Neil Gray
The Last Man (1826) – The Invention of Post-Apocalyptic Horror and the Terminal Annihilation of Hope
The two preceding novels established Mary Shelley’s core thesis: the great horrors of humanity are self-inflicted, stemming from unchecked ambition and the ultimate failure to prioritize compassion and responsibility. With The Last Man, published in 1826, Shelley takes this philosophical and emotional breakdown and expands it to the unimaginable scale of the species itself. The book is not merely a tale of the future; it is the definitive, scathing indictment of the Romantic era’s political idealism, the final, desperate testament to human moral fragility, and, critically, the undisputed blueprint for all subsequent post-apocalyptic and survival horror fiction.
This is where the fear of the unknown becomes the horror of the known—the slow, inevitable erasure of all meaning, purpose, and existence. It is Shelley’s magnum opus of nihilism, her most ambitious and utterly desolate achievement, a chilling narrative meticulously dedicated to documenting the death of the human story. To dissect The Last Man is to witness the final curtain call, narrated by the one man condemned to outlive it all: Lionel Verney.
I. The Genre Revolution: From Apocalypse to Post-Apocalypse
To appreciate the novel’s radicalism, we must understand the literary context it violently shattered. Before The Last Man, narratives of global doom were generally “apocalyptic”—focused on the spectacular, usually divine, cataclysm itself (floods, fire, plagues sent by God). These narratives often carried a strong theological message, where destruction served as a moral judgment or a purging ritual leading to rebirth. Shelley, the child of Enlightenment thinkers, discarded this theological framework entirely.
Shelley’s Innovation: The Post-Apocalyptic Mode: Shelley invents the post-apocalyptic genre by shifting the focus away from the “event.” The plague strikes early in the book and operates not as a divine punishment, but as a neutral, indiscriminate force of Nature’s indifference. The narrative is not about the spectacle of the destruction; it is about the slow, existential horror of life after civilization collapses. This is a study of survival and social decay in a world rendered meaningless by human impotence. This focus on the psychological and social aftermath—the crumbling infrastructure, the abandoned institutions, the psychological regression—is the definitive structural innovation that informs every post-apocalyptic narrative since. The world has ended, and the survivors are merely waiting for the final tally.
The Birth of Survival Horror: Shelley understood that the greatest threat in a dying world is not the plague itself, but the surviving, desperate human being. The slow breakdown of infrastructure, the abandonment of cities, and the subsequent psychological regression of the few remaining survivors define the terror. As the number of living dwindles, the remaining groups do not band together in noble solidarity; they fracture into fearful, hostile factions driven by ego and the desperate struggle for dwindling resources. This normalization of scavenging, the collapse of currency, and the subsequent descent into inter-human warfare perfectly anticipate the conventions of modern survival horror. The message is chillingly modern: the chaos caused by desperate human beings is more lethal than the plague itself. The greatest enemy is not the disease, but our own species’ inherent, self-serving flaws magnified by existential crisis.
II. The Structural Masterpiece: A Novel as a Tombstone
The novel’s profound impact is magnified by Shelley’s sophisticated and relentless use of narrative structure, cementing her as an innovator whose control over literary form often overshadows her thematic genius.
The Prophetic Frame (2073–2100 AD): Shelley deliberately sets her novel over a century in the future where England has transitioned into a republic. This prophetic setting immediately establishes the tone of her critique: she is not writing fantasy; she is projecting the inevitable failure of the present into the future. By placing the tragedy over a century away, she denies her contemporaries the comfort of thinking their current political and social problems are merely temporary. The promise of the future—the Enlightenment’s great hope—is shown to be just as vulnerable as the past.
The Found Document and Verisimilitude: Like Mathilda’s confession, the novel is framed as a historical document—the Journal of Lionel Verney, supposedly discovered in a cave amidst the Roman ruins. This lends the narrative a chilling, documentary-like verisimilitude. The reader is not reading fiction; they are reading the only surviving history of the species, written by the only witness. This framing device isolates the reader alongside Verney, forcing them to accept the finality of the extinction event and the historical truth of humanity’s total failure. The reader is the final, silent auditor of humanity’s account.
The Chronicle of Despair and Pacing: The narrative deliberately avoids the peaks and valleys of typical high drama. It is a slow, exhaustive chronicle of decline. Time stretches out, measured not by events of hope, but by the relentless, geometric reduction of the population. This structural pacing reflects the psychological experience of true, sustained trauma, where the only certainty is loss. The novel functions as a literary tombstone, documenting every stage of humanity’s descent into oblivion. By the time the final pages arrive, the reader is utterly exhausted, the psychological experience mirroring Verney’s final, weary isolation.
