of the nineteenth-century reading public. Shelley’s novel has received much more positive attention from postmodernist scholars than it did from her contemporaries. The Last Man received widespread critical appraisal only after a new edition was printed in America in 1965 (Parrinder 66). Reflecting the generally poor critical reception in 1826, one reviewer called the novel “the offspring of a diseased imagination, and of a most polluted taste” (“Review of The Last Man”). With today’s popular tastes, the ecological valences of disease and pollution may be read to great advantage in this prophetic novel, and its narrative chaos is familiar to modern readers.
It is a complicated tale, with a wandering plot and surprisingly conventional characters, not improved by the sentimental and logorrheic dialogue. The novel’s value lies in Shelley’s perceptive treatment of a chaotic female-gendered nature, her appreciation of radical contingency in natural history, and the remarkable visions of global warming through globalization, which together exacerbate the spread of disease. Her characters are tortuously, farcically Romantic, but the imagined twenty-first-century climate she describes is eerily apt. Frederick Buell’s analysis of apocalypse reminds us that “plague” has dated, almost medieval connotations for individuals in modern developed nations, who often believe that medical technology and inoculation have eradicated epidemiological threats to our bodies (132). However, Shelley realizes that disease transmission will only increase as the climate warms. Shelley’s novel shows a perverse reversal of the colonial project by depicting the decline of the British body as it is colonized by exotic microbes, and an assault on English nature by advancing tropical species.
Where Frankenstein drew scenes of sublime terror evoked by the vast arctic plains, ending with the blind image of the creature “lost in darkness and distance,” The Last Man capitalizes on the paradoxical horror of a too-pleasant nature mocking psychological despair. The early arrival of the warm season indicates the arrival of the survivors’ annual trial by plague. Mother Nature reveals her vindictive, witchlike properties in the face of humanity’s reasoned opposition:
Nature, our mother, and our friend, had turned on us a brow of menace. She shewed us plainly, that, though she permitted us to assign her laws and subdue her apparent powers, yet, if she put forth but a finger, we must quake. She could take our globe, fringed with mountains, girded by the atmosphere, containing the condition of our being, and all that man’s mind could invent or his force achieve; she could take the ball in her hand, and cast it into space, where life would be drunk up, and man and all his efforts for ever annihilated. (232)
This willful, vindictive, powerfully destructive characterization of Nature, the portrait drawn in chaos ecology, was originally embodied as the fallen Eve in the Western tradition (Merchant, Reinventing Eden 157). This gendering of Nature reawakens mythological traditions of natural power lying in the laps of personified goddesses, and Shelley extends the accusatory “she” from natural climate to the pestilence itself as a she-disease. The war between the sexes is fought along conventional lines, the revolting element of feminine nature, climate, and disease pitted against masculine human culture, science, and reason. As in Frankenstein, there are no female human characters with intellect or agency, though females have a disproportionate share of emotive dialogue. Nature, however, is a feminine element with chaotic agency that overcomes masculine reason, yielding a chic element of proto-ecofeminism to Shelley’s work (McKusick 109).
The tone in the passage quoted above echoes a Malthusian worldview, which helped Charles Darwin envision how survival itself was a virtue that affected evolutionary progress. Malthus’s “Essay on the Principles of Population” (1798) proposes that the plight of human experience (war, famine, disease) could not be wholly extirpated by Enlightenment institutions such as democratic government, intensive technological farming, and enhanced medical technology. Shelley’s father, William Godwin, an Enlightenment political idealist, wrote a lengthy refutation of Malthus’s essay. However, Mary Shelley’s novel consistently builds and then systematically destroys schemes of Enlightenment-rational and Romantic-imaginative hope developed by her male characters (Paley xv). The Last Man is a Malthusian work without recourse to salubrious progressive evolution. In describing the capricious moods of nature, Shelley figures Mother Earth as the author of both jeremiads and idylls; her duplicity is all the more unsettling. For chilled British readers, there is a notable irony that a warmer world resembling colonies in the British Indies (both East and West) may dress up like paradise, but the climate change is an epidemiological nightmare. Shelley takes the Malthusian notion one notable step further by envisioning a world in which even Edenic, productive, and nurturing Nature offers no succor to the cursed human race. Much worse than providing a challenge to survival, Lionel Verney comes to know the pleasant natural world as a set of false signs that belie a fate of death by disease. Order and balance seen in nature are illusive hopes, manifestations of overwrought human cognition rather than a true mirror of larger intelligible forces at work in the cosmos. Verney’s narrative repeatedly returns to microcosmic images of order and containment lost to the catastrophe of universal human decline.
Part of this lost control over the ecological world seems attributable to the lost cultural control of the imperial power. Alan Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease devotes a long and thorough chapter to The Last Man’s epidemiology. England harbors ships that have landed on every continent, bringing their stores of trade goods, humans and other animals, and mi-crobes. Each one of these categories has a quality of invasiveness to it. Goods from other climates invade the British identity and change consumer appetites, a trend particularly suspect in the nineteenth century, with the import of addictive opium and foods reliant on slave labor (coffee, sugar, chocolate). Foreign men contribute to the worldliness of London, but their settling in England provides an early glimpse of immigration debates, which often took a pointedly racialized tone. Globalization allows the easy traversal of disease from more resistant populations to more vulnerable ones. Colonial history shows that most diseases were carried from Europe to the native populations of colonized lands, but in Shelley’s novel this pathway is reversed. The plague arrives in England from an American trade vessel, and in Italy from the nearest Eastern country: Turkey. Europe is laid open to the world’s diseases as a porous, susceptible body.
Part of the novel’s paranoia must be accounted for by the very real concerns about urban sanitation in the nineteenth century. Cholera arrived in England six years after the publication of Shelley’s novel, during the second cholera pandemic. The first pandemic affected India, China, and Indonesia, including British colonial regions where there was a large military presence (Paley xiii). The second pandemic reached London and Paris in 1832 from its origin in the Ganges River Delta, and it claimed sixty-five hundred lives in London and a hundred thousand in France (Rosenberg 101). Cholera remained a serious water-borne threat in Europe until 1851, the year of Shelley’s death. Her generation directly experienced how global trade routes served as disease vectors that could rapidly and efficiently carry bacteria from locales of origin into vastly different climates and populations, moves that often dramatically increased a disease’s virulence.
Shelley’s depiction of the rapid spread of disease in the mysteriously warmer English climate of 2100 aligns with present-day epidemiological concerns about how pathogen habitats will be expanded via climate change. As Frederick Buell notes, environmental despoilment in the twenty-first century involves a constant network of exchange among macro-, meso-, and microbiological conditions: “Raising the likelihood of a substantial increase in serious infectious disease are trends like climate change, development, habitat destruction, pollution, overpopulation, urban slummification, the industrialization of agriculture, and the rise of global transport and mobility. A host of decisive human modifications of natural and social environments—rapidly expanding modifications that lead not just to the destruction of macroecosystems but also to deeply problematic alterations in microbiological environments, are thus responsible for the rise of infectious disease” (129–30). This twenty-first-century perspective shows how the ecology of disturbance operates at many scalar equivalencies simultaneously—the macrocosmic issue of global epidemiology must consider microcosmic conditions in local climates and the immune capacities of local populations. Even as antibiotics
