Lessons for the 21st century from a 200-year-old book by ‘Frankenstein’ author Mary Shelley

A literary scholar who edited a new edition of Mary Shelley's 1826 novel ‘The Last Man’ traces its plot: a court romance near Windsor collapses into political corruption, a war for Greek independence spreads a lethal plague worldwide, and by the final volume governments have failed to cooperate, leaving one survivor, Lionel Verney, wandering a depopulated Earth. The scholar connects the novel's themes of extreme weather, pandemic, and extinction to Shelley's own grief after losing her husband and three children, documented in her private ‘Journal of Sorrow’.

The piece credits the novel as a foundational text for postapocalyptic fiction, citing later works from ‘I Am Legend’ to ‘Station Eleven’ and ‘The Last of Us’. Despite its bleak arc, the novel ends with Verney holding out hope for other survivors and setting sail to find them, a note the scholar frames as tempering catastrophe with the possibility of persistence.

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