The Last Man

471 Pages·1996·23.695 MB·English

by  Mary Shelley, Anne McWhir

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THE LAST MAN
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THE LAST MAN
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Edited with an introduction by Anne McWhir
broadview literary texts
Review Copy
©1996 Anne Ruth McWhir
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced,
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
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Adelaide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario M5C 1H6 — is an
infringement of the copyright law.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851
The last man
(Broadview literary texts)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-55111-076-8
I. McWhir, Anne Ruth, 1947- . II. Title. III. Series.
PR5397.L3 1996 823'.7 C96-930180-4
Broadview Press
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Broadview Press is grateful to Professor Eugene Benson for advice on
editorial matters for the Broadview Literary Texts series.
Broadview Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada
Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ministry of Canadian
Heritage.
Typesetting and assembly: True to Type Inc., Mississauga, Canada.
PRINTED IN CANADA
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley by R. Rothwell, 1841. (Photo courtesy of
The National Portrait Gallery.)
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Contents
Preface ix
Introduction xiii
A Note on the Text xxxvii
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: A Brief Chronology xxxix
The Last Man
Introduction 1
Volume 1 7
Volume 2 129
Volume 3 247
Map of Lionel Verney's World 368
Appendix A: Some Contemporaries of the Last Man
1. George Gordon, Lord Byron, "Darkness" (1816) 369
2. Thomas Campbell, "The Last Man" (1823) 371
3. Thomas Campbell, letter in The Times, 24 March 1825 373
4. Thomas Hood, from "The Last Man" (1826) 374
5. George Dibdin Pitt, from The Last Man; or, The Miser of
Eltham Green (\%Z^ 375
6. Thomas Love Beddoes, notes for a projected play, The
Last Man 376
Appendix B: The Sibyl's Cave
1. Virgil, from Aeneid 6 377
2. Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville, from The Last Man, or
Omegarus and Syderia, A Romance in Futurity (1806) 379
Appendix C: Versions of Plague
1. Edward Gibbon, from The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire (177'6-88) 383
2. Daniel Defoe, from A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 386
3. Charles Brockden Brown, from Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800) 388
4. John Wilson, from The City of the Plague (1816) 390
5. From "Contagion and Sanitary Laws," Westminster Review 3
(1825): 134-67 391
THE LAST MAN vii
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Appendix D: "The Web of Mind"
1. Constantin Francois de Ghasseboeuf, comte de Volney, from The
Ruins (1791) 394
2. William Godwin, from Political Justice (1793) 396
3. Thomas Robert Malthus, from An Essay on Popula-
tion (1798) 398
4. Mary Wollstonecraft, from The French Revolution (1794) 399
5. Edmund Burke, from A Letter to a Noble Lord'(1796) 401
6. Percy Bysshe Shelley, from Notes to Queen Mab (1813) 401
7. Percy Bysshe Shelley, from Preface to The Revolt of Islam
(1818) 402
8. William Godwin, from Essay on Sepulchres (1809) 403
Appendix E: Mary Shelley's poems (1825)
1. "The Choice" 405
2. "On Reading Wordsworth's Lines on Peel Castle" 409
3. "To Jane— (with the 'Last Man')" 410
Appendix F: Contemporary comments on and reviews of The Last Man
1. From The Literary Magnet or Monthly Journal of the Belles Lettres, ns 1
(January 1826): 56 411
2. From The Literary Gazette, and Journal of the Belles Letters, 474
(Saturday 18 Feb. 1826): 103-05 411
3. From Monthly Review 1 (1826): 333-35 412
4. From Blackwood's 21 (January 1827): 54 413
Appendix G: Postscript
From Mary Shelley, Rambles In Germany and Italy (1844) 415
Works Cited/Recommended Reading 417
Vlll MARY SHELLEY
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Preface
Several editions of The Last Man have appeared over the past few years,
testifying to a growing interest in Mary Shelley's life and work. This new
version of the first edition (1826) sets out to provide not only an annotat-
ed text, but sufficient intertexts to help students of Mary Shelley's fiction
acquire knowledge of its intellectual and literary milieu. The Last
Man is a deliberately and significantly allusive text, and knowledge of con-
texts often affects reading. Further, Mary Shelley's wide-ranging reading
is an important part of the texture of this genetically complex novel,
which has affinities to personal journal, biography, autobiography, roman-
tic apocalypse, fantasy, science fiction, essay, travel narrative and history
as well as to the novel or, as Shelley herself preferred to call it, "romance."
As my Introduction argues, one of her own images in The Last Man is
the "clue," the thread which enables one to explore and escape from the
labyrinth of the text. The thread has more than one strand, for there are
