The Last Man

By Mary Shelley, John Havard and Rebecca Solnit

Mary Shelley's landmark novel that invented the human extinction genre and initiated climate fiction, imagining a world where newly-forged communities and reverence for nature rises from the ashes of a pandemic-ravaged society, now for the first time in Penguin Classics, with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit

A Penguin Classic

Written while Mary Shelley was in a self-imposed lockdown after the loss of her husband and children, and in the wake of intersecting crises including the climate-changing Mount Tambora eruption and a raging cholera outbreak, The Last Man (1826) is the first end-of-mankind novel, an early work of climate fiction, and a prophetic depiction of environmental change. Set in the late twenty-first century, the book tells of a deadly pandemic that leaves a lone survivor, and follows his journey through a post-apocalyptic world that's devoid of humanity and reclaimed by nature. But rather than give in to despair, Shelley uses the now-ubiquitous end-times plot to imagine a new world where freshly-formed communities and alternative ways of being stand in for self-important politicians serving corrupt institutions, and where nature reigns mightily over humanity—a timely message for our current era of climate collapse and political upheaval. Brimming with political intrigue and love triangles around characters based on Percy Shelley and scandal-dogged poet Lord Byron, the novel also broaches partisan dysfunction, imperial warfare, refugee crises, and economic collapse—and brings the legacy of her radically progressive parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, to bear on present-day questions about making a better world less centered around “man.” Shelley’s second major novel after Frankenstein, The Last Man casts a half-skeptical eye on romantic ideals of utopian perfection and natural plenitude while looking ahead to a greener future in which our species develops new relationships with non-human life and the planet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9780593511992

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was the only daughter of the political philosopher William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, celebrated author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. At the age of sixteen, Shelley (then Mary Godwin) scandalized English society by eloping with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was married. Best known for the genre-defining Frankenstein (1818), she was a prolific writer of fiction, travelogues, and biographies during her lifetime, and was instrumental in securing the literary reputation of Percy Shelley after his tragic death.

Book preview

Cover for The Last Man, Author, Mary Shelley; Introduction by John Havard; Foreword by Rebecca Solnit

PENGUIN

CLASSICS

THE LAST MAN

mary shelley was born in London in 1797, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, famous radical writers of the day. Mary’s mother died tragically ten days after the birth. Under Godwin’s conscientious and expert tuition, Mary’s was an intellectually stimulating childhood, though she often felt misunderstood by her stepmother and neglected by her father. In 1814 she met and soon fell in love with the then unknown Percy Bysshe Shelley, and in July they eloped to the Continent. In December 1816, after Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, committed suicide, Mary and Percy married. Of the four children she bore Shelley, only Percy Florence survived. They lived in Italy from 1818 until 1822, when Shelley drowned following the sinking of his boat Ariel in a storm. Mary returned with Percy Florence to London, where she continued to live as a professional writer until her death in 1851.

The idea for Frankenstein came to Mary Godwin during a summer sojourn in 1816 with Percy Shelley on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Lord Byron was also staying. She was inspired to begin her unique tale after Byron suggested a ghost story competition. Byron himself produced A Fragment, which later inspired his physician John Polidori to write The Vampyre. Mary completed her short story back in England, and it was published as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818. Among her other novels are The Last Man (1826), a dystopian story set in the twenty-first century, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837). As well as contributing many stories and essays to publications such as the Keepsake and the Westminster Review, she wrote numerous biographical essays for Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1835, 1838–39). Her other books include the first collected edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poetical Works (4 vols., 1839) and a book based on the Continental travels she undertook with her son Percy Florence and his friends, Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844). Mary Shelley died in London on February 1, 1851.

rebecca solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell’s Roses, Recollections of My Nonexistence, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell, River of Shadows, and Wanderlust. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a regular contributor to The Guardian and other publications.

john havard is professor of English at the State University of New York, Binghamton. He is the author of Disaffected Parties: Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760–1830 and Late Romanticism and the End of Politics: Byron, Mary Shelley, and the Last Men. His essays about literature and politics have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Minnesota Review, The New Rambler, and Public Books.

Book Title, The Last Man, Author, Mary Shelley; Introduction by John Havard; Foreword by Rebecca Solnit, Imprint, Penguin Classics

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in Great Britain by Henry Colburn in 1826

This edition with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit and introduction by John Havard published in Penguin Books 2024

Foreword copyright © 2024 by Rebecca Solnit

Introduction and suggestions for further exploration copyright © 2024 by John Havard

Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797–1851, author. | Solnit, Rebecca, writer of foreword. | Havard, John Owen, writer of introduction.

Title: The last man / Mary Shelley ; foreword by Rebecca Solnit ; introduction by John Havard.

Description: New York : Penguin Classics, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023048774 (print) | LCCN 2023048775 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143137900 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593511992 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: End of the world–Fiction. | Plague–Fiction. | LCGFT: Apocalyptic fiction. | Novels.

Classification: LCC PR5397 .L3 2024 (print) | LCC PR5397 (ebook) | DDC 823/.7–dc23/eng/20231023

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023048774

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023048775

Cover illustration: Eleanor Taylor

Interior design adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed

pid_prh_6.3_148337315_c0_r0

Contents

Foreword by rebecca solnit

Introduction by john havard

Suggestions for Further Exploration

THE LAST MAN

Volume I

Volume II

Volume III

_148337315_

Foreword

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley is now widely credited with writing the first science fiction novel with Frankenstein in 1818, and you could extend that to make her author of the second as well, the one you hold in your hands now. Revisiting Shelley’s life and work makes me wish I could wield what would become one of that genre’s favorite devices, time travel, on her behalf, to amend the maladies and masculinities that were the causes of her life’s great griefs.

