The Last Man (1826) is a miserable read…

Hello readers! I recently finished reading The Last Man, a dystopian novel written in 1826 by Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. I first learnt of this book’s existence when I was researching the origins of science fiction, as The Last Man is often listed as the earliest example of the dystopian, apocalyptic genre. The novel was certainly ahead of its time, not only due to its nihilistic themes and its less-than-flattering portrayal of humanity, but because it was set in the future – a literary device that didn’t become mainstream for another 50 years after it was published. Mary Shelley was a genre-defying and genre-defining pioneer, so I decided that The Last Man must be worth reading, if not for the story, then for the insight into the mind of its author.

Spoiler warning: I will be discussing the plot of The Last Man in some depth. So, while it’s unlikely that any of you readers will pick up this book for the plot (or for any reason at all), be warned! There are spoilers ahead.

A brief synopsis…

The Last Man is set in Europe, mostly England, in the late 21st century. It follows the life of a man named Lionel Verney as he witnesses humanity being wiped out by a deadly, inexplicable disease. One by one, the people around him are killed. Society collapses, economies crumble, and the class system implodes, until Lionel becomes the last man on Earth. As such, the title of the book gives away its ending, rather than setting the scene. The story ends once Lionel realises that he is alone.

A more detailed synopsis…

The book starts in 2073. Lionel Verney and his sister Perdita are orphans from an upper-class family, with their father having gambled away all of their money before killing himself. The pair are left to grow up homeless and uncivilised in Cumberland, where Lionel scrapes a living by shepherding, and by poaching game from an estate on the banks of Ullswater.

Far from Cumberland, the political landscape is shifting. After years of pressure from revolutionaries, the king gives up his throne, and Britain becomes a republic. Adrian, the king’s son, is being pressured by royalists to reclaim the throne, and to avoid these demands, he moves to the isolated Ullswater estate. Here, he meets Lionel, and the two soon become good friends. Adrian provides Lionel with an education, social connections and the means to travel, which allows Lionel and his sister to be accepted back into upper-class society.

A few years later, a war hero named Lord Raymond returns to Britain, having been aiding the Greeks in their fight against Turkey. He spends time with Adrian and Lionel, and falls in love with Lionel’s sister, Perdita, whom he marries soon after. Around the same time, Lionel marries Adrian’s sister, Idris. Raymond becomes the Lord Protector of the new republic, and for many years, this close-knit group of friends and in-laws live happily together. However, Perdita soon discovers that Raymond has been seeing another woman without her knowledge – a princess that he knew from his time in Greece, who has come to live in London. Raymond denies any wrongdoing, but the pair decide to separate. Raymond gives up being Lord Protector, and returns to the battlefields of Greece, taking Adrian with him.

Not long after, Adrian returns to Britain, badly wounded, and accompanied by rumours that Raymond has been killed. Perdita suddenly has a change of heart, and begs Lionel to take her and her daughter to Greece to find him. When they arrive, Lionel frees Raymond from the Ottomans, and the pair of them join the battle, helping the Greeks reach Constantinople. However, the city has been left deserted by a deadly plague. Raymond ventures in alone, only to be killed in an explosion. Lionel takes Perdita and her daughter back to Britain, but Perdita is so distraught that she casts herself overboard and drowns.

Over the next few months, stories reach Britain of a plague that is sweeping the world. The British consider themselves to be safe, as they are more knowledgeable, more sanitary, and more civilised than other countries. However, the disease soon arrives and starts tearing through the population, killing old and young, rich and poor alike. The disease has already destroyed America, and the survivors arrive in ships to invade and plunder Europe. It is Adrian who steps up to repel them and restore order to Britain, and the people request that he becomes their leader – effectively restoring the monarchy.

The disease continues to kill off the population, growing particularly intense in the summer months, then lessening off over winter. There are now only a few thousand people left, with Adrian as their leader, and they eventually decide to flee England, to find somewhere with a more benign climate. The day before they depart, Lionel and Idris travel through a snowstorm to rescue someone, only for Idris to die in the cold.

The survivors make it to France, where they discover that the French survivors have split into warring factions, one of which has become a religious cult, with a leader who claims that his followers will be spared from the disease. Lionel helps to debunk these lies, and the factions unite under Adrian’s leadership to head further into Europe. However, by the time they reach Switzerland, all but Lionel, Adrian, Lionel’s son and Clara (his niece) have been killed by the plague. They manage to make it to Italy, where Lionel’s son dies of typhus. The others try to sail from Italy to Greece, only to be caught in a storm, in which both Adrian and Clara drown. Lionel washes ashore in Ravenna, northern Italy, and over the next few months he makes his way to Rome, meeting no other humans.

