The Last Man

Lionel Verney survives into a depopulated England as the sole witness to a species-wide extinction, and Shelley refuses the plague any of the moralizing logic older plague fiction relies on: it does not punish vice or spare virtue, it simply removes people, famous and obscure, faithful and treacherous, at the same indifferent rate. The novel's frame, a set of Sibylline leaves found scattered in a Neapolitan cave and pieced together by an unnamed editor, keeps even Verney's own testimony at one remove, as if the extinction of humanity were too large an event for any single voice to report without mediation.

Adrian, Earl of Windsor, and Lord Raymond are close enough to Percy Shelley and Byron that the novel reads as elegy wearing the costume of prophecy: Adrian renounces the English throne to live as a private idealist devoted to poetry and reform before drowning at sea, Raymond abandons a domestic life for military glory and dies laying siege to Constantinople. Shelley wrote this after both men were actually dead, Percy drowned off the Italian coast in 1822, Byron gone in Greece in 1824, so the novel isn't guessing at their ends so much as replaying them inside a fiction large enough to hold her grief.

England's brief experiment as a republic, engineered by Adrian's own family surrendering the crown, collapses not because the political idea fails but because the plague renders every institution equally irrelevant, a bleak answer to the perfectibility arguments Shelley grew up inside courtesy of her father William Godwin and her husband alike. Reform, republic, and utopian planning all turn out to be questions the world stops asking once there's no population left to govern.

By the time Shelley finished the manuscript in 1826, she had lost her husband, Byron, and two of her three children, and the novel's occasional real-name winks (a cameo appearance from a poet clearly meant as Shelley herself) sit inside otherwise heavily disguised portraiture. Contemporary reviewers, expecting another Frankenstein, found the book's total bleakness, no monster to defeat, no survivors to celebrate, simply depressing rather than thrilling, and it went out of print for decades before twentieth-century critics recovered it as one of English fiction's first sustained apocalypses.