“The whole appears to us to be the offspring of a diseased imagination, and of a most polluted taste”; so wrote a reviewer of Shelley’s The Last Man.[1] Given the different diseases that coursed through the minds and the airways of early 19th century inhabitants, this interpretation is not so far removed from reality. Shelley’s novel can, and should be, understood as a new ecohistorical text, one that focuses on a fine-grained knowledge of epidemics and the devastation that can be effected by them. Within the novel’s core is an early 19th century understanding of disease and epidemiological discourse. Although the plot centers on the inner circle of the narrator and the consequences of the plague on this group and the English isle, the major actor that governs the novel is the plague. With the introduction of the plague in the novel through the exoticized and Eastern character, Evadne, plague becomes the centripetal force of the action. Not only does the plague invade the narrative from this moment, but it invades the bodies, minds, spirits, homes, thoughts and language of the novel’s characters, much like rampant and actual disease coursed through the cultural, political and personal spheres of those, like Mary Shelley, who lived in early 19th century England. While Shelley’s reviewer was disgusted and repulsed by the novel’s content, it should not have surprised him. Several diseases were active during the novel’s inception. I think it is possible to read the novel through the knowledge of epidemiological discourse in the early 19th century in order to understand The Last Man not solely as a post-apocalyptic, fictional account of an epidemic, but as a narrative that re-imagines and emphasizes the contemporaneous state of man and disease. I propose a reading that focuses on the prevalent diseases of the early 19th century and their influence on Shelley’s version of a plague. The novel does not function as a doomsday narrative per se, but as a record of what disease could do, in an environment where man was beginning to grasp what disease already did. Within The Last Man, plague becomes the dominant discourse and demonstrates the overwhelming power of fear and the potential for epidemiological threat that pervaded Shelley and her contemporaries.

The obvious question then is what does this approach bring to a reading of The Last Man? I believe it brings to the fore the need for knowledge and background in the history of medicine and disease. Shelley proves her extensive knowledge of fictional and real plagues through her references from Brockden Brown’s yellow fever, Defoe’s narrative of the Great Plague, to Gibbons’s history of plague in the Roman Empire, her personal experiences with typhus in her young son, William, as well as her knowledge of the Crimean and Napoleonic wars. By delving into the historical details of epidemiology in the early 19th century, we can better understand what went into Shelley’s own monstrous amalgamation of plague as well as the driving forces of that fictional plague. Therefore we can begin to answer such questions as why it was so devastating, why did it take seven years to decimate mankind, where and how it did spread, where it originated, and the approaches taken by the characters to prevent contamination and illness, and how these medical ideologies related to the theories propounded by Shelley’s contemporaries. Having the answers to these questions will reveal Shelley’s The Last Man in ways other conventional readings cannot. It is necessary to move away from biography to history, for it should not be surprising that, stemming from accounts of cholera in India, which by 1823 had already raged on for seven years and threatened to approach Europe, and from news of typhus in Ireland, Shelley’s novel would indeed be the ‘offspring’ of disease and pollution. With this new ecocritical perspective, we can understand the novel’s treatment of these elements, among others, in a whole new light by placing it in conjunction with them.

I will pursue the various origins of Shelley’s mysterious plague, what could have inspired it and how epidemics in the early 19th century, whether in England, its territories or its colonies, were understood. By turning to texts concerning 19th century diseases and their epidemiology, I aim to uncover the potential influences behind Shelley’s plague. Nineteenth century England and the larger reaches of the empire were prone to several epidemics, and a comparison to England in the novel, seemingly unassailable, provides a fascinating test of understanding disease discourse at the beginning of the 19th century. As the noted anticontagionist of the era, Dr. Charles Maclean wrote in 1817,

although there is reason to hope, and to expect, that circumstances will never occur again, by which London may have to lament the loss of a hundred thousand, and Marseilles of fifty thousand inhabitants, in the course of a single autumn; yet the number that fall victim to annual epidemics, […] even in the best cultivated countries, and under the most favorable circumstances, are still, and probably will long continue, so considerable, that discussions relating to this class of maladies cannot but be regarded as objects of essential importance to the domestic interests of all parent states. [2]

I will examine how these historic outbreaks influenced, and were in turn, mutated by Mary Shelley, thereby creating the horrific plague, which decimated mankind in The Last Man. Similar to the cholera epidemic that swept through Asia between 1817 and 1823, the plague in the novel does not have a clear etiology, pathology, and epidemiology.

