The Last Man

"It’s pretty dark. You know, one of the things that I actually find paradoxically comforting about The Last Man is that it’s so much worse than even the worst predictions about coronavirus. But while The Last Man is a work of fiction, it does capture some central ideas about epidemics that were ubiquitous in the early nineteenth century. Something that Shelley’s central band of characters temporarily try to console themselves with, for example, is a sense that the epidemic wouldn’t spread from tropical countries, or from the Middle East, to Western Europe. Clearly she’s influenced by the logic of the quarantine system! The characters tell themselves the plague is native to the tropics and therefore cannot exist in cold countries. In other ways, Shelley’s novel, apocalyptic though it is, captures quite well some of the reactions we’re hearing now to coronavirus. You know, one politician featured in The Last Man keeps trying to ignore it, insisting on the social program he had come up with beforehand, finding it hard to reconcile himself to the changed atmosphere of the pandemic. There’s a messianic figure who convinces his followers that they are immune to the disease, and others who claim that it’s all a hoax. The final point I want to make about The Last Man that makes it—even as fiction—a fascinating lens into what it was like to contemplate life during an epidemic in the early 19th century is that Shelley spent a lot of time in Italy during a period that really was one of the darkest times for disease in the Mediterranean. Bubonic plague epidemics, starting in the decade before she wrote—the 1810s—started to ripple across the Mediterranean. Istanbul had one of the worst plague epidemics in its history in 1813. A plague spread from the Middle East, probably from Egypt, to Malta (then a British colony) in 1813, as well, and another British colony, Corfu, in the Ionian Islands, had a plague epidemic in 1816. Plague reached the coast of southern Italy in 1815, then Mallorca in 1820. And there were terrible yellow fever epidemics in the early 1820s in northern Spain. Yes. So, a few years after Shelley left Italy, but presumably within easy memory of what it was like to be in close proximity to locations stricken by serious diseases. I think she absolutely would have been aware of the palpable fear that epidemics elicited in Southern Europe. Dealing with that kind of fear, and warning about it via this apocalyptic vision she has in this book, The Last Man, might be her own reaction to living through a period where epidemics were constantly in the news. It’s hard to say. I’m not sure what I think about that. When Shelley wrote this book, it was after the death of her husband, after the death of two of her children. It’s a melancholy story, and I think it comes out of her own sadness. She has a small band of characters, many of whom are overtly modelled on friends and even family. Percy Shelley has a clear analogue in the book. Ruefully noting the breakup of that small band of people surely was part of what she was doing here. I’m not sure that in 1826 she was necessarily freaked about epidemic disease, but I do think the frailty of humans in the face of events that that they can’t anticipate or plan for—and against which their ideas and philosophies and ideologies seem kind of stale—are themes in The Last Man that come out of her experiences of the last decade of her own life."