Political Ruin: The Scathing Critique of Romantic Idealism
The Last Man is, above all, a deeply cynical political allegory aimed squarely at the Romantic Circle’s idealism—the very intellectual environment that shaped Shelley. The main characters are not merely individuals; they are thinly veiled, devastating critiques of her friends and family, and their collective failure under crisis is the novel’s central, shattering statement.
The Flawed Idealist: Adrian (Percy Bysshe Shelley): Adrian, the wise, philosophical Earl of Windsor and later the Republican Lord Protector, embodies the noble, intellectual, but ultimately ineffective idealism of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Adrian is driven by pure principles, yet he is incapable of navigating the chaos and self-interest of actual people. His virtue is powerless against the brute reality of the plague and human fear. Shelley suggests that virtue, abstract reason, and intellectual pursuits—the cornerstones of high-minded Romantic social thought—are useless when confronted with true existential terror. Intellectual purity fails to translate into effective survival.
The Flawed Activist: Lord Raymond (Lord Byron): Lord Raymond, the charismatic, ambitious, and morally compromised figure who rises to political power through popular appeal, is a clear stand-in for Lord Byron, who was heavily involved in supporting the Greek War of Independence. Raymond, a man of action and passion, achieves what Adrian’s static idealism cannot. Yet, Raymond is fatally flawed by his own overwhelming ego and desire for glory. He dies attempting a heroic but ultimately meaningless military action outside of England, proving that even grand passion and political charisma are ultimately rendered ridiculous by the plague. The critique is brutal: political ambition, whether noble (Adrian) or selfish (Raymond), is utterly meaningless when existence itself is on the line. The crisis strips away all pretense, leaving only the fundamental inability to survive as a unified species.
The Collapse of Systems and Allegory: As the plague spreads, the systems of government—Republic or Monarchy—prove irrelevant. The institutions do not save humanity; they simply fail, facilitating factionalism, and collapse under the weight of the crisis. Shelley’s message is definitive: human political systems, built on fragile consensus and ego, are utterly irrelevant when facing an indifferent force of nature. The plague is the great equalizer, wiping out all distinctions of rank, genius, and ideology, proving that all human-created structures are fragile, self-serving illusions.
IV. The Subversion of the Sublime and The Romantic Dream
A core tenet of Romanticism was the concept of the Sublime: the feeling of awe, terror, and spiritual uplift experienced in the face of overwhelming natural beauty. Romantics believed the Sublime could heal the tormented soul and offer a pathway to transcendental truth. Shelley, ever the subversive, uses Nature to achieve the opposite.
Nature as Indifference: In The Last Man, Nature is not a comforting force; it is utterly indifferent. The sun still shines, the flowers still bloom, and the Mediterranean Sea remains beautiful, but this beauty only serves to mock the human tragedy. The beauty of the landscape emphasizes the unnaturalness of the emptiness. The great forests and seas, which P.B. Shelley might have looked to for inspiration, are for Verney merely enormous, silent tombs.
The Ruined Monument: Shelley constantly places Verney in sites of past human grandeur (Rome, the Alps, the Thames) now overgrown and abandoned. This is a critique of the historical and cultural ambition of humanity. The pyramids, the Colosseum, the libraries—all are meaningless monuments to a failed species. Memory is torture, and history is a joke.
The Subversion of Robinson Crusoe: Shelley consciously draws upon and then demolishes the isolation narrative established by Daniel Defoe. Crusoe uses his isolation to reaffirm his faith, exercise his ingenuity, and rebuild a miniature society, proving the resilience of the Western man. Verney does the opposite: he sees no God, his ingenuity is useless without a population, and his isolation only confirms the futility of human endeavor. Verney is Crusoe without the hope, without the faith, and with the tragic memory of all he has lost. His ultimate choice is not to build, but to drift.
V. The Contagion of Despair: The Abandoned Soul and the Terminal Thesis
The chronological reading of Shelley’s trilogy reveals that Lionel Verney is the final, most complex, and most desolate form of her abandoned figures. He is the repository of all the guilt and isolation previously suffered by the Creature and Mathilda.
The Evolutionary Scale of Abandonment: The consistent thesis is undeniable. Destruction follows failure to accept responsibility:
Frankenstein: Abandonment by a Creator (Scientific Ego), leads to moral isolation.