many paths to the centre and back again. Some readers may choose to get
access to The Last Man through contemporary issues and interests—AIDS
as a late twentieth-century version of plague, millennial hopes and fears,
the novel as speculative fiction. Others may be more interested in the
context of Shelley's other fiction, or in how she uses, and perhaps repu-
diates, the writings of her father, William Godwin, her husband, Percy
Bysshe Shelley, or even her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Because of the
remarkably broad swath that this novel cuts through texts and ideas, and
because of its wide-ranging implications for modern readers, this edition
can provide only a few clues which will, I hope, introduce readers to some
of the twists of the labyrinth.
Since that labyrinth is partly geographical, I include a map. Although
the world of the novel extends to Pekin, Quito, Ispahan, and Van
Diemen's Land, the map is limited to Europe, the world of all Lionel
Verney's adventures and the cultural centre from which he projects his
final journey. Appendices include literary contexts (some classical inter-
texts, the "last man" as early nineteenth-century hero, reviews of
Shelley's book), a political context (post-revolutionary retrospect), a soci-
ological context (the debate initiated by T. R. Malthus in 1798 about the
adequacy of the food supply to sustain population), several historical con-
texts (especially various accounts of outbreaks of plague), and a personal
context (especially Shelley's own poems representing her feelings after
the death of her husband). In framing The Last Man with such contempo-
rary intertexts, I follow D. Lome Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf s edi-
tion of the 1818 text of Frankenstein (Broadview, 1994), which demon-
strates how appendices of this kind can engage in dialogue with Shelley's
fiction.
THE LAST MAN IX
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My choice of James Beresford's blank-verse translation of the Aeneid
(1794) is based less on its merits (Dryden's version is far livelier) than on
my desire to present readers with styles of writing familiar to Mary
Shelley and her contemporaries. In spite of the importance of Percy
Bysshe Shelley's work, I have included only three brief selections, all
from his prose. His poetry is readily available elsewhere: I hope that read-
ers will follow hints in the footnotes to this edition and consult, among
other works, The Revolt of Islam, Hellas, Prometheus Unbound, and "Ode to
the West Wind."
I have chosen material in the Appendices less because of direct corre-
spondence with particular passages in the novel (though such correspon-
dences will strike some readers) than because the material illuminates
Shelley's book as a whole. Working with the text of The Last Man, how-
ever, one recognizes a far denser and more specific intertextual structure
than can be demonstrated by a few passages from other writers, no mat-
ter how carefully selected. I have therefore chosen to annotate quite thor-
oughly, hoping by doing so to emphasize the novel's complexity. When
she wrote The Last Man Shelley relied pointedly and precisely on her
extensive reading: she herself appears not to have written fragments of
verse to suit her context, as some previous editors have suspected. Having
tracked down all but a few quotations and references, I hope that readers
will help me to identify those that remain.
While the material in the Appendices allows readers to explore con-
texts and intertexts for themselves, my Introduction suggests how I
myself have put Shelley's sibylline fragments together. Texts mentioned
in the notes are listed in Works Cited/Recommended Reading, a bibliog-
raphy intended not just for those who want a list of articles on The Last
Man, but especially for those who wish to extend their study of Mary
Shelley and her circle, or of the literary, political, and social contexts of the
novel, through further reading primarily in contemporary sources.
Wherever possible, I have chosen to cite editions readily available to stu-
dents and general readers; the bibliography includes all references in the
notes in order to emphasize the intertextual range of Shelley's novel.
Those readers who would like to trace the last man into the twentieth
century, in works by such writers as M. P. Shiel (The Purple Cloud, 1901),
Olaf W. Stapledon (Last and First Men, 1930), and Nevil Shute (On the
Beach, 1957), might like to begin with the bibliography in Arthur McA.
Miller, The Last Man: A Study of the Eschatological Theme in English Poetry
and Fiction from 1809 Through 1839 (diss. Duke University, 1966).
I would like to acknowledge the work of previous editors of The Last
Man, particularly Hugh J. Luke, Jr., and Morton D. Paley, whose annota-
tions often pointed me in useful directions. For their patience and persis-
tence, thanks to the library staff at the University of Calgary and at the
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. I am particu-
larly grateful to those staff members at the Bruce Peel Special Collections
Library, University of Alberta, who prepared a photocopy of the first edi-
X MARY SHELLEY