have the epidemiological side effect of promoting mutant bacteria. Liberated from intraspecies competition, our antibiotics select survivor microbes, or “superbugs,” that become the next generation to infect human populations.
Nineteenth-century theories of miasma suggested that unhealthy environments had certain characteristics, particularly fog and dampness that incubated “bad air.” Miasmatic theory was used to explain the cholera outbreaks in large European cities and provided the basis for major renovations that cleared out stagnant waterways in urban areas and drained wetlands in the country. These measures did indeed improve the sanitary and health situation, but not for the reasons miasmic theory cited. When John Snow discovered in 1854 that the epicenter of the London cholera epidemic had been the Broad Street pump in Soho, cholera transmission was correctly linked to waterborne germs, and the ground was laid for the identification of microbes as the causes of illness. Shelley’s treatment of Lionel’s inoculation certainly relies on the contemporary “bad air” conventions of miasma, but the scene is much more complex than the cliché of the damsel catching a chill from her evening walk in the moors. He enters a dark room in London: “A pernicious scent assailed my senses, producing sickening qualms, which made their way to my very heart [. . .]. I lowered my lamp, and saw a negro half clad, writhing under the agony of disease, while he held me with a convulsive grasp. With mixed horror and impatience I strove to disengage myself, and fell on the sufferer; he wound his naked festering arms round me, his face was close to mine, and his breath, death-laden, entered my vitals” (336–37). Here, it is not London’s bad breath that is infectious but the racialized encounter that throws the Englishman into the arms of the African, in a gust of colonial breath and tropical disease. Plenty of racial anxiety is revealed through the quasi-intimacy of their entanglement; this could not be an arbitrary choice of disease vector. This scene speaks to British anxiety about the effects of colonialism, which is the most popular interpretation of the novel. What is missing from these colonial and epidemiological readings is an account of how a disturbed nature provides the stage for this drama. There would be no disease exchange in this encounter between racial others if the climate had not already begun to shift away from established patterns.
The unnatural global warming estranges Europeans from their environments of adaptation, heightening their susceptibility and bringing them into an intimate common fate with the world’s other peoples. Contagion makes the other into brother. The Last Man’s global warming theme begins with descriptions of war-torn Constantinople, gateway between East and West:
The southern Asiatic wind came laden with intolerable heat, when the streams were dried up in their shallow beds, and the vast basin of the sea appeared to glow under the unmitigated rays of the solsticial sun. Nor did night refresh the earth. Dew was denied; herbage and flowers there were none; the very trees drooped; and summer assumed the blighted appearance of winter, as it went forth in silence and flame to abridge the means of sustenance to man. [. . .] All was serene, burning, annihilating. [. . .] The sun’s rays were refracted from the pavement and buildings—the stoppage of the public fountains—the bad quality of the food, and scarcity even of that, produced a state of suffering, which was aggravated by the scourge of disease. (189–90)
Here, the disease is secondary to the famine caused by the failure of the rains. The climate’s shift toward a desertlike ecosystem has occurred too rapidly for flora or agriculture to adapt, and the plague’s path cuts directly through the bodies of a weakened population. Before long, both the climate and its sidekick, the plague, have swept across Europe into England. This is the point at which the other disorders of civilization, war and colonialism, fall into inconsequence compared to the “eruptions of nature” (232). The people start to balk at catastrophe: “Can it be true [. . .] that whole countries are laid waste, whole nations annihilated, by these disorders in nature?” (233). Orators mislead their countrymen into believing that the English are not subject to the natural disasters as natives of the tropics are:
Countrymen, fear not! [. . .] [Plague] is of old a native of the East, sister of the tornado, the earthquake, and the simoom. Child of the sun, and nursling of the tropics, it would expire in these climes. It drinks the dark blood of the inhabitant of the south, but it never feasts on the pale-faced Celt. If perchance some stricken Asiatic come among us, plague dies with him, uncommunicated and innoxious. Let us weep for our brethren, though we can never experience their reverse. Let us lament over and assist the children of the garden of the earth. Late we envied their abodes, their spicy groves, fertile plains, and abundant loveliness. (233)
This speech, with its sneering blend of false pity and racial pride, screams for correction. It comes on the very next page, where those English who might have envied the “spicy groves, fertile plains, and abundant [ecological] loveliness” of the tropics find, to their dismay, their wish granted (237). In August, the disease in an oddly hot England “gained virulence, while starvation did its accustomed work. Thousands died unlamented; for beside the yet warm corpse the mourner was stretched, made mute by death” (235). Several deadly years on, the four English seasons have fallen completely off their orbit:
Winter was coming, and with winter, hope. In August, the plague had appeared in the country of England, and during September it made its ravages. [. . .] The autumn was warm and rainy: the infirm and sickly died off—happier they. [. . .] The crop had failed, the bad corn, and want of foreign wines, added vigour to disease. Before Christmas half England was under water. The storms of the last winter were renewed. [. . .] But frost would come at last, and with it a renewal of our lease of earth. Frost would blunt the arrows of pestilence, and enchain the furious elements; and the land would in spring throw off her garment of snow, released from her menace of destruction. It was not until February that the desired signs of winter appeared. For three days the snow fell, ice stopped the current of the rivers, and the birds flew out from crackling branches of the frost-whitened trees. On the fourth morning all vanished. A south-west wind brought up rain—the sun came out, and mocking the usual laws of nature, seemed even at this early season to burn with solsticial force. It was no consolation, that with the first winds of March the lanes were filled with violets, the fruit trees covered with blossoms, that the corn sprung up, and the leaves came out, forced by the unseasonable heat. We feared the balmy air—we feared the cloudless sky, the flower-covered earth, and delightful woods, for we looked on the fabric of the universe no longer as our dwelling, but our tomb, and the fragrant land smelled to the apprehension of fear like a wide church-yard. (269–70)
The plague is borne of ecological disturbance first and foremost. The pleasing signs of spring come unearned by the privations of winter, and the missed cycle of cold allows the plague to overwinter without check. The violets, fruit trees, and corn still have English ecological origins, but their rhythms are spun into strange oscillations as the warmer months gain dominance, making evolutionary shifts in species composition inevitable.
This estrangement between humans and their accustomed environment threatens psychological consequences that we are beginning to understand in this age of climate change. What dies is the cognitive comfort of the home ecology, the well-known oikos that carries yearly rituals and passes time in its intelligible, cyclical way. The psychology of disturbance inherits this vacated brain space, as it did for Mary Shelley dwelling beneath the parasol of Tambora’s ash in the lost summer of 1816. With a “global weirding” mentality, we come to expect weather anomalies and look to anthropogenic sources to explain them.2 Chaotic tangles of human and natural activities seem to underlie every event, even the pleasantly warm day in winter. We become less able to enjoy ourselves within the weather, whatever its conditions, because they seem to be signifiers of an inexorable process already on the move, a beast slouching toward Bethlehem.
This beast is borne out by the frequency of objectively measured landmark weather events. As of this writing, the twenty warmest years in the last 130 (when the National Climatic Data Center began measurement) have all occurred since 1983, and every year since 1977 has been above the average set during that 130-year period (NCDC). Habitat shifts result from climate shifts: animal species are migrating about