Mathilda: Abandonment by a Father (Emotional Ego), leads to psychological isolation.
The Last Man: Abandonment by the Species (Societal/Political Ego), leads to literal and existential isolation.
The Universalized Guilt: Verney is not personally guilty of any great sin, yet as the last man, he inherits the cumulative guilt of the entire human project. He is the ultimate witness to humanity’s failure, condemned to carry the crushing weight of existential meaninglessness. Why read Homer? Why tend a garden? Why survive if there is no one left to witness it? Shelley forces Verney—and the reader—to grapple with the terrifying realization that human value is entirely relational. Once the relationship to others is severed, meaning dissolves.
The Final Journey into Non-Existence: Verney’s final act—sailing across the empty Mediterranean with no destination, intending to wander until he dies—is the definitive, uncompromising conclusion to Shelley’s career-long study of isolation. It is a journey into non-existence, solidifying Shelley’s belief that human ambition and failure, regardless of scale, lead only to isolation and oblivion. Unlike the Creature’s death, which offered a form of final peace, Verney is denied even the solace of an end; he is condemned to wait for an end in absolute solitude.
VI. The Philosophical Terminality: The Triumph of Nihilism
The Last Man is Shelley’s final, definitive break from the theological and philosophical idealism of the past. Her rejection of redemption is absolute, making the novel a unique work of nihilism in 19th-century literature.
The Indiscriminate Plague: The plague, a natural force, is the ultimate agent of this nihilism. It operates without malice, but also without conscience. It is a force against which human reason, love, and political organization are utterly defenseless. The plague is not malicious; it simply is. It is a force of cosmic indifference that obliterates the human illusion of centrality in the universe.
The Futility of Art and Memory: Verney attempts to console himself by reading, by visiting ruins, and by recording his story—the very acts that define civilized meaning. Yet, the meaning dissolves. The ultimate irony is that his journal, the history of the species, will have no reader. Art and history require an audience to have value. When the audience dies, culture becomes nothing more than beautifully arranged garbage, preserved for no one.
The Absolute End: Unlike almost all apocalyptic literature preceding it, Shelley offers no hope of renewal. There is no small group designated to restart humanity; there is only Lionel Verney, the last man, and perhaps his dog, a final animal companion representing the purely biological nature of survival. The human story is unequivocally over. This refusal to soften the ending is the novel’s most radical statement, denying the reader the comfort of divine intervention or human resilience. It is a work that fundamentally rejects the Enlightenment narrative of progress and the Romantic narrative of spiritual salvation.
Final Thought: The Ultimate Curtain Call
The Last Man is the terrifying culmination of Mary Shelley’s entire vision. It proves that the catastrophic failure witnessed in the isolated laboratory of Victor Frankenstein and the ruined sanctuary of Mathilda’s home was simply a prelude to the inevitable failure of the species itself. Shelley’s great achievement is not just in inventing the post-apocalyptic genre, but in creating a narrative that is intellectually, emotionally, and philosophically terminal.
Lionel Verney is left with the final, terrible realization that human life, divorced from its community, is meaningless. He ends his days sailing an empty sea, a solitary, drifting monument to the folly of human pride and the ultimate fragility of civilization. Shelley takes the utopian dreams of the Romantic era—dreams of liberty, progress, and the triumph of the individual—and drowns them in a sea of viral darkness.
She proved that the human story ends not with a bang of divine judgment, but with the hollow echo of a single man’s voice, a solitary journal written against the backdrop of an indifferent cosmos. The human project failed. And in that profound, unflinching statement, Shelley cemented her place not just as a great author, but as a prophet of the modern age of anxiety, whose work screams a final warning across the desolate centuries.
The fact is: Mary Shelley was a genius. She dragged horror from the folklore and parlour stories around an open fire and into the 19th-century in a way that still echoes to this very day.
She radicalised traditional horror in a way we take for granted. Before Frankenstein there was no Frankenstein. Just ghost stories, old wives tales, and biblical warnings about following the right path or an invisible man in a cloud would punish you. With Frankenstein she created life – both figuratively and literally – where there hadn’t been any before.
With Mathilda she gave the world psychological horror. Mathilda’s decent into depression and madness is still the blueprint for the genre over 200 years later, and in The Last Man she gave rise to survival horror, as she exposed the societies collapse and how we, as a race, would eat each other just to survive.
Mary Shelley was and is a force of nature unlike any other, before or since, and every writer, author, film maker, and fan of the genre should acknowledge that without her, this thing of ours, just wouldn’t exist.
