The Last Man

The Last Man Review

Mary Shelley published The Last Man in 1826, eight years after Frankenstein, and the intervening years had taken nearly everything from her. Percy Bysshe Shelley had drowned in 1822. Lord Byron had died in Greece in 1824. Her circle, which had seemed to contain the brightest minds of her generation, was gone. The Last Man is the novel she wrote from inside that catastrophe — and she projected her grief onto the entire species.

The novel is set in a future twenty-first century in which England has abandoned the monarchy for a republic, and the world appears to be moving toward an era of peace and prosperity. Lionel Verney, narrator and eventual last man, rises from poverty through the influence of the noble Adrian — a transparent portrait of Percy Shelley — and finds himself part of an idealistic circle that includes the Byronic Lord Raymond. The political and personal establishment of the first volume is slow but careful, building exactly the world whose destruction will constitute the novel’s grief.

The plague arrives in the novel’s second volume, spreading westward from Turkey in waves that no government, no science, and no human will can slow or stop. Shelley’s account of how societies respond to pandemic — the initial denial, the desperate measures, the breakdown of social order, the survivor’s guilt, the collapse of everything that seemed permanent — reads as uncannily contemporary. She understood, two centuries before COVID, what a pathogen does not merely to bodies but to civilisations.

The final volume, in which Lionel Verney walks alone through the empty cities of Europe, is one of the most desolate passages in English literature. Shelley renders the silence of an unpeopled world — Rome without Romans, Paris without the Parisians — with a lyrical precision that makes the absence of humanity almost physically felt. The Last Man was largely ignored in its own time but has grown in critical estimation steadily: it is now recognised as a foundational text of apocalyptic fiction and one of Shelley’s two or three most important works.

Our rating: 4.1/5

Personal Grief and Universal Catastrophe

Mary Shelley published The Last Man in 1826, two years after Lord Byron died in Greece and four years after Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia. The two men who had been the defining intellectual presences of her young life were gone; her circle had dissolved. The Last Man is the novel she wrote from inside that catastrophe, and she gave her grief its most extreme possible projection: not just her circle but all of humanity, wiped out by a plague that no will or intelligence could prevent.

The autobiographical dimension of the novel is visible in its thinly disguised characters: Adrian, the noble idealist who dies in a shipwreck, is a portrait of Percy Shelley; Lord Raymond, the Byronic political adventurer who dies in battle, is Byron. Shelley was not trying to conceal these portraits; she was using fiction to process losses she could not otherwise contain.

A Foundational Apocalyptic Text

The Last Man is one of the first pandemic novels in English literature and one of the first major works of apocalyptic fiction. The genre of civilization-ending catastrophe — which would produce, across the subsequent two centuries, everything from H.G. Wells to Cormac McCarthy to Emily St. John Mandel — begins here, with a twenty-first century setting, a plague spreading inexorably from east to west, and a narrator who survives to record the end of everything he knew.

The prescience of Shelley’s pandemic narrative has become a critical commonplace, particularly since 2020. But the prescience extends beyond the mere fact of a global plague: her account of how societies respond — the initial denial, the nationalistic quarantines, the collapse of economic and legal order, the competing claims of duty and survival, the survivor guilt — anticipates the dynamics of modern pandemic response with an accuracy that reflects not prediction but clear-eyed observation of human behavior.

The Empty Cities

The novel’s final movement, in which Lionel Verney walks alone through the empty cities of Europe, is among the most powerful sequences in English literature. Shelley’s rendering of Rome without Romans, of Paris emptied of its inhabitants, achieves a silence that is almost physically present on the page. She understood that the horror of universal death is not the dying itself but the absence that follows — the world continuing to exist, its physical structures intact, with nothing left to inhabit them. The image anticipates post-apocalyptic photography and film by nearly two centuries, and it has lost none of its force.

The Plague at the End of History

The Last Man (1826) is among the earliest works of apocalyptic fiction. Set at the close of the twenty-first century, it follows Lionel Verney as a pandemic relentlessly depopulates the Earth until he is left, as the title promises, alone. The central figures are transparently modelled on Byron and Percy Shelley, so that the novel doubles as an elegy for the Romantic circle Mary Shelley had outlived; long dismissed, it is now read as one of her most ambitious achievements.

Narrated from a frame in which Shelley claims to have found the prophecy among the scattered leaves of the Cumaean Sibyl, the novel projects her grief at outliving Percy Shelley, Byron and her own children onto a whole species, so that the extinction of humanity becomes a vast elegy for the lost Romantic circle she could not stop mourning.