even know where to begin detailing the problems with this novel and how much I lament that trees died in its name. First, the very first rule of fiction is, "show, don't tell." The tell in this novel is mammoth. You know how you can tell? Flipping through pages you'll see little dialogue. In the midst of reading this I dipped into Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) to remind myself that yes, they did already know how to write novels back then and there it was when I glanced down on the page--lively, plausible, complex characterizations, witty dialogue, wise and insightful comments about human nature--well integrated into the narrative--and restrained emotion. Mary Shelley on the other hand has the most emo characters I've ever read--even by the standards of the at times overwrought Frankenstein. I never thought of Brits as a weepy people, not even in the romantic era but Good God. And the exclamation points, the capitalizations, the classical metaphors, the archaic language, the frequent quotation of poetry. Let's have a short sample:In the deepest fountain of my heart the pulses were stirred; around, above, beneath, the clinging Memory as a cloak enwrapt me. In no one moment of coming time did I feel as I had done in time gone by. The spirit of Idris hovered in the air I breathed; her eyes were ever and for ever bent on mine; her remembered smile blinded my faint gaze, and caused me to walk as one, not in eclipse, not in darkness and vacancy--but in a new and brilliant light, too novel, too dazzling for my human senses. On every leaf, on every small division of the universe (as on the hyacinth ac is engraved) was imprinted the talisman of my existence--SHE LIVES! SHE IS!That was chosen from a random page--most of it is... well worse. And though this is set over 250 years in the future, at the end of the 21st century, there is no imaginative speculation about the future on display here. There are balloons for fast travel--an invention from the century before the book was published. And Britain is a republic with an elected Lord Protector. That's it. Otherwise this is a decidedly pre-industrial setting with no discernible social differences from the time the novel was written. Never mind cars or trains, this is a world still connected by horse and sail. It might be said that it was easier for Verne and Wells writing in the midst of the Industrial Revolution to imagine voyages through time and under the sea and into space. Maybe so, but I did expect better from the author of Frankenstein.The book does have one redeeming quality that kept me somewhat interested, especially through the first third. Both the back cover of the book and the introduction reveals this is somewhat a roman-a-clef. Volume 1, the first third of the novel, is basically a domestic drama--no apocalypse in sight--but I did find there the dynamics of the characters interesting in a voyeuristic sense. Mary Shelley wasn't just the author of Frankenstein. She was the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the great English Romantic Poets, and they were close to another of the great English poets--Lord Byron. Supposedly the character of Adrian is based on Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Raymond is a portrait of Lord Byron. (If true-to-life then Bryon was a prime jerk.) If you have the Oxford edition, I don't recommend reading the introduction before the main text, since it gives away the entire plot--but what it did detail of Mary Shelley's life and circle did have some fascinating parallels in the book. The few times I felt moved by the book was when I felt I could read on the page how Mary Shelley must herself have felt like the last human on the earth after the death of so many she had held dear not long before she wrote the novel. The isolation at the end of the novel and hint of hope really is well done. In fact, the last chapter was great--it just came 450 pages too late. So if you're fascinated by these literary figures, you might find (well, some of) this book of interest: otherwise, I'd leave this novel to the academics.

[nickangelis · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I can be more insensitive than normal with this review because Mary Shelley is very dead. This book is terrible enough to make it into the introduction of my first book as the measuring stick by which all stupid works of literature should be judged. Shelley's 19th century novel takes place in the future, but sci-fi hadn't been invented yet, so people are still dying of fashionable things like tuberculosis and broken hearts and unheated horse-drawn wagons. I hope I haven't given too much away--actually, I hope I have. Don't read this book. The only good thing about "The Last Man" is that in Mary Shelley's future, the beautiful country of Greece has a prominent role (and not because of financial blunders).

[john257hopper · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I found this rather a chore to read. Mary Shelley is a great evocative writer. However, the dense opacity of much of the text, its, for the most part, slow pace and, especially, the complete absence of any remotely believable three dimensional characters (they're all handsome and noble heroes and beautiful ladies), were problems for me. Also, from a modern perspective, the portrayal of 2090s society fails totally, as there is no technology (e.g. all long distance travelling is by sailing ship or sailing balloon). The social structure is entirely the same as that of the 1820s except that England is a a republic, though rather a strange one where all significant characters are nobles, including the son of the last deposed king. All this said, the tragic last section, where the surviving population diminishes from 1500 to 80 to 50 to 4 to 3 then finally to Lionel Verney, the Last Man, is hauntingly and movingly described. Reading the Introduction afterwards, which covers the author's motives, helped somewhat with my comprehension of the work.

[finxy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Review from BadelyngeIt seems like I've been reading Mary Shelley's The Last Man all year. I'm not the fastest of readers but whenever I read poetry I read even slower. The Last Man isn't poetry but it is written using poetic prose, which keeps tricking me into thinking I'm reading an epic poem. The primary characters are based on Shelley's recently deceased husband poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and herself (although personified by the eponymous male character). The woman can write some. The novel really shines when the story finally concludes on its note of tragic isolation. Unfortunately to get to this brilliant finale of loss you have to first present fully what is being lost. Shelley spends over half of the book setting this up and it is, admittedly quite a slog. And then the plague hits. This part of the book is unrelentingly morbid in what it depicts although Shelley's writing and exploration of themes and ideas during this section are delivered with great acuity. If I'd been aware how dark much of the book was going to be after such a long set up I would probably have given the book a miss. I'm glad I read it though because the writing is so good on certain levels but it is often rather daunting in its density.

[tngolden_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a fantastic book. Mary Shelley was a genius, and this work rivals her better-known Frankenstein. The setting is a war between the East and the West and between the war and a plague that comes on its heels, only one nobleman survives. He is left to wander the world and ponder the follies of mankind. This character also provides Mary Shelley with a vehicle to examine and critique the Romantic era that she was a part of with her husband, Lord Byron and John Keats. Looking back she has some very interesting thoughts about how dreams tend to go awry even with the best of intentions. Somehow this book just seems to still ring true even now... or maybe more now then ever. A bucket-list novel in my estimation.