Lionel Verney, the novel’s narrator, in what turns into a moment of alarm, both for himself and for the reader, “spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot of its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety.”[3] This moment represents a “critical moment in the history of epidemiology, […] the recognition that modern diseases do not respect natural geographical boundaries.”[4] Verney realizes that everything is plagued. The earth and its inhabitants are struck, even before plague reaches them, with an anxiety and fear that presages the disease. I will focus on the first instance of plague in the novel, then look at how the plague resembles or mirrors a few diseases, cholera in particular, while considering Shelley’s inspiration from current events and other fictional disease narratives. While I believe the plague has historical precedents, it purposefully remains unexplained, undetermined, and unabated. It is unidentifiable because it is constantly mutating, continually associated with various signifiers, such as the East, or woman, until language breaks down. Because no one is able to explain what the plague is not, it thereby has the potential to be anything.

Origins of the Plague in The Last Man

The first instance of the plague occurs while the main characters, Raymond, Verney and his sister, Perdita, are in Greece. Raymond, based on Byron, is an English native, but Greek patriot, who seeks to continue his fight for the safety and freedom of Constantinople, even though he has just been recovered after having been a prisoner of war of the insurgent Turks. His wife, Perdita, fears for his safety, but fears even more so what waits in the city of the East. Verney says that the “word, as yet it was no more to her, was PLAGUE. This enemy to the human race had begun early in June to raise its serpent-head on the shores of the Nile, parts of Asia, not usually subject to this evil, were infected.”[5] This plague is one that regularly visits Constantinople, and Verney, like the others, assumes an indifferent posture: “small attention was paid to those accounts which declared more people to have died there already”[6] and so they carry onwards to the Golden City. This heedless attitude not only comes back to haunt them, but is perpetuated by nearly all.

Verney encounters a death-like omen in the form of Evadne, who approaches him in a field in the garb of a soldier. She is emaciated and feverish, suffering mainly from the ravages of the soldier’s life. Her dying words convert the plague, still a word to the reader and to Verney, and a harmless signifier to Perdita, into a vehicle of action. The plague becomes a living, breathing character, female and potent, casting a dark shadow over the narrative. Evadne calls upon the “instruments of war, fire, the plague are my servitors. […] I have sold myself to death, with the sole condition that thou shouldst follow me –Fire, and war, and plague, unite for thy destruction – O my Raymond, there is no safety for thee!”[7] While her words are directed at Raymond, she sends down the plague upon all. The former Greek princess and past lover of Raymond, Evadne seems to embody several things at once: the agent of plague and death; a transsexual agent, crossing gender lines and those of domestic life; a Faustian dealer, selling her life in order to bring death; a prostitute, who willingly sells her body in exchange for revenge, and the ‘true’ transmitter of the plague, a malevolent Eastern force that overtakes the mainly dominant, powerful West. It is this Eastern princess who marks plague and death as her servitors (in a reductive capacity: Evadne is a combination of Eve evade = she becomes a symbol of temptation, slippery significance, but most importantly, of latent destruction).

Evadne’s words, however, form only one component of the nature of the plague. As Verney notes, the plague typically visits this area and little attention is paid to any warnings of its increased vigor. Verney relates Evadne’s death and imprecation to Raymond, who receives it all stoically; he accepts this confirmation, for he knows that, in Constantinople, this is all that awaits him. The city is ravaged, and Verney comments that there is talk of “the ravages the plague made in its chief cities; conjectures were hazarded as to the progress that disease might have made to the besieged city.”[8] By the time the Greek troops are about to attack Constantinople, it is vacant; the Turks have been fleeing the city because of the plague. One Turkish soldier states, “take the palaces, the gardens, the mosques, the abode of our fathers – take plague with them; pestilence is the enemy we fly; if she be your friend, hug her to your bosoms. The curse of Allah is on Stamboul, share ye her fate.”[9] This is the first instance of the plague assuming a female form; that is, if one does not immediately associate Evadne with the disease. Similar to the adulterous, if not supposedly benign, relationship Raymond had with his lover, the plague assumes the role of close friend; yet, the soldier sees the plague as a curse of god.