With a time machine, I would send medical care back in time, all the way to her 1797 birth. Had a more sanitary doctor tended her mother, the legendary feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1759–1797), than the one whose unwashed hands likely gave her the infection that killed her, her namesake might not have been motherless. Other interventions could perhaps have prevented three of Mary Shelley’s four children from dying so young and, for her, so heartbreakingly.

But for the other half of her trouble we’d have to send her into the future, because it wasn’t only the medical realities of her time that shaped her life; it was the limits put on her as a woman. As a man, she would have cut a swathe through nineteenth-century English intellectual life and paid no price for living with her future spouse before marriage. As a woman she was cut down to nothing again and again.

Her imagination was itself confined by its time in some ways. In others, it soared above it as the airships in The Last Man soar above the late twenty-first century landscape. In both Frankenstein and this novel, she simply bypasses the conventions of Christian theology to reimagine the world. In the former, life is created neither by God nor by biology but by a scientist; in the latter human beings face extinction, though the Christian apocalypse and Last Judgment are nowhere in sight, and this plague is natural, not divine punishment.

All the rest of life goes on blooming without us—human beings seem to be neither necessary to life on earth nor the pinnacle of creation. Charles Darwin was just a schoolboy when she wrote these books, and the ruptures he and the geologists would produce in the understanding of the earth and its living beings had yet to happen. So Shelley was plunging out ahead, on her own. That nature seems to thrive without humans in The Last Man recalls contemporary ecological visions—notably Alan Weisman’s 2007 book The World Without Us, in which he imagines how nature would restore itself were our species to vanish suddenly.

In the age of climate chaos, in which human beings are so obviously the source of destruction from pole to pole, from oceans to peaks, from burning forests to flooded plains, the world without us can seem blessed rather than cursed. The current Thirty-by-Thirty plan seeks to preserve that portion of earth and sea percentage of the earth, by 2030, for wildlife and the natural carbon sequestration plants engage in, realizing human withdrawal in a more positive way. But the thriving natural world is not a welcome sight in The Last Man, and her protagonist declares, We feared the balmy air—we feared the cloudless sky, the flower-covered earth, and delightful woods, for we looked on the fabric of the universe no longer as our dwelling, but our tomb. . . .¹

But at a later point, he sees all nature thriving: Where was pain and evil? Not in the calm air or weltering ocean; not in the woods or fertile fields, nor among the birds that made the woods resonant with song, nor the animals that in the midst of plenty basked in the sunshine.² From the perspective of our time, a catastrophe that leaves the natural world untouched seems a relief. In 1826, this decline of the species does lead to one interim boon: social and economic equality among the survivors, as titles and rank come to mean nothing, and palaces and treasures become available to all.

Mary Shelley also shows an insurrectionary interest in equality and a distaste for monarchy, writing when government by hereditary elites threatens to return: The half extinct spirit of royalty roused itself in the minds of men; and they, willing slaves, self-constituted subjects, were ready to bend their necks to the yoke.³ This so outraged a reviewer that he wrote, A king of England, in conformity with the wishes of the people, retires from his throne, to make way for the establishment of a republic. Can we wonder at the plague that was to follow, and sweep off all the inhabitants of the earth? The holy salt of royalty removed, what was to preserve the mass from corruption?⁴

In these ways her work is subversive. In others it’s conventional. She dethrones kings in this book, but not husbands. The protagonists of The Last Man, Frankenstein, and some of her other novels are male, because despite her own mother’s famous screed against the suppression of female possibilities, she cannot or at least did not imagine women with the agency to participate so fully in life. Instead, she ventriloquizes through a series of male narrators, so much so she seems to see women through men’s eyes. The good women of The Last Man, though they live and breathe in 2073 and after, are demure wives, devoted mothers, a dutiful niece. Only the minor character Evadne takes a more adventurous and creative path and plays a role in public life, at a cost.

Shelley herself lived a life strangely stretched between speech and silence, deference and adventure. In her journal for 1822, she recalls that six years earlier, at the Lake Como villa of the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, incapacity and timidity always prevented my mingling in the nightly conversations,⁵ so she merely listened as her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron, and the other men present conversed. But it was during those conversations, while the freakishly cold summer kept them indoors, that Byron proposed they each write a ghost story. Mary’s towering entry into the competition, Frankenstein, was initially published anonymously, and her husband was sometimes credited as the author (and later The Last Man was coyly credited to "the author of Frankenstein"). It’s a roundabout revenge that the girl who hardly dare speak wrote a book that would by the twentieth century loom far larger in the public imagination than anything those men did.

While her husband lived, she was dependent on his income and his whims, and he was often capricious, improvident, and callous. When he died, his hostile father, Sir Timothy Shelley, furnished her and her surviving child with a modest allowance on the condition that she silence herself, so she was forced to publish anonymously while she strove to write for a living. The Last Man shows the tension between what she wants—to explore ideas and craft an allegory for her profound sense of loss and loneliness—and what she thought the market might want. So her flowery and sometimes florid prose style and her characters’ emotional lives seem conventional furnishings in an utterly unconventional premise.

Before the Romantics, the word lonely mostly just meant alone, isolated, as likely to be used for isolated places and objects as for forlorn people—the 1755 edition of Doctor Johnson’s dictionary defines it as solitary, addicted to solitude. It lacked the sense of sad yearning and bereftness that it now evokes. Mary Shelley’s peers and their near predecessors, the first generation of Romantic poets, were preoccupied with solitary figures, outcasts, orphans, and with loneliness. A number of them wrote about the mythic figure of the Wandering Jew, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge modeled his Ancient Mariner after him (one of Shelley’s childhood memories was hiding behind the sofa as Coleridge recited the poem to her father and stepmother). Among all these figures, Shelley might be the one whose life was most threaded through with an actual experience of loneliness, and in making that emotion a subject for literature she was a true romantic.

