“[D]eath fell on man alone” – Re-reading Mary Shelley's the last man during a global COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

There are many works of literature which give us detailed accounts of plague, as epidemic and
even pandemic (Decameron, Journal of a Plague Year, The Plague). However, Mary Shelley’s The Last
Man is the first plague narrative to depict a global pandemic. Moreover, it interrogates a world before
nineteenth-century globalization by prophesying a future in 2073. Shelley’s frame narrative shows the
reader an alternate history where the hegemony of free-market capitalism and Darwinian evolutionary
science do not exist. What can this fictional world without capitalism and evolutionary theory tell us?
This article engages in a qualitative critical analysis of The Last Man from the field of literature and
science. First, as a novel, Shelley addresses both the individual perspective of the isolated narrator-witness,
and, at a wider level, the society that dissolves around the protagonist. This literary unpacking of the
novel suggests McKeon’s naïve and sceptical empiricism as useful in interrogating both fictionality and
any basis for interpretation of empirical, factual evidence mediated through human narrative in the text.
Second, Shelley draws on the competing theories of proto-evolutionary science of the 1820s: Huttonian
eternalism, Cuvierian catastrophism and Lamarckian transformism. Shelley’s reworkings of nineteenthcentury
natural philosophy allow us to re-evaluate our relationship with nature from a paradigm before
evolutionary theory. This history-of-science approach interrogates the novel as both methodology and
content. Indeed, I argue that Shelley’s proto science fiction classic can help us re-interrogate our own
dominant cultural and ideological assumptions in the midst of the current Covid-19 global pandemic.
Key words: Pandemic, Covid-19, Shelley, frame narrative, naïve and sceptical empiricism, protoevolutionary
science, Hutton, Cuvier, Lamarck, eternalism, catastrophism, transformism