Raymond argues later that the plague strikes each year, and that the extreme virulence this year is due only to war, heat, drought, and scarcity. He blames the fear of all on base superstition, even after believing the curse of Evadne. Determined to conquer Constantinople, he braves the city, even after Verney assures him that the coming winter will dissipate the plague and the fears of the Greek army. In the end, it is not the plague, but the exploding city that destroys Raymond. After dying in Constantinople, the literal ground zero of the plague, Raymond appears to Verney in a dream:

while to my diseased fancy, the vessels hurled by him after me, were surcharged with fetid vapour, and my friend’s shape, altered by a thousand distortions, expanded into a gigantic phantom, bearing on its brow the sign of pestilence. The growing shadow rose and rose, filling, and then seeming to endeavour to burst beyond, the adamantine vault that bent over, sustaining and enclosing the world. [10]

Bearing on his forehead, like the mark of Cain, the signs of pestilence, Raymond’s ghostly specter hurls what seem to be weapons of dank destruction at Verney. This ghastly dream image of Raymond also grows in magnitude, much like the plague which he has helped release from within the walls of Constantinople. Verney dreams that his friend, once the Lord Protector of England, has become a vast cloud, pregnant with powers, which may potentially burst and envelop the world. The destruction of Constantinople together with Raymond’s transformation into a gaseous, shadowy substance presage the chain reaction of epidemic disorder that governs the rest of the novel. Most importantly, it recalls the spread of disease throughout Asia and Europe in the years preceding, and surrounding, the novel.

Shelley’s description of the plague that destroys all of mankind is vague, mutable, and open to discussion. It resists identification, and by default, it also resists epidemiological analysis. This plague is different from yellow fever, since it does not produce the black vomit typically associated with it, even though it involves symptoms as muscle pain, fever, and fatigue. It does not resemble scarlet fever because it lacks the usual rash and Shelley dismisses smallpox, because in the 21st century of the novel, it is extinct. Shelley differentiates it from typhus, which also involves a rash, cough and delirium[11] , and makes it clear that the plague is not contagious: “It was called an epidemic. […] the grand question was still unsettled of how this epidemic was generated and increased. If infection depended upon the air, the air was subject to infection.”[12] However, the 19th century definition for an epidemic is not our definition. The plague in the novel would be seen now as pandemic. Those who believed in a plague being contagious, that is, in its ability to be transmitted from person to person, were pitted against those who believed it was ‘epidemic’ and could only be transmitted through the air. A 19th century leader in anticontagionist theory, Dr. Charles Maclean’s definition of an epidemic is similar to Shelley’s, in that it “consists of every variety of morbid affection, in every degree of intensity, and on every scale of diffusion, […] pervading a whole community.” He lists the principal causes of epidemics, relating to the atmosphere, differences in temperature, deficiency in nourishment, depression of mind, and belief in contagion, the last of which, while not a technical cause, is still believed by most of the novel’s English nationals.[13] Even Verney questions the environmentalist theory of disease: “how are we to judge the airs, and pronounce-in such a city plague will die unproductive; in such another, nature has provided for it a plentiful harvest?”[14] It is the air that leads to the rise of the epidemic, not the interaction of people. Despite this belief, the nation establishes a trade embargo, but does not quarantine itself – refugees seek England as a safe destination, not realizing that the air will transmit the plague, only to flee England when the plague arrives.

