I’m not sure how to react to this novel. Part of me balks at the saccharine sentimentality that drips from some of the passages. At the same time, part of me stands in utter awe of Mary Shelley. She was, perhaps, the first person to offer up a full articulation of the idea that human beings are just another species of animal and, for that reason alone, inevitably bound for extinction. In that regard, she is absolutely without sentimentality. I almost get the feeling her language is a squeamish apology for a world view (critical of modernity, skeptical of the optimism it proffered) that turned its back on the prevailing mode of thinking.
The themes she takes up here remind me of the themes she first explored in Frankenstein. There is, for example, the prevailing view of human mastery. Her narrator, Lionel Verney, a citizen of late 21st century England, scoots around the countryside by balloon. It’s worth remembering that the first hot air balloon flight had taken place in 1783, only 40 years before the novel’s writing, and was still a novelty. Yet the new mode of transport provided an early illustration of that most modern of sentiments, namely that humans would inevitably discover workarounds to all nature-imposed limitations. His flight causes him to reflect:
Such was the power of man over the elements; a power long sought, and lately won; yet foretold in by-gone time by the prince of poets, whose verses I quoted much to the astonishment of my pilot, when I told him how many hundred years ago they had been written:—
Oh! human wit, thou can’st invent much ill,
Thou searchest strange arts: who would think by skill,
An heavy man like a light bird should stray,
And through the empty heavens find a way?
It’s not clear Shelley shares her narrator’s optimism and this offers an early example in English novel writing of an author drawing a clear distinction between the authorial and the narrative voices. (Remember that Jane Austen had published her four novels only in the previous decade. Like hot air balloons, the playful treatment of point of view and narrative voice was a relatively new invention.)
Again, in keeping with Frankenstein, Shelley addresses the mind/body problem. Is the self, the soul, that essence which defines me as me, a thing which exists apart from the body? Or is embodiment somehow integral to the experience of being? Verney offers us an early modern perspective in his assessment of the Countess of Windsor:
Her passions had subdued her appetites, even her natural wants; she slept little, and hardly ate at all; her body was evidently considered by her as a mere machine, whose health was necessary for the accomplishment of her schemes, but whose senses formed no part of her enjoyment.
However, he stands in an antagonistic relationship to the Countess, so it’s unclear if even he, as narrator, accepts a view which Shelley, as author, calls into question. Where Dr. Frankenstein approaches the question as a matter of academic interest, here the question assumes greater urgency as a pathogen overtakes the human population and threatens annihilation. At the end, as the novel’s title portends, Verney finds himself alone in the world, the last man. What will come of all human achievement, and all human feeling, when the last man has expired? We come to this question by drawing an analogy from the more obvious question: who will read his narrative when he is gone? Why does he even bother if there is no one left behind to read it?
These kinds of pronouncements abound. Verney’s friend, Adrian, proclaims: “For the will of man is omnipotent, blunting the arrows of death, soothing the bed of disease, and wiping away the tears of agony.” Later, still, Verney observes: “The physical state of man would soon not yield to the beatitude of angels; disease was to be banished; labour lightened of its heaviest burden. Nor did this seem extravagant. The arts of life, and the discoveries of science had augmented in a ratio which left all calculation behind; food sprung up, so to say, spontaneously—machines existed to supply with facility every want of the population.”
We don’t need to worry ourselves about our “shattered prison-house of flesh” because our godlike ingenuity will master its animal frailties.
Yet alongside these weighty themes is the tiresome cadence of the English Romantic:
How lovely is devotion! Here was a youth, royally sprung, bred in luxury, by nature averse to the usual struggles of a public life, and now, in time of danger, at a period when to live was the utmost scope of the ambitious, he, the beloved and heroic Adrian, made, in sweet simplicity, an offer to sacrifice himself for the public good.
Again and again, we have such phrases! Generosity of feeling coupled with exclamation marks. Mary Shelley would have enjoyed social media, I’m sure. She was a creature ahead of her time, but forced to give expression to it in the idiom of her day, a spirit imprisoned in the flesh of early 19th century English verbiage.
Nearly half way through the novel, we have the first hint that all these fine sentiments, the optimism, the faith in an emergent technology, English imperial dominance, all of it might come crashing down around our heads:
One word, in truth, had alarmed her more than battles or sieges, during which she trusted Raymond’s high command would exempt him from danger. That word, as yet it was not more to her, was PLAGUE. This enemy to the human race had begun early in June to raise its serpent-head on the shores of the Nile; parts of Asia, not usually subject to this evil, were infected.
Writing before the rise of germ theory, Shelley adheres to the prevailing theory of disease: miasma. Illness passes from person to person through bad air. So, for example:
As it was an epidemic, its chief force was derived from pernicious qualities in the air, and it would probably do little harm where this was naturally salubrious.
Curiously, because Covid-19 is transmitted principally by aerosols, the idea of miasma is not that far off from our current experience. We are safest when our social encounters are outdoors or happen in well-ventilated enclosures. We want our air to be naturally salubrious.
The plague spreads, invariably killing those it infects, until the sole survivor is our narrator. We can read this as a cautionary tale of modern hubris: our reliance on our own mastery guarantees our doom. While some readers might point out that the scenario Shelley imagines could never happen because a pathogen that virulent would “burn itself out” long before it infected the entire population. But that doesn’t blunt the message which we can easily transfer to the technological solutionism that abounds in conversations about climate emergency. The arrogance of today’s mostly young, mostly male, engineers is breathtaking.
Quite apart from hubris, Shelley’s tale also speaks to loneliness, an issue which has become pressing as we observe isolation protocols and resort to new communication technologies which underscore our loneliness even as they seek to bridge the distance between us. In Shelley’s mental world, loneliness is related to her concern with the mind/body problem. Does my identity survive apart from my body? Are there perhaps opportunities for a closer communion of my being with yours? Or does my apparent entrapment in my body mean that, in some fundamental way, I am alone? I don’t doubt that these are questions that plagued Shelley who had lost the love of her life too soon. Percy Shelley drowned while sailing his boat off the coast of Viareggio. Mary was only 25 at the time. Verney loses his last two companions to a similar fate and becomes The Last Man. When Mary Shelley lost Percy, it must have seemed to her that she stood all alone in the world.
The Last Man, by Mary Shelley, was published in 1826 and is in the public domain. It can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg.