‘The Last Man’ by Mary Shelley

I read this curious and quite lengthy novel because January 2026 marks the two hundredth anniversary of its original publication. I am glad I did, but have to confess to having had a somewhat equivocal reaction.

I was attracted to it because it is set in the future – now a reasonably common setting for a novelist to choose – but back in 1826 a daring and original thing to do. It is a very early example of what we would now call dystopian fiction, the premise being that around the year 2080 a peculiarly deadly plague engulfs the world and gradually kills pretty well the entire human population. Although this only really drives the story in the second half of the book, its title ensures that this is not really any kind of spoiler. The story ends in 2100 when the narrator decides to write his story, despite being of the belief that he is the last person still left alive and that it will never therefore be read.

For me, until the final chapters when Mary Shelley does a good job of imagining what it would be like to be part of a small group of survivors left inhabiting the world when everyone else is dead, I found the book to be pretty boring in places. It is written in a very florid style, the narration proceeding as if declaimed from the stage by a slightly pompous actor.

The characters are pretty well all decent and heroic types, all upper class and English, all in love with one another and keen to do their best. The one slightly unpleasant character – a deposed Queen now called The Countess of Windsor – ends up being rather a good egg too.

Aside from the style, my main problem with the book is that Mary Shelley seems either uninterested or incapable of speculating in any serious way at all about how society may progress for good or ill in the future. Britain – and Europe too - in the final quarter of the twenty-first century is essentially portrayed as unchanged from the 1820s. We have a republic rather than a monarchy, but it is labelled ‘a protectorate’ a la Olver Cromwell. The Protector rules alongside a Parliament that looks very much like that of 1820. There has been no significant social progress at all, no apparent improvement in literacy rates and absolutely nothing whatever has changed technologically. This aspect really irritated me because by 1825 when Mary Shelley was writing her future-set novel, the steam engine was already radically re-shaping industrial development in all manner of ways, steam boats were operating in coastal waters and on rivers, George Stephenson’s first trains were transporting passengers by rail (albeit quite slowly and over short distances), seed drilling was in operation on farms, explosives and dyes were being used in innovative ways, while gas was being piped and used to provide street lighting. It would have been apparent to any educated person of the time that electricity was poised to have a significant if as yet uncertain impact too.

But in Mary Shelley’s late twenty-first century world people still travel everywhere on foot or horseback. They sail or row across the seas. Military battles to all intents and purposes proceed in the same manner as they did at Waterloo, while peasants wear wooden clogs and harvest corn using scythes.

The argument that seems to be deployed in support of Mary Shelley on this point is that in this respect she deliberately chose to portray a future society in which no meaningful social or technological progress had been made. She was an adherent of romantic counter-enlightenment ideals. She disapproved of the assumptions that lay behind the idea of ‘progress’, deploring much of the industrial innovation she observed in her day. Her novel therefore supposes that there will be a return to a slower more natural, more rural and less industrial time after a short atypical interval. Industry is simply not portrayed in the book at all. There are no middle classes present at all really, just toffs (like her main characters) and simple country folk.

There are scenes set in Greece and Rome too, reminding readers I presume that civilisations do fall as well as rise, and that history proceeds cyclically rather than in a linear direction onwards towards ever greater prosperity and happiness.

OK, I get the point, but I still think that she could have made some effort to speculate knowledgeably about what might plausibly be different two hundred and fifty years hence. At best it seems to have been a missed opportunity. Why bother to set a work of fiction in the distant future if you really just want to write somewhat nostalgically about your own world?

Others managed it, albeit without Mary Shelley’s artistic panache. A year after ‘The Last Man’ was published, Jane Webb (later Loudon) had great commercial success with a novel set a little later at the start of the twenty-second century called ‘The Mummy’. Here we have widespread use of electricity, a great deal of automation, rapid transportation systems, robots (of sorts) and plenty of social development – particularly the emergence of technocratic and bureaucratic forms of government. Britain is a monarchy still, but governed rather inefficiently by committees of officials. It may not be so great as a work of literature, but it is much more on point as a piece of speculative fiction.

The strengths of ‘The Last Man’ lie elsewhere. It is best read as a very personal reflection on grief and loss, Mary Shelley at the time of its composition having relatively recently lost her husband, Percy Byshe Shelley, two of her children, her close friend, Lord Byron, and other members of her circle. The major characters bear more than a passing resemblance to these people and die in similar ways and at similar locations. The narrator, Lionel, is very much channelling her thoughts and feelings, having (as she did) a daughter called Clara and feeling very uncomfortable about being ‘The Last Man’ left after all friends and relatives have perished.

There are also some wonderful passages, like this one, that give eloquent voice to the philosophy of romanticism and are as different as can be imagined from anything like Mary Shelley’s near contemporary, Jane Austen, would ever have written:

How unwise had the wanderers been, who had deserted its shelter, entangled themselves in the web of society, and entered 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, the gracious waving of trees, the beauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry of the skies. Let us leave ‘life’, that we may live.

For me the early chapters were not especially engaging. It takes a long time before the plague finally arrives and that is only then that the novel becomes truly engaging, stimulating and original. The final chapters are much the most enjoyable, but you have to wade through quite a lot of flowery prose and a very slow moving story beforehand. The pay-off though is worth it, not least because the book forces its readers to think seriously about the potential for human extinction and about what would happen to the world if it carried on turning with all its creatures and plants intact, except us:

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?