After her mother, the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, died, she was raised by an unsympathetic stepmother and a father who prized her intellect more than he protected her well-being. When, at the age of sixteen, she ran off to France with the married Shelley, she was rejected and reviled, even by her own father, for violating the sexual rules circumscribing women’s lives. The stigma lived on long after the death by suicide of the first Mrs. Shelley and her marriage to the poet. During the eight years of their life together, she had at least five pregnancies, resulting in the early death of three of those children and a miscarriage. She nearly bled to death from the latter, a few weeks before her young husband and his friend died in a boating accident in early July of 1822. He was almost thirty; she not yet twenty-five.

Her journal stops abruptly upon his death and then resumes a few months later, Now I am alone—oh, how alone! The stars may behold my tears, and the winds drink my sighs; but my thoughts are a sealed treasure, which I can confide to none.⁶ In April of 1824, Byron died, apparently of malaria and blood loss after being, in a common medical practice of the time, bled repeatedly by his doctors. Though her relationship with Byron had been conflicted, she felt his passing deeply—and, it’s often said, modeled The Last Man’s Raymond after him. In her journal for May 14, 1824, while in the midst of writing this novel, she wrote, The last man! Yes, I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.⁷ Only her son Percy lived on as a companion to the widow and a relic of those hectic years among the poets.

There are few books about loneliness more wrenching than The Last Man, but it’s hard to attribute it all to her bereavement when the novel she wrote in the midst of her marriage and the society Shelley brought with him was as fierce an exploration of solitude. Frankenstein describes the utter loneliness of the singular creature cobbled together from corpses, brought to life with electricity, and then abandoned by his creator. Lionel Verney, the protagonist and narrator of The Last Man, is fated to become as unique and as solitary as this creature, to be the only one of his kind.

But it’s worth remembering that Verney’s life begins in solitude as well as ends in it. As a child, he had been orphaned and sent out to herd sheep, becoming a vagabond whose life offered companionship with nature, and a reckless loneliness.⁸ The latter part of the phrase negates the former: nature is indeed a companion, and beauties of landscape are much praised in this book, but it is no substitute for human companionship. Verney’s life echoes Shelley’s—a lonely childhood, an adventurous heyday among remarkable peers, and a return to isolation.

I contemplate that time machine and the possible meddling with her hardships and losses, and then contemplate that had her life turned out differently her work might well have too, or never come to be. We need that work, and so I leave her to her fate and her readers to her books.

rebecca solnit

NOTES

1. The Last Man, pp. [X]

2. The Last Man, pp. [X]

3. The Last Man, pp. [X]

4. The Last Man, pp. [X]; review of The Last Man, The Panoramic Miscellany, or Monthly Magazine and Review of Literature, Sciences, Arts, Inventions, and Occurrences 1 (March 1826): 380–86, https://romantic-circles.org/reference/chronologies/mschronology/reviews/pmrev.html.

5. Mary Shelley’s Journal, October 18, 1822, edited by Frederick L. Jones (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947), p. 184.

6. Mary Shelley’s Journal, October 2, 1822, p. 180.

7. Mary Shelley’s Journal, May 14, 1824, 193.

8. Similarly, her novella Mathilda, written after Frankenstein but before The Last Man, features a protagonist whose mother dies, father deserts her, and then returns—but rather than offering nurturing parental love, he becomes erotically obsessed with her, so Mathilda has to flee him for a deeper solitude, a greater bereftness.

Introduction

The Last Man imagines a mysterious disease that leaves a lone survivor. That premise is a grim one. But Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel—her second major work after Frankenstein—is a beguiling, thrilling, even delightful read, filled with as much wonder as dread. The political intrigues and love triangles of the opening volume recall the author’s time with her husband Percy Shelley and scandal-dogged poet Lord Byron.¹ These bucolic scenes are gradually darkened by partisan dysfunction, imperial warfare, and a brewing refugee crisis; inconstant hearts give way to overweening ambition; youth and hope fade to anxiety and fear. Based on its opening volume, The Last Man may seem to say little about its stated theme. But Shelley uses these rustic idylls and political ideals to stage a dramatic reversal. As the scene shifts to the international arena in volume two, a troubling presence begins to emerge from the shadows: Plague (000).

Pandemics have a rich literary history, from the stories conceived in the shadow of the Black Death in Boccaccio’s Decameron and the pestilent London of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year to the wartime allegory of Albert Camus’s The Plague, the unexplained loss of sight in José Saramago’s Blindness, and the deadly flu of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.² The nineteenth century saw a growing interest in last men and emptied planets.³ In Shelley’s novel, disease and desolation converge, as the sweeping force of the virus decimates the global population. The Last Man shows the world stopping, society unwinding, humanity disappearing to a mere trace. The survivors stagger through weed-tangled ruins, as apocalyptic storms herald the end of days. This dystopian world becomes the backdrop for a very human drama, as narrator Lionel Verney and company confront the baffling heartbreak of loss whose scale outstrips mourning.

But this deadly pandemic does not spell the end, at least not exactly. Like other works of art concerned with speculative predicaments—from Paradise Lost to Groundhog Day—the second half of The Last Man plays out a fascinating thought experiment. What does life mean with the entire species hurtling toward death? What happens to humanity when man dwindles to a single individual? What endures after the death of hope for the future? Alone amid the ruins of Rome, Lionel raids libraries for copies of Homer and Shakespeare.⁴ But the story of this last man is not a classic for the bookshelf, one of the great works left behind at the end of the world. This tale of mass death and tenuous survival is very much alive. In an age of political earthquakes and man-made disasters, freak pandemics and spiraling climate catastrophe, The Last Man provides a road map, of sorts, for a world of vanishing certainties.

---

*

Shelley’s life was shadowed by grief. The author of The Last Man was also to live in a world dominated by men. Her father, coolly rationalistic philosopher William Godwin, provided a childhood filled with ideas. Shelley was not, like most of her female contemporaries, taught the arts of womanliness, Muriel Spark writes, and in an age when men expected women to studiously reveal a desire to please them, the increasing substantial seriousness of Mary Shelley’s company appalled and scared the life out of [the] friends of earlier, flimsier days.⁵ Following her turbulent years abroad with Percy Shelley and after returning to England as a widow with their surviving infant child, she faced social isolation and financial duress. That experience became the crucible for a work of immense imaginative power and political insight.

The Last Man was the product, in a sense, of lockdown. Shelley later wrote that her solitude even before she was widowed had sunk her in a state of loneliness no other human being ever before I believe endured—Except Robinson Crusoe.⁶ Amidst all the depressing circumstances that weigh on me, the 1824 journal entry where she identified as the last man bereft of companions continued, none sinks deeper than the failure of my intellectual powers. But inspiration struck again. She took walks in the forest. She gazed at the swirling night sky. After Byron died unexpectedly, she visited the poet’s corpse and watched his funeral procession pass by her door. Muriel Spark—who wrote her own career-making novels from a South London bedsit—locates Shelley’s inspiration in these days of desolation: From this abyss, brimming with deep waters of despondency, her imagination drew its morose sustenance, and fed in turn, the theme of her novel. In letters with a female correspondent, Shelley discussed dreary weather and her plans for a book on the last man. I am excited to meet him, came the reply.⁷

Percy Shelley was an idealist, who believed in natural goodness. In The Last Man, Shelley reckoned with the loss of her husband’s guiding spirit. The book’s preface describes a real trip undertaken by the couple to the cave of the Sibyl of Cumæ, the prophetess sentenced to eternal life—without eternal youth—who wrote on scattered leaves. Shelley smuggles her voice in under the ungendered narrator of the preface, whose encounter with that scene of disjointed futurity gives way to Lionel Verney. He later notes that, unlike expressive women, he struggles to cry, making him a potential stand-in for an author who similarly veiled her feelings (000). In the character of Adrian—beloved by Lionel—Shelley honored her husband’s legacy. But her reverence for his memory aside, she did not share his belief in schemes for democratic reform or universal love. The novel dramatizes her ambivalence toward romanticized ideals, as events place the ability of men to lead under acute pressure.

The Last Man begins in England in the final decades of the twenty-first century. The book is not, in any straightforward way, futuristic, blending archaic-feeling pasts together with modestly updated institutions. After the voluntary abdication of the king—which Shelley optimistically dates to 2073—monarchy is no more and competing factions are vying to lead the country. As heir to the royal line, Adrian is an obvious choice. But he is a benevolent naturalist, seen as weak and ineffectual. Lord Raymond, a proud, vainglorious aristocrat, takes his place. Based on Byron, Raymond shares the fiery brilliance (and volatile temper) that Shelley had viewed up close in the poet. Rather than the goodness of man, Raymond believes in himself. When Adrian has a nervous breakdown and retreats into nature, Raymond (mocking him for picking blackberries and taunting that he has turned squirrel [000]) becomes Lord Protector in his place.

The opening volume establishes our investment in the novel’s characters, while conveying their investment in elusive ideals. That extends, in the case of Adrian, to the dubious belief that mankind will achieve immortality—and Raymond’s similarly outlandish desires for world domination. We find a hint of what is to come when parliament becomes extinct at the stroke of midnight, the beginning of the end of politics as usual (000). In Adrian, Shelley cast a half-skeptical eye on her husband’s utopian enthusiasm; the book implies more obvious disapproval of Raymond, whose reckless inconstancy and military adventuring see him decide, as Byron did, to join the Greek struggle against Ottoman rule. An aggressive populist named Ryland succeeds Raymond, but this man of the people proves an erratic leader, stoking resentment at privilege and panicking as the plague takes hold. Adrian, meanwhile, succeeds in convincing the wealthy to share their resources. When Ryland proves to be a paranoid hypochondriac, Adrian comes into his own as the country’s spiritual figurehead, projecting calm and empathy. He seems to have finally set the country on the proper course. But his belated ascent to leadership proves ironic. Ultimately, the book shows politics falling into the dust with everything else, as the world, in some sense, starts over. The end of the species tellingly begins with the silencing of some vocal men.⁸

---

*

We survey this elite world through the eyes of Lionel, an outsider, a wanderer, and a poacher (000). His sister Perdita—who shares her name with the forgotten heroine of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale—lives in a flowery bower at the edges of Windsor Forest. Lionel falls for Adrian’s sister Idris, while Perdita becomes attached to Raymond. These hopelessly devoted and self-denying women suggest the continuation of limited gender roles well into the twenty-first century.⁹ But they have a counterpart in the fiery figure of Evadne, an exile from Greece, whose presence haunts the second volume, in which the Verney siblings follow Raymond back to the Greek struggle. It is the besieged residents of Constantinople/Stamboul/present-day Istanbul who will begin falling prey to a mystery illness that has been swirling in Asia.

Whether or not readers were expected to approve of Raymond’s campaign against the barbarian Turks, he leads a pyrrhic victory. Classical monuments and crowds of adoring villagers give way to the dazzling pyrotechnics of explosion and collapse, hastening on Raymond’s demise and creating new vectors for the spread of disease. From these distant battles and ancient ruins, the virus advances to the heart of Europe.¹⁰ At first, England seems protected. But Lionel resists that insular perspective, having witnessed the virus sweep through Asia into Greece. As he watches his son frolic with his Eton school friends, he is consumed by a sickening realization: Ye are all going to die, I thought (000).

Facing the inevitable, his countrymen panic, riot, seize the moment, distract themselves with revelry. At a performance of Macbeth, the audience hear Shakespeare’s lines on good men’s lives expiring before the flowers in their caps: Each word struck the sense, as our life’s passing bell (000).¹¹ Yet for all its horror, the plague issues in a kind of societal reset, even a kind of New Deal. Bankers are suddenly without money. The poor are at a loss for employment, as the supply chain for luxury goods seizes up. But as the crisis deepens, they realize . . . there is nothing to stop them seizing the homes of the rich! The upper classes experience life without servants and learn to take care of themselves. Yet this leveling of social distinction proves short-lived. Shelley explores political conundrums and moral dilemmas only to subordinate them to life’s passing bell. Rich and poor, young and old, East and West, all end up in the same boat. Everybody dies.

Shelley uses the onset of the plague to comment on England’s presumed global eminence. Refugees at first take over country estates, creating a kind of wartime socialist paradise.¹² But the nation’s privileged position soon collapses. Cut off from the trade that secured its status, England risks becoming an inhospitable, craggy outpost (with bad corn and no foreign wine [000]). Adrian talks about England once again becoming an unspoiled paradise, recalling the rural idylls celebrated by Romantic poets. But it also becomes a Brexit-like retreat, pulling up the drawbridge on the outside world, succumbing to decline. The characters may carry England with them as they—like Milton’s banished Adam and Eve—become exiles in their turn, seeking a new home in Europe’s warm South.¹³ But the institutions that undergird that identity collapse. The novel’s opening lines imagine Lionel at the end of his story, haunted by dreams of an island nation that no longer exists.

Before leaving England, Lionel walks in the forest with his family on one of the lovely winter-days that bestow beauty on barrenness. All at once, the world around them takes on a new appearance and he realizes their future lies elsewhere. He encounters Merrival, an astronomer whose hyperrational calculations look centuries into the future. Lionel hears he has gone mad. In fact, he is possessed only by the delirium of excessive grief at the death of his family:

One by one they were carried off by pestilence; and his wife, his helpmate and supporter, more necessary to him than his own limbs and frame, which had hardly been taught the lesson of self-preservation, the kind companion whose voice always spoke peace to him, closed her eyes in death. The old man felt the system of universal nature which he had so long studied and adored, slide from under him, and he stood among the dead, and lifted his voice in curses (000).

He and Lionel part on a winter day of pattering rain and melancholy wind. With rain drench[ing] his uncovered head, Merrival rages at the heavens and throws himself on the wet ground of the churchyard, begging to be allowed to die and be laid beside his family. This scene of desperate grief also marks the final collapse of his tarnished ideals. His belief in the system of universal nature falls in the dust, subsumed beneath the loss of the woman whose support made life possible.

But the virus also gives rise to altogether new relations with nature. With the world turned upside down, Lionel’s vagabond youth (000) becomes a shared condition. Behind his resonant farewells to the world as it was, we hear Shelley bidding an adieu to established institutions. That dissolution proves equivocal, as the characters return to a strangely inverted version of the natural state that precedes and surrounds political society, a new world. At the start of the third volume, Shelley describes a scene of barren plenty (000). Yet there is a strange sense of fullness in the air. The novel acquires a trippy, hallucinogenic quality as the characters rediscover the natural world. Lionel shares a profound moment with a dying robin (000). A fresh awareness of changes in the air provides a reminder that all living beings share the same atmosphere.¹⁴ These new experiences of nonhuman nature couple with dramatic reworkings of human society—and the strange world that takes society’s place.

---

*

What does it all mean? The book’s complexly layered aesthetics withhold easy answers. To be sure, The Last Man voices and amplifies its author’s grief. But the book’s heady meditations also stretch the limits of Shelley’s experience to the impossible scenario in which those left behind must mourn the species itself. The expressions of anguish can reach an almost campy excess: Lionel at one point describes life as that labyrinth of evil, that scheme of mutual torture! (000). Elsewhere, he presents the hauntingly beautiful image of a shepherd who, when he had sheared his sheep, would let the wool lie to be scattered by the winds, deeming it useless to provide clothing for another winter (000). The book’s prose becomes increasingly poetic, embroidering reflections on loss and life together with wide-ranging questions about community and creation, material abundance and spiritual meaning, the vanity of human wishes.

These losses enclose complex reflections. Shelley was too hardheaded and skeptical to believe in schemes of political reform and universal benevolence. The Last Man nonetheless provides a blank canvas on which to explore other possible worlds. With mankind reduced to a cluster, Adrian’s leadership supplies Percy Shelley’s political utopianism with a kind of practical afterlife. But The Last Man also asks what we do when no future exists: what happens when man is no more, just individual men. What we owe each other comes into sharp focus at precisely the moment it becomes beside the point. This paradox becomes critical to the subtle political work done by the novel. Shelley’s careful staging of the world’s unraveling makes audible possible new beginnings that look beyond existing ways of being in the world.

Building upon nineteenth-century fears about apocalypse and extinction, twentieth-century readers could approach The Last Man through the lenses of global war and nuclear catastrophe. Shelley’s novel poses equally sharp questions for our own moment. As we face the gathering chaos of a twenty-first century whose woes are all too real, The Last Man has become uncannily resonant, if not urgently relevant. That includes recent—and likely future—pandemics, whose scope and frequency threaten to overwhelm existing containment strategies. HIV/AIDS was partially cordoned off in Western societies by the stigmatization of gay men and neglect of vulnerable populations.¹⁵ The West has often ignored the diseases that ravage distant countries and continents. But viruses, as we know all too well, do not respect borders and societal divisions. Shelley’s novel asks what happens when a hierarchical society in a world of nations confronts a global disease of unstoppable force.