The novel ends in 2100. Lionel declares himself to be the last man, and resigns himself to his fate of being alone. He plans to wander the world, looking for any other survivors.

Is it worth reading?

Reading The Last Man requires a lot of time and effort. So, unless you are an avid fan of Mary Shelley or historic science fiction, I wouldn’t recommend picking it up. If you are a Shelley fan, or you have the patience to withstand the overdramatic and effusive prose of early nineteenth century fiction, you might find this novel interesting – but even then, I doubt that you would find it engaging. The plot often becomes aimless and rambling, descending into a list of harrowing events over which the protagonists have no influence. I found it very hard to feel for any of the characters, and I was only engaged on an emotional level thanks to my pre-existing knowledge of Mary Shelley, which allowed me to read the entire novel as a semi-autobiographical window into her fascinating life.

Is it as good as Frankenstein?

Frankenstein is Mary Shelley’s most famous work – and for good reason. I’ve discussed Frankenstein on this blog before, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for some exciting classic literature. It was immediately successful when it released in 1818, and remains one of the best-known stories of all time. Mary Shelley’s second novel was an entirely different genre. Valperga (1823) was a work of historical fiction, and although it received generally positive reviews, it did not sell particularly well – possibly because it was regarded as a love story. The Last Man (1826) was her third novel, and a return to the horror genre, but it fared even worse than Valperga, attracting scathing critical reviews and meagre sales. Some readers saw the perceived drop in quality as proof that Mary Shelley had never been the true author Frankenstein, and that it had really been written by her husband, Percy Shelley.

But were any of these claims warranted? Is The Last Man really so much worse?

Unfortunately, I think it probably is. Frankenstein and The Last Man are both horror novels, but they are horrifying in different ways – and The Last Man feels much less compelling. Where Frankenstein is built on intrigue and suspense, and underpinned by a strong philosophical premise, The Last Man is built on pain and depression, and underpinned by nihilism. Its horrors are so unrelenting that the reader is left suffering disaster fatigue, so that after a while, the shocks lose their impact. This is compounded by the length of the novel, which clocks in at 375 pages compared to Frankenstein’s breezy 280.

As much as I hate to admit it, many of my criticisms of The Last Man align with those made at the time: the story is too depressing. Put simply, it is not an enjoyable read. However, I wouldn’t go as far as the contemporary critic who described Mary Shelley’s imagination as “diseased”, because The Last Man is clearly semi-autobiographical – meaning that its horrors mirror the anguish and grief that Mary Shelley experienced in her own life. So, although the novel is not entertaining in the traditional sense, and its story and characters are far from compelling, it provides a window into Mary Shelley’s emotional state and political beliefs – something that Frankenstein never provided. It is worth remembering that Frankenstein was written while Mary Shelley was a teenager, whereas The Last Man was written once she was a woman, a mother, and a widow.

Is it actually science fiction?

We have discussed the definition of science fiction previously on this blog, and after some consideration, I think that The Last Man should be included this genre. Writing a novel in the 1820s, and setting it in 2073, was a bold move. However, Mary Shelley’s vision of the future may appear somewhat stunted to a modern reader. Wars are still fought with swords, cannons and guns, with a huge reliance on cavalry, and people communicate by writing letters, meaning that it takes months for news to reach Europe from Asia. Women are excluded from politics and show no inclination to get involved, and the spread of the disease, so central to the plot, remains mysterious and misunderstood.

However, there are occasional flashes of science fiction inspiration. At one point, Mary Shelley describes a “sailing balloon” which sounds a lot like an airship or dirigible. Lionel takes one from Windsor to Perth, and it is described as flying half a mile high, steered or powered by wings. The journey takes nearly two days, suggesting that the contraption travelled at less than ten miles per hour, but this is certainly science fiction from an 1826 perspective.

Technically, the novel isn’t set in the future, but in 1826 – the year it was published. Like many nineteenth century novels, The Last Man was written as a framed narrative in the past tense, in the manner of someone recounting their story. In fact, it is a framed narrative within a framed narrative: in the introduction, Mary Shelley writes in the first person (“I visited Naples in the year 1818”) and recounts a fictional discovery of writings from the ancient prophet, Sibyl. The novel is presented as a translation of these writings, which detail the experiences of the last man to walk the Earth. As such, the book is presented as a fake historical document that predicts the future. I’m not sure that I’ve ever read another book with such a premise – and it’s a very interesting way to set up a science fiction story.