I do not want to argue for a specific pathology of the plague in The Last Man; rather it is an amalgam of known troublemakers: it most resembles cholera, but also has elements of typhus and yellow fever. What matters is the usage of several diseases to create one that resists identification and therefore, becomes a nightmare disease. As a concentrated dose of early 19th century diseases, the plague in the novel becomes the ultimate leveler. It resists classification primarily because it functions as a usurper of systems, especially the human system. For the characters in the novel, the plague is a biological threat in that it threatens them physically, as well as psychologically. Because 19th century epidemiology was in its infancy, even one illness posed a threat to the individual and to the populace, but to combine, as Shelley did almost all of the known major players into one big bad wolf, presents not only a challenge to epidemiology, but to all systems, and as readers, to all potential interpretations. Without a clear understanding of what is attacking them, the characters essentially plague themselves with anxiety; their language and actions are diseased before they are ever contaminated. As Verney writes, “Pestilence had become a part of our future, our existence.”[15] Because the plague is an amalgam of known diseases, it is best to examine it through the context of certain of these diseases, beginning with cholera in the 19th century, which shares numerous striking similarities with this plague.

Rampant Disease

Fearful of the plague, in conjunction with natural disturbances, Verney asks, “Can it be true, […] that whole countries are laid waste, whole nations annihilated, by these disorders in nature?” There were numerous, devastating contexts for Verney’s disease. This plague was associated with the East, and Shelley seems to have drawn inspiration from the cholera epidemic in Asia, as well as from Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His description of the plague in Constantinople in 542 is remarkably similar to the one that strikes Constantinople in the novel. Gibbon places its origins in Ethiopia and Egypt, with its “damp, hot, stagnating air” and the Nile, from which “it spread to the East, over Syria, Persia, and the Indies, and penetrated to the West, along the coast of Africa, and over the continent of Europe,”[16] which is mimicked by the course of the novel’s plague. This Eastern and ‘stigmatized’ plague was not thought to be contagious. Trade continued, for “no restraints were imposed on the free and frequent intercourse of the Roman provinces: from Persia to France, the nations were mingled and infected by wars and emigrations,” permitting its transmission to spread like wild fire. Shelley’s nameless plague operates in the same manner as that of 542, in that it “always spread from the sea-coast to the inland country: the most sequestered islands and mountains were successively visited.”[17] After his question, Verney continues by noting that the plague is “old a native of the East,” following Gibbon’s assertion, that it is “child of the sun, and nursling of the tropics, it would expire in these climes.”[18] Despite Verney’s optimism, the novel’s plague continues to breed, extending its fearsome airs.

It is likely that Shelley’s readers remembered, possibly even witnessed, the ruin of the Asiatic Cholera Pandemic throughout the Indian subcontinent and Asia; they possibly also uttered Verney’s question concerning the devastating power of the plague. For Shelley’s contemporaries, “a new fear began to grip the British public. Since 1818, reports had been arriving from the Colonies of a new and deadly disease.”[19] Between 1817 and 1823, cholera was widely feared, especially since it nearly knocked on Europe’s door, and finally appearing in 1831. The pandemic started in Jessore, India, near Calcutta, in August of 1817, arriving in Sri Lanka by 1818. The disease then spread throughout Asia, from India’s northern borders in present day Afghanistan, from soldiers fighting British troops there, to Burma, and Thailand. It was then carried over the sea to Sumatra, Java, and China, whereas it traveled by land to eastern Siberia and Japan by 1822, the Phillipines and the southeast Asian mainland. It then traveled to Africa, and to the head of the Persian Gulf in Basra. The southern Russian territory of Astrakahn was affected, but a severely cold winter in 1823-1824 ensured cholera did not reach beyond the Caspian Sea.[20]

Whitelaw Ainslie, a doctor with the East India Company, in his postscript to his Observations on the Cholera Morbus of India, writes that “in the Birman empire, it was so destructive in 1821, that in the capital alone, Bancok, 40,000 souls perished. In less than two years it is said to have carried off half a million of people in Java.”[21] Ainslie’s astonishment at the mortality rates seems to indicate his own fear of cholera reaching his “dear native land,” something that Shelley imagines in horrifying ways. In the