period as the era during which the first known contemplations of a fictional secular apocalypse emerged in the West. Shelley’s work made no mention of God or any deity as causing the end of the world, but in fact she was playing with a theme that other writers had addressed earlier in the nineteenth century. During the Romantic period, contemplations on possible ends of the world unrelated to theology tended to be more philosophical in their reflections, rather than scientific, and may properly be termed secular. By the 1870s fictional apocalypses in the West would be connected to current scientific and technological trends.
A look at Romantic-era last man narratives is useful for distinguishing between a secular apocalyptic and a scientific apocalyptic. After Darwin gave Westerners a feasible naturalistic creation story, fiction and nonfiction writers grounded their descriptions of how the world might end without God in science. Earlier writers exploring a secular apocalypse made no attempt to explain how the world had ended without God, let alone how one man could be left after an apocalypse. Rather such works used the apocalypse as metaphor to explore themes of loneliness, disillusionment, and existential despair.
The secular apocalyptic last man stories found their inspiration in an earlier entry in the nineteenth-century last man genre. This work, Le Dernier Homme by the French writer Cousin de Grainville, deviated from the biblical apocalyptic associated with the books of Daniel and Revelation but emphasized a continuing belief in God, sometimes in an explicitly Christian God. It is the earliest known last man work in the West. Published posthumously in France in 1805, a pirated translation appeared in England the following year with no authorial credit.46 De Grainville posits a last man and woman who parallel the first man and woman, Adam and Eve. He situated his account firmly within a Christian understanding of the End.47 De Grainville himself had been a Catholic priest forced to marry during the French Revolution.48 His suicide does not detract from the novel’s anti-atheistic and hopeful message involving the translation of humanity into heaven.
There were only two last man works of literature that could properly be termed atheistic, involving a true rejection of divine action ending the world or redeeming humanity at the end of time. Vijay Mishra, a literature professor, has compared traditional “millenarian” works with the Gothic apocalyptic, noting that “a millenarian end affirms history and our place in a larger design, [while] Gothic apocalypse narratives portray a world exhausted and otiose.”49 While last man works written from a purely atheistic perspective were rare, they are notable for illustrating how Christian apocalypticism inspired reflections on a secular apocalypse and how these secular visions of the world differed from later scientific conceptions of the End.
Of the two atheistic works, the most explicit rejection of a supernatural ending for the world was found in Lord Byron’s poem “Darkness.” Byron, a legend in British literary circles even during his own time, wrote the poem while in a moody funk after the end of his marriage, but the poem damaged his image, earning him epithets such as the “head of the Satanic school.” Byron’s poem lacked an explanation for the apocalypse and did not feature a millennium following the eschaton. As contemporaries of Byron noted, “Darkness” included apocalyptic elements that resonated with prophetic passages from Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Revelation.50 Byron wrote his poem during the summer of 1816, a year that many called “the year without a summer,” because of its unusually cold temperatures and dark skies. Not known to Westerners then, the eruption of a volcano in Tambora, Indonesia, the prior year had caused the seemingly apocalyptic climatic conditions. The idea for Byron’s poem came to him on a particularly dark day that summer when candles had to be lit to provide light enough for writing and reading even at noon.51 The portrait of the last days that Byron painted was harsh and barren:
The world was void,
The populous and the powerful—was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths.52
What is important about Byron’s use of biblical imagery is “what Byron did not take from the Bible,” as Morton Paley, a scholar of Romantic literature, notes.53 Byron’s poem raises the hopes of a millennium by playing with biblical imagery to describe the actual End. For instance, men and women in Byron’s poem had “but one thought—and that was death” as total darkness fell upon the Earth; similarly, Revelation reports that “and in those days shall men seek death” but according to biblical account, men “shall not find it.”54 Byron’s vision disturbed his contemporaries, and commentators suggested that he had broached a topic that was unthinkable. Byron’s idea of humanity living and dying in an empty and meaningless way remained unimaginable to the Westerners who later articulated a scientific apocalypse.
Mary Shelley was a close friend of Byron’s; her novel The Last Man tells of a tight-knit group of couples that slowly experience the end of the world due to an inexplicable plague. By the end, only the narrator, Lionel Verney, remains, as the last man. Verney occupies his isolation by writing a personal history of his life and of the last days of humanity. He remarks on the futility of writing: “I … will write a book, I cried—for whom to read?—to whom dedicated? And then with silly flourish (what so capricious and childish as despair?) I wrote, ‘DEDICATION / TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD. / SHADOWS, ARISE, AND READ YOUR FALL! / BEHOLD THE HISTORY OF THE / LAST MAN.’”55
While Verney questions the very possibility that his account will be read, Shelley as author formally addressed the issue by transforming the account into a prophecy. The “author’s introduction” tells readers that the author discovered Verney’s narrative, which takes place in the year 2100, on a trip to Naples in 1818 upon a visit to “Sibyl’s Cave,” with “Sibyl” a reference to a legendary female prophet in ancient Rome.56 While Shelley redresses the problem formally, she does not escape the dilemma that is embedded in the last man genre; in their implicit assumption of a readership, fictional narratives of a last man suggest a resistance to an end of the world without design. Documenting the final days of human life on Earth is an attempt to make sense of the event and, as Verney attempts to do, leave an epitaph for humanity.
Shelley wrote her novel after the deaths of her husband, Percy Shelley; their friend Byron; and two of her children. The Last Man is an expression of her despair and loneliness in the aftermath of these losses. It also expresses the idea that humanity itself is alone, without any deity to provide comfort or meaning. Shelley’s atheism was empty and not humanistic, unlike later atheistic formulations. The last man’s account of the end of days as well as his desperate search for other survivors illustrates this bleak worldview that Shelley shared with Byron. Scientific apocalypticists, writing after Darwin, in many ways mirrored the attempts of Verney to understand his predicament, but Shelley’s novel itself was a performance for her contemporaries rather than a prophecy in itself, unlike how later end-of-the-world novels would position themselves.
These two atheistic last man works, while in the minority, laid a foundation for later scientific apocalyptic fiction, at least in terms of themes. One survivor (or a small group of survivors) of an apocalypse roaming the world in search of others is a theme that appears again in twentieth-century end-of-the-world literature. While there were no American last man fictional explorations, American Gothic writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Robert W. Chambers, and H. P. Lovecraft approached the darkness of Byron and Shelley.
Poe’s fantastical works, such as “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839) or “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), reproduced the horrors humans could inflict upon themselves or each other, even before the Civil War had birthed the dark supernatural fictions of Ambrose Bierce. Chambers’s 1895 short-story collection, The King in Yellow, connects several of its stories through