The originality of The Last Man

I have spent much of this post effusing about Mary Shelley’s originality and creativity, but I should acknowledge that “the last man” was not an original concept. In the early nineteenth century, people were beginning to realise that species could go extinct. Dinosaur fossils were being excavated all over the world, upending Christian teachings and raising the possibility that dominant species could be wiped out in violent catastrophes. Suddenly, humanity felt a little less secure.

In 1816, Lord Byron published his poem Darkness, describing the end of the world and the death of humanity. Then, in 1823, Thomas Campbell published a poem called The Last Man, in which humanity destroys itself through wars and famine, leaving only one man left alive. However, where Byron’s poem was bleak and atheistic, Campbell’s poem implies that humanity’s spirits will all return to God and be reborn. Personally, I don’t rate Campbell’s poem: at one point he refers to planet Earth as a “sepulchral clod” in order to find a rhyme with “God”. Compare this to Byron’s description of Earth as a “lump of death”: proof, if ever there was, that long words don’t equate to good poetry. Still, Campbell’s mediocre offering inspired two famous paintings, including one by J. M. W. Turner, and “the last man” became an established trope.

Mary Shelley’s The Last Man was published in the wake of these two very influential works, and this might be one reason that her story generated such little interest. However, the tone of Mary Shelley’s work was far closer to Byron’s poem than it was to Campbell’s, and it offered a very different perspective. Byron described a catastrophe in which the whole planet dies, including trees, animals, rivers and oceans (although he fails to mention any women, which I suppose is hardly surprising). Mary Shelley, by contrast, envisages a world where only humans suffer from the virus, allowing nature to thrive as humanity fades. In her world, humans are expendable. We are not integral to the planet, and we have no power. This, in my view, is the key theme that makes The Last Man so ahead of its time – and of course, this was wholly unappreciated in 1826.

Semi-autobiographical

We’ve discussed Mary Shelley on the blog before, but I’ll provide a quick recap of the main points needed to understand this novel. As a teenager, Mary fell in love with Percy Shelley, who was already married, and the pair eloped to France, then Switzerland. Percy’s wife drowned herself, and Percy and Mary married just 20 days later. In 1818 they had to flee the country, as Percy had amassed catastrophic debts that he couldn’t hope to pay back. The lack of a permanent home put Mary under a lot of stress – only made worse by being disowned by Percy’s parents, and by Percy having numerous (alleged) affairs with other women (including Mary’s sister).

Mary was pregnant five times, but three of her children died young, and only one survived to adulthood. In 1822, while the couple were living in Italy, she suffered a miscarriage that nearly killed her – and a few weeks after this, Percy was killed in a boating accident. He was only twenty-nine, and Mary was only twenty-five. Lord Byron was a close friend of the Shelleys, but he died in 1824, fighting for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. When The Last Man was published in 1826, nearly everyone in Mary’s social circle had passed away.

It is very easy to draw parallels between the book and Mary’s life. Adrian, the son of the last king of England, who eventually becomes a leader despite his republican principles, and who dies when his boat sinks, is clearly Percy Shelley. Lord Raymond, who is passionate and ambitious and goes to fight wars in Greece and Turkey, is clearly Lord Byron. The main character, Lionel, the son of an impoverished nobleman, is probably based on Mary Shelley herself. I think that knowing these connections is vital for reading and understanding this book – because when Lionel mourns the death of his friends and family (and there is a lot of mourning), we’re really reading Mary Shelley’s own feelings towards the death of her husband, children, and friends.

Politics and beliefs

Another reason for reading this book is to gain an insight into Mary Shelley’s views on politics and religion – and to realise that she was quietly revolutionary. It is easy to trace these views to her upbringing, as she was the daughter of two writers and political campaigners (William Godwin, an early anarchist, and Mary Wollstonecraft, an early women’s rights advocate), and she spent her formative years surrounded by romantic poets with lofty ideals regarding love and personal freedom (Percy Shelley was an atheist, and Byron was an all-round agent of chaos). However, if you spend long enough reading Mary Shelley’s work, you’ll realise that she has a voice of her own – she didn’t just parrot the views of her parents and husband. For example, where romantic poets such as Byron and Shelley championed individualism, believing that personal emotional responses to events were the key to understanding the world, Mary Shelley presented the ultimate individual as a tragic figure: the last man in the world, who could appreciate the forces of nature, but was doomed to loneliness, with his life made meaningless without human connection.