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic saw bodies pile up in cold storage trucks and pauper’s graveyards, unthinkable parallels of the late seventeenth-century death carts and charnel pits described in Defoe’s plague journal. Covid also stopped the world on its axis. From the Vatican to Shibuya to Wall Street, iconic scenes fell silent. Images circulated of animals reclaiming abandoned streets, recalling Lionel’s account of herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, wandering at will (000). While so-called ghost flights continued to take off, empty of passengers, skies were largely cleared of planes and pollution, as relentless economic activity and global interchange ceased. The pandemic effected massive shock to the global economy, as well as subtler shifts in living patterns that continue to reverberate. The bustle and noise of modern life has since recommenced. But for a moment, at least, another world could be imagined.¹⁶

The Last Man has glimpses of horrible death, rioters and marauders, street prophets and dangerous cults. But the book is also eerily silent, spookily empty. As the pages dwindle, we follow the survivors through sublime landscapes and watch the nonhuman world quietly going about its business. Lionel watches on as dogs formerly trained by man move herds, a final trace of human influence now absorbed into other species’ being (000). The Last Man gestures toward a future in which humans and their fellow creatures might live in new harmony. The dissolution of institutions couples with the unwinding of identity to a new state in which we can reexamine society, if not human nature, from the ground up.¹⁷ The second volume ends, facing a final winter, with a poignant account of the death of hope. Life, for a while, goes on. But does The Last Man somehow present a hopeful spin on wiping out the existing human world and starting over? Or does the book instead carry muted judgment against our species, a sense that we deserve our doom?

In 2004, a motion was tabled in Britain’s House of Commons: That this House is appalled, but barely surprised, at the revelations in M15 files regarding the bizarre and inhumane proposals to use pigeons as flying bombs; recognises the important and lifesaving role of carrier pigeons in two world wars and wonders at the lack of gratitude toward these gentle creatures; and believes that humans represent the most obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised and lethal species ever to inhabit the planet and looks forward to the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into the earth and wipes them out thus giving nature the opportunity to start again. This was an excoriating attack on the modern world, by diehard progressives (one of the signatories was Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn). But while Shelley did not have much time for radical democrats, she might have appreciated a proposed amendment from a conservative politician making the more hopeful suggestion in conclusion that humans and other creatures may with luck have the chance to live together again.¹⁸ The Last Man lets us glimpse such a possibility.

And yet, the novel also presents a dark picture of nature thrown off course. Plague couples with the arrival of strange storms and a black sun (000).¹⁹ Shelley had lived through the eruption of Mount Tambora, a volcanic eruption that turned day into night and disordered the seasons.²⁰ The book’s imagery of birds falling from the sky, sudden winds, and even the fantastical prospect of a flood that will pluck Britain out of the ocean tie the pandemic to a wider sense that the world is dangerously out of balance. These scenes also point to far-reaching fears that capitalism was darkening the planet—throwing off time-honored rhythms, making nature something to extract and exhaust. At the time Shelley wrote, England was already responsible for most of the world’s carbon emissions. The wheels were in motion for the kind of Promethean unleashing of fire that created today’s climate catastrophe.²¹

We live in a moment of peril: baking heat, freak storms, mass migration, zoonotic viruses—deepening political tensions, widening geopolitical divides. The evacuated world of The Last Man brings with it strange echoes. The book may seem to uphold Eurocentric worldviews, presenting an amorphous and threatening East and constructing a fortresslike retreat against the masses. But Shelley ultimately portrays the unraveling of defenses in the face of swelling populations and shifting borders. In the book’s closing pages, Lionel imagines a voyage to the East, recalling the poetic language used to bolster imperial conquest. His fantasized escape looks back to a real world in which no such fresh starts or minimized impacts are possible any longer. The book imagines its exiles founding a new race in the Mediterranean. That scenario never comes to pass. Everybody dies. But green shoots are visible between the cracks. The Last Man quietly holds out hope for what can happen when existing certainties are suspended, when the clock stops.²² This novel about colossal suffering and unimaginable loss is also, ultimately, something else: a polyphonic celebration of the possible worlds buried in the ruins of this one.

john havard

NOTES

1. For a lively introduction to the circle, see Daisy Hay, Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives (2010).

2. See Jill Lepore, What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About, The New Yorker, March 23, 2020.

3. See Fiona Stafford, The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (1994).

4. While this can be viewed as a gesture toward continued English imperialism and Western supremacy, books acquire different meanings in a world where the nation and its institutions no longer exist. See John Havard, Late Romanticism and the End of Politics: Byron, Mary Shelley, and The Last Men (2023).

5. Muriel Spark, Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1951), 3.

6. The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844, edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (1987), 2.555.

7. Spark, Child of Light, 152. Spark quotes the journal entry about intellectual powers and concludes that Shelley’s talent depended very much on the fluctuating influences of external things, like the weather (151). The letter mentioned here appears in Shelley’s papers at the Bodleian Library.

8. See John Havard, Late Romanticism and the End of Politics: Byron, Mary Shelley, and The Last Men.

9. The figures of Perdita and Idris, both self-images of Mary Shelley, define the roles of women within the domestic sphere even as they alert us to the potentially negative consequences of an ideological construction of the woman, as primarily a member of a family unit, as a daughter, wife, and mother. Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (1988), 153. These authorial avatars find counterparts in Evadne—who may also recall Wollstonecraft—and even Lionel, whose devotion to Adrian recalls that of Shelley for her husband.

10. For the cholera epidemic whose spread west into Europe that may have influenced Shelley, see Brian Aldiss, Introduction to Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1985).

11. Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) begins with a performance of King Lear that marks the onset of a deadly winter plague. The book later follows a theatrical troupe that roams an abandoned world performing Shakespeare for the few remaining survivors, finding meaning and healing in the words of the past brought to new life.

12. England helped them, Elizabeth Nitchie wrote, with an eye on the Second World War, as she helped the political refugees of the eighteenth century, and those of the twentieth, of whom Mary never dreamed. Mary Shelley: The Author of Frankenstein (1953), 37–38.

13. See Charlotte Sussman, Peopling the World: Representing Human Mobility from Milton to Malthus (2020).

14. For the emergent concept of the international airspace in the novel, see Siobhan Carroll, Mary Shelley’s Global Atmosphere, European Romantic Review (2014).

15. In "Plaguing Politics: AIDS, Deconstruction, and The Last Man (1993), Audrey A. Fisch suggestively proposes that responses to AIDS within and outside the United States saw two kinds of ‘foreignness’ inform each other."

16. Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris have recently asked how reading pandemic narratives in the wake of Covid-19 might suggest alternative trajectories for society. See States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic (2022) and John Havard, The End of Days, Minnesota Review (forthcoming).

17. See Hilary Strang, "Common Life, Animal Life, Equality: The Last Man (2011) and Fuson Wang, We Must Live Elsewhere: The Social Construction of Natural Immunity in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (2011). Because there is only the potential of a society left for Lionel, Collin Lam writes, Shelley bypasses Rousseau’s concerns about societal corruption of natural virtue: her melancholic community [. . .] can only imagine the desire of others as the desire for others—a community of care, not hierarchy." Sorrow Worlds: Romantic Melancholy and the Condition of History, PhD dissertation, Binghamton University (2023), 182.

18. UK Parliament, Early Day Motions, 21 May 2004, https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/24837.

19. For the novel’s converging natural disasters, see Melissa Bailes, "The Psychologization of Geological Catastrophe in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man," ELH (2015).

20. See Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (2014) and David Higgins, British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene: Writing Tambora (2017).

21. See Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016) and Tobias Menely, Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics (2021).

22. Compare Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1994): Yesterday was Sunday but I’ve been a little unfocused recently and I thought it was Monday. So I came here like it was going to work. And the whole place was empty. And at first I couldn’t figure out why, and I had this moment of incredible . . . fear and also . . . It just flashed through my mind: the whole Hall of Justice, it’s empty, it’s deserted, it’s gone out of business. Forever (000).

Suggestions for Further Exploration

Shelley’s many-layered treatment of a world-stopping plague recalls other fictionalized attempts to weave stories and create meaning around mass infection and its disastrous aftermath. The characters in the book read Boccaccio, De Foe, and Brown (000); these and more recent examples of pandemic literature appear below, including Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s fictional account of the early twentieth-century Ottoman Empire and Zadie Smith’s essayistic responses to the onset of Covid-19. Shelley’s personal losses—including the death of her infant children and mother Mary Wollstonecraft—became entwined with her wider reflections on the world. She tied literary creation directly to childbirth and female prophecy, subtly undermining myths of solitary male genius, Promethean struggle, and Christian creation. John Milton’s Paradise Lost and its story of divine genesis giving way to banishment from Eden hangs over The Last Man, as it does over Shelley’s earlier masterpiece Frankenstein. In addition to taking down man-centric myths, Shelley set her gaze on a natural world in growing disorder: what Amitav Ghosh has called the Great Derangement of the planet by capitalism. Yet her novel also offered a quietly hopeful take on the end of the world, echoed in some of the works listed below. The deadly virus of The Last Man also looks ahead, of course, to horror potboilers and zombie movies. The films and TV series listed below depict diseases originating in Africa and Asia giving rise to global lockdown, scientific innovation, state repression, mass hysteria. They also include postapocalyptic and science-fictional treatments of lone survivors and deadly plagues (or mass infertility). There is a lengthy—and growing—list of works that present dystopian spins on biomedical experimentation and environmental devastation. Covid-19 will no doubt produce a new wave of works reflecting on the traumatic experience of mass death and the fleeting opportunity that crisis offers for reexamining things as they are.

1. PANDEMIC LITERATURE

Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn (1799)

Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron (c.1353)

Albert Camus, La Peste [The Plague] (1947)

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)

Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1994)

Suzan-Lori Parks, Plays for the Plague Year (2023)

Jack London, The Scarlet Plague (1912)

Orhan Pamuk, Nights of Plague (2022)

José Saramago, Ensaio sobre a Cegueira [Blindness] (1995)

Zadie Smith, Intimations (2020)

2. SHELLEY, LIFE, AND CREATION

Julie A. Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (2007)

Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley (2015)

Barbara Johnson, A Life with Mary Shelley (2014)

John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

Muriel Spark, Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1951)

William St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family (1989)

3. NATURE DISORDERED

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016)

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014)

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014)

Hilda Lloréns, Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice (2021)

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016)

Tobias Menely, Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics (2021)

Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015)

Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (2007)

4. END OF THE WORLD FICTION

Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (2017)

P. D. James, The Children of Men (1992)

Richard Jeffries, After London; Or Wild England (1885)

Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home (1985)

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890)

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (2014)

Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 (2017)

5. FILMS AND TV SERIES

28 Days Later (2002)

Children of Men (2006)

Contagion (2011)

I Am Legend (2007)

The Last of Us (2023)

Outbreak (1995)

Station Eleven (2021)

This England (2022)

Let no man seek

Henceforth to be foretold what shall befall

Him or his children.

Milton.

VOLUME I

Introduction

I visited Naples in the year 1818. On the 8th of December of that year, my companion and I crossed the Bay, to visit the antiquities which are scattered on the shores of Baiæ. The translucent and shining waters of the calm sea covered fragments of old Roman villas, which were interlaced by sea-weed, and received diamond tints from the chequering of the sun-beams; the blue and pellucid element was such as Galatea might have skimmed in her car of mother of pearl; or Cleopatra, more fitly than the Nile, have chosen as the path of her magic ship. Though it was winter, the atmosphere seemed more appropriate to early spring; and its genial warmth contributed to inspire those sensations of placid delight, which are the portion of every traveller, as he lingers, loath to quit the tranquil bays and radiant promontories of Baiæ.

We visited the so called Elysian Fields and Avernus: and wandered through various ruined temples, baths, and classic spots; at length we entered the gloomy cavern of the Cumæan Sibyl. Our Lazzeroni bore flaring torches, which shone red, and almost dusky, in the murky subterranean passages, whose darkness thirstily surrounding them, seemed eager to imbibe more and more of the element of light. We passed by a natural archway, leading to a second gallery, and enquired, if we could not enter there also. The guides pointed to the reflection of their torches on the water that paved it, leaving us to form our own conclusion; but adding it was a pity, for it led to the Sibyl’s Cave. Our curiosity and enthusiasm were excited by this circumstance, and we insisted upon attempting the passage. As is usually the case in the prosecution of such enterprizes, the difficulties decreased on examination. We found, on each side of the humid pathway, dry land for the sole of the foot. At length we arrived at a large, desert, dark cavern, which the Lazzeroni assured us was the Sibyl’s Cave. We were sufficiently disappointed—Yet we examined it with care, as if its blank, rocky walls could still bear trace of celestial visitant. On one side was a small opening. Whither does this lead? we asked: can we enter here?—"Questo poi, no,—said the wild looking savage, who held the torch; you can advance but a short distance, and nobody visits it."

Nevertheless, I will try it, said my companion; it may lead to the real cavern. Shall I go alone, or will you accompany me?

I signified my readiness to proceed, but our guides protested against such a measure. With great volubility, in their native Neapolitan dialect, with which we were not very familiar, they told us that there were spectres, that the roof would fall in, that it was too narrow to admit us, that there was a deep hole within, filled with water, and we might be drowned. My friend shortened the harangue, by taking the man’s torch from him; and we proceeded alone.

The passage, which at first scarcely admitted us, quickly grew narrower and lower; we were almost bent double; yet still we persisted in making our way through it. At length we entered a wider space, and the low roof heightened; but, as we congratulated ourselves on this change, our torch was extinguished by a current of air, and we were left in utter darkness. The guides bring with them materials for renewing the light, but we had none—our only resource was to return as we came. We groped round the widened space to find the entrance, and after a time fancied that we had succeeded. This proved however to be a second passage, which evidently ascended. It terminated like the former; though something approaching to a ray, we could not tell whence, shed a very doubtful twilight in the space. By degrees, our eyes grew somewhat accustomed to this dimness, and we perceived that there was no direct passage leading us further; but that it was possible to climb one side of the cavern to a low arch at top, which promised a more easy path, from whence we now discovered that this light proceeded. With considerable difficulty we scrambled up, and came to another passage with still more of illumination, and this led to another ascent like the former.

After a succession of these, which our resolution alone permitted us to surmount, we arrived at a wide cavern with an arched dome-like roof. An aperture in the midst let in the light of heaven; but this was overgrown with brambles and underwood, which acted as a veil, obscuring the day, and giving a solemn religious hue to the apartment. It was spacious, and nearly circular, with a raised seat of stone, about the size of a Grecian couch, at one end. The only sign that life had been here, was the perfect snow-white skeleton of a goat, which had probably not perceived the opening as it grazed on the hill above, and had fallen headlong. Ages perhaps had elapsed since this catastrophe; and the ruin it had made above, had been repaired by the growth of vegetation during many hundred summers.

The rest of the furniture of the cavern consisted of piles of leaves, fragments of bark, and a white filmy substance, resembling the inner part of the green hood which shelters the grain of the unripe Indian corn. We were fatigued by our struggles to attain this point, and seated ourselves on the rocky couch, while the sounds of tinkling sheep-bells, and shout of shepherd-boy, reached us from above.

At length my friend, who had taken up some of the leaves strewed about, exclaimed, "This is the Sibyl’s cave; these are Sibylline leaves." On examination, we found that all the leaves, bark, and other substances, were traced with written characters. What appeared to us more astonishing, was that these writings were expressed in various languages: some unknown to my companion, ancient Chaldee, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, old as the Pyramids. Stranger still, some were in modern dialects, English and Italian. We could make out little by the dim light, but they seemed to contain prophecies, detailed relations of events but lately passed; names, now well known, but of modern date; and often exclamations of exultation or woe, of victory or defeat, were traced on their thin scant pages. This was certainly the Sibyl’s Cave; not indeed exactly as Virgil describes it; but the whole of this land had been so convulsed by earthquake and volcano, that the change was not wonderful, though the traces of ruin were effaced by time; and we probably owed the preservation of these leaves, to the accident which had closed the mouth of the cavern, and the swift-growing vegetation which had rendered its sole opening impervious to the storm. We made a hasty selection of such of the leaves, whose writing one at least of us could understand; and then, laden with our treasure, we bade adieu to the dim hypæthric cavern, and after much difficulty succeeded in rejoining our guides.

During our stay at Naples, we often returned to this cave, sometimes alone, skimming the sunlit sea, and each time added to our store. Since that period, whenever the world’s circumstance has not imperiously called me away, or the temper of my mind impeded such study, I have been employed in deciphering these sacred remains. Their meaning, wondrous and eloquent, has often repaid my toil, soothing me in sorrow, and exciting my imagination to daring flights, through the immensity of nature and the mind of man. For awhile my labours were not solitary; but that time is gone; and, with the selected and matchless companion of my toils, their dearest reward is also lost to me—

Di mie tenere frondi altro lavoro

Credea mostrarte;