First and Last of Mary Shelley's Humankind
Mary Shelley holds the distinction of having written—two hundred years ago—the story of the first of a new kind of human, who is created and animated by science, and the last of the old order of humanity, which is felled by a pandemic. The first novel, her well-known Frankenstein (1818), invented the science-fiction genre. The other, her little known, futuristic The Last Man (1826), invented the end-of-the-world genre. It also was the first climate-change novel! (She adds to her sci-fi credits a short story about a man who is revived after years of being frozen.)
Mary Shelley was the daughter of feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died as the result of the childbirth. They suffered similar trials in their efforts to make a living and be taken seriously as women. Their parallel lives are recorded in the revealing joint biography Romantic Outlaws (2015) by Charlotte Gordon.
At the age of sixteen, the younger Mary ran off with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She married him a few years later after his abandoned wife committed suicide. In Europe, Mary and Percy hung out with Lord Byron and other literati.
Frankenstein originated in 1816, during the Year Without a Summer, when dust from the eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia scattered around the globe, cooling the weather. (Jane Austen’s brother Edward discounted the rents for his tenants because of poor harvests.) One dreary day/evening in Italy, Byron challenged the group to produce a new horror novel. Mary seems to have listened quietly during the conversations, but she was the only one to produce anything from the contest. She wrote much of the novel in Bath during a return to England.
The Last Man came later, as Mary struggled to survive after Percy’s death. Her father-in-law begrudgingly provided minimal financial support for her and his grandchild but only as long as she remained quiet. She published anonymously, which was typical for women then (as with Austen). Shelley published other novels and wrote other pieces for hire but mostly spent her later years promoting Percy Shelley’s poetry.
The Last Man begins in 2073, roughly 250 years in the future from her writing. The novel just tiptoes into future technology. Balloons and steamships, which were newish in the 1820s, are shown as standard components of the transportation system, but no other scientific advances are proposed. Focus is on politics and personal relationships—and the tumultuous mix of the two.
Opening with Great Britain having just ended government by kingship (nearly two centuries after it actually did but well after Shelley’s death), volume I involves the jockeying for political power among different men representing either the traditional powers or “the people.” Shelley shows a subtle grasp of both the good and bad behaviors of men catering to such constituencies.
Later volumes involve political and military operations in Greece and efforts to maintain a semblance of social order as an unknown disease sweeps the world. The earth also begins to suffer sudden, violent shifts in weather that compound the harm done by the pandemic. Shelley shows a practical understanding of how an empire built on shipping would step by step collapse as humanity declines rapidly in numbers. She also shows, without comment, how both wild and domesticated animals begin to prosper as humans begin to wither away.
Of most interest in the last volume is the rise of a charismatic religious leader who claims only he—speaking for God, of course—can protect people from this new plague. His emboldened followers, of course, must attack nonbelievers. Their fanaticism ends only when the cult, too, is ravaged by disease.
Ryland, a man of the people, proves useless under duress. The goodness of Adrian, the recently abdicated king, helps survivors to avoid bloodshed and mayhem as they make their way through an increasingly desperate and chaotic world. Having disdained power before, Adrian rises to the occasion at the end. His royal bloodline, it is implied, is the reason. A strange sentiment, indeed, to come from a political radical such as Shelley.
Breakdown of the world order provides the backdrop for shifting love triangles among the main cast. These are Adrian and his sister Idris, who still wield considerable power; Raymond, a man who bridges the peerage and men of commerce; Evadne, an independent royal woman who pays for her independence; and Lionel Verney, the narrator, and his sister Perdita. The last pair grew up isolated and in poverty after their father was disgraced at court, but they slowly redeem their family.
I don’t usually read much biography into novels, but this book is different. Shelley takes the pain and passion of her own private world and extrapolates it into the maelstrom of the world at large. The gentle, utopian Adrian seems a glorified image of Percy. Raymond, the most complex and enigmatic character, is clearly modeled on Byron—down to his wars in Greece. Except for Evadne, the women are as domesticated as sheep, dutifully and lovingly supporting their men. All but Raymond are exemplars.
A 480-page book that could be 350 pages in length, The Last Man carries the interior life to an extreme. Every character, but especially Perdita—a stand-in for Mary, perhaps—thinks deep rhapsodic or melancholic thoughts. Every joy is exquisite. Every unhappy incident—and there are many in an end-of-the-world novel—is super-processed and wrung out via someone's (usually Perdita’s) excessive lamentations. It is hard to feel the natural movement of life when every single emotional response is treated as a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10.
Contemporary reviews of the novel called it “morbid” and criticized it for its “sickening repetition of horrors.” It is morbid, and it does repeat its horrors. The Last Man is also the loneliest novel, the saddest novel, I have ever read. Characters suffer heartbreak because of the actions of other people, because of accidents, because of traditional disease and then a new disease, because of weather. People are often alone. Sometimes the loneliness helps the pain. Sometimes loneliness makes it worse.
What happens to the world happened to Mary Shelley. She was isolated as a social outcast and during outbreaks of cholera. She lost her worshiped husband to cruel nature—Percy died when a storm arose while he was sailing a lake in a small boat. She lost one child, born prematurely; two others, most likely to childhood disease; and suffered another late miscarriage in which she almost bled to death. She was still recovering when Percy drowned.
That Shelley demonstrates the devastation of a pandemic and of fearsome changes to weather patterns makes the novel a more galvanizing read today than it may have been a generation ago. But it is love—unrequited, requited, betrayed—that creates storms as devastating as anything that Mother Nature could batter humanity with.
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My new book, Jane Austen and the Creation of Modern Fiction: Six Novels in a “Style Entirely New,” which examines Austen’s development as a writer, is available at a discounted price from Jane Austen Books. Formal launch will be at the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) annual general meeting in October.
The Marriage of Miss Jane Austen is also available from Jane Austen Books and Amazon. The trilogy traces love from a charming courtship through the richness and complexity of marriage and concludes with a test of the heroine’s courage and moral convictions. A “boxed set” that combines all three in an e-book format is also ava