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The Last Man
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The Last Man - Background
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So, Tuesday then? :-D
There is also a free Kindle version on Amazon, at least on the US site.
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It was a volcanic eruption that caused "the year without a summer" and the cool, rainy weather that kept Mary, Percy, Lord Byron & others indoors, where Byron challenged everyone to write a scary story.
Yes, Robin, it was the Indonesian Tambora eruption, the same that with its ashes caused the beautiful sunsets painted by Turner. :-)
General Overview
The Last Man is an apocalyptic, dystopian science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, which was first published in 1826. The book describes a future Earth at the time of the late 21st Century, ravaged by an unknown pandemic that quickly sweeps across the world. It also includes a discussion of English culture as a republic, with Mary Shelley sitting in meetings of the House of Commons to gain an insight into the governmental political system of the romantic era. Within the novel, she dedicates it highly to her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley who drowned in a shipwreck four years before the book's publication. It is also dedicated to her dear friend Lord Byron who adored the Greek isles which were eventually his place of death.
The Last Man was severely suppressed at the time. It was not until the 1960s that the novel resurfaced for the public as a work of fiction, not prophesy. The Last Man is the first piece of dystopian fiction published, yet it is debated among literary critics whether The Last Man can be classed as a dystopian novel as it excludes political themes of repression and totalitarianism of the novels of later periods such as Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World.
Major Themes
Failure of romantic political ideals
The Last Man not only laments the loss of Shelley's friends, but also questions the Romantic political ideals for which they stood. In a sense, the plague is metaphorical, since the revolutionary idyll of the élite group is corroded from within by flaws of human nature. As literary scholar Kari Lokke writes, "in its refusal to place humanity at the center of the universe, it's questioning of our privileged position in relation to nature, then, The Last Man constitutes a profound and prophetic challenge to Western humanism." Specifically, Mary Shelley, in making references to the failure of the French Revolution and the Godwinian, Wollstonecraftian, and Burkean responses to it, "attacks Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of progress through collective efforts".
Isolation
Hugh Luke argues, "By ending her story with the picture of the Earth's solitary inhabitant, she has brought nearly the whole weight of the novel to bear upon the idea that the condition of the individual being is essentially isolated and therefore ultimately tragic". Shelley shares this theme of tragic isolation with the poetry of Lord Byron and William Wordsworth.
Science and medicine
Just as her earlier and better-known novel Frankenstein (1818) engaged with scientific questions of electromagnetism, chemistry, and materialism, The Last Man finds Shelley again attempting to understand the scope of scientific inquiry. Unlike the earlier novel's warnings about Faustian over-reaching, this novel's devastating apocalypse strongly suggests that medicine had become too timid and ultimately come too late. The ineffectual astronomer Merrival, for example, stands in stark contrast to the frighteningly productive Victor Frankenstein. Shelley's construction of Lionel Verney's immunity remains a subject of significant critical debate, but the novel certainly demonstrates a deep understanding of the history of medicine, specifically the development of the smallpox vaccine and the various nineteenth-century theories about the nature of contagion.
Biographical Context
Many of the central characters are wholly or partially based upon Shelley's acquaintances. Shelley had been forbidden by her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, from publishing a biography of her husband, so she memorialized him, amongst others, in The Last Man. The utopian Adrian, Earl of Windsor, who leads his followers in search of a natural paradise and dies when his boat sinks in a storm, is a fictional portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley, although other minor characters such as Merrival bear traces of Percy as well. Lord Raymond, who leaves England to fight for the Greeks and dies in Constantinople, is based on Lord Byron. The novel expresses Mary Shelley's pain at the loss of her community of the "Elect", as she called them, and Lionel Verney has been seen as an outlet for her feelings of loss and boredom following their deaths and the deaths of her children.
Social Background
Beginning in about 1805, stories and poems came as a response to great cultural changes and new, unsettling discoveries that challenged how people thought about the place of the human race in the world. A new understanding of species extinction (the first recognized dinosaur was discovered around 1811) made people fear humans could also be extinguished from the Earth.
Two catastrophically depopulating events – the horrifying bloodshed of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815), and the rapid global cooling caused by the massive eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 – made human extinction seem a horrifyingly imminent possibility. Meditations on ruined empires abounded. Many writers began to imagine (or prophesy) the ruination of their own nations.
Publication History and Reception
Two editions of The Last Man were published by Henry Colburn in London on 23 January 1826, and one edition in Paris in 1826 by Galignani. A pirated edition was printed in America in 1833. The Last Man received the worst reviews of all of Mary Shelley's novels: most reviewers derided the very theme of lastness, which had become a common one in the previous two decades. Individual reviewers labeled the book "sickening," criticized its "stupid cruelties," and called the author's imagination "diseased." The reaction startled Mary Shelley, who promised her publisher a more popular book next time. Nonetheless, she later spoke of The Last Man as one of her favorite works.
The novel was not reprinted until 1965. In the 20th century, it received new critical attention, perhaps because the notion of lastness had become more relevant.
Adaptations
In 2008, director James Arnett adapted the book into a film of the same name.
Sources
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