Challenging religion

Mary Shelley also challenges Christian beliefs. Having a virus that wipes out humanity wasn’t just a novel idea – it was totally at odds with biblical teachings. Most people believed that the world would end with judgement day, when the virtuous would be saved from the catastrophe and sent to heaven. However, Mary Shelley’s virus strikes randomly. It doesn’t matter whether someone has lived a virtuous life: everyone is equally likely to die. Sinners and saints all suffer the same, and every death is agonising.

It is no surprise that this plot device caused so much upset at the time. Religious or not, most of us like to think that our actions matter, and that the world would be a better place if we were all kind to one another. However, Mary Shelley presents us with the ugly truth: that death comes for us all, and that its timing and guise are in no way dependent on our virtuosity.

Challenging class structure

Another of Mary Shelley’s predictions is that once the disease has killed enough people, society will collapse. She describes a dystopian world in which titles and social classes mean nothing. However, she doesn’t explore this revolutionary idea in much depth. She dares to suggest that poor people could be just as kind and intelligent as rich people, but doesn’t provide any evidence for this in the narrative. The protagonists are all upper class, but when society collapses, we don’t read about them doing manual labour out of necessity. The peasants continue to treat them with reverence, and they are still afforded luxuries that they haven’t earned, even when supplies are running low. Clearly, the concept of shovelling dirt or cooking meals was a little outside Mary Shelley’s wheelhouse.

For me, the biggest flaw in The Last Man’s revolutionary ideals is that the upper-class protagonists are always presented as inherently good people. Even though Mary Shelley states that social hierarchies have broken down, the upper class are still the ones leading the populace, making the important decisions. Eventually, Adrian becomes leader of the country, essentially reinstating the monarchy – but there is never any suggestion that working-class people might have the aptitude for leadership. The seed of revolutionary thinking is there, but it never quite takes root.

Challenging cultural superiority

Finally, the novel deals with the theme of cultural superiority. Mary Shelley describes the disease beginning outside Europe, then spreading across Asia and the Americas. The white Europeans convince themselves that they will be immune to it, because they see themselves as inherently purer and cleaner, but the disease soon arrives and starts killing them all anyway. In this sense, Mary Shelley challenges the idea of cultural or racial superiority. Just as the disease is blind to religion or virtuosity, it is also blind to race. So, yet again, Mary Shelley presents death as the great leveller, with societal constructs being utterly meaningless.

Some final gripes…

My biggest issue with this book is that it isn’t an engaging read. Part of this is due to nineteenth century narrative tropes; for example, character traits are often dictated to the reader, rather than allowing us to draw our own conclusions from actions, words, or facial expressions. Mary Shelley’s writing is generally accessible by nineteenth century standards, but it still enforces a distance between the protagonist and the reader, rather than inviting the reader to view the world from the protagonist’s perspective.

Another reason that the novel fails to be compelling is that the reader always knows where the story is going: we know that Lionel is destined to become the last man, and that the people around him are all doomed to die. In this regard, there is no suspense, and rooting for characters becomes difficult. Mary Shelley doesn’t make it any easier, either, because none of the deaths are quick or merciful. No reader wants to risk forming an attachment to a character who then dies in excruciating circumstances.

Also, there is a general lack of intrigue. Most modern apocalypse stories use chase sequences or fights to keep the reader engaged, but The Last Man doesn’t involve much action at all – even when the characters go to war. And when it comes to the virus, Mary Shelley creates an enemy from which there is no escape. Nobody knows how the disease spreads, so it cannot be stopped. Survival depends solely on luck – so the characters lose most of their agency. It doesn’t matter how clever they are, or how strong they are, or the connections they make along the way. There are no underdogs. There is no comeuppance. Again, the reader is deterred from forming any attachment to the characters.

Finally, I was a little disappointed that all the main characters are men. The story is told through men’s eyes, and they make every decision that drives the narrative. The women have personalities, but they are generally presented as being quiet and submissive, agreeing with their husbands. It’s a bit sad that Mary Shelley saw the future this way – especially when you consider who her mother was. Clearly, it was too much of a leap to imagine a world where women could engage in politics.

In summary…

The Last Man was a fascinating read, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have an academic interest in the subject. Next time, I’ll read and review something a little more accessible (I’m currently making my way through Frank Herbert’s Dune).

Happy reading, and have a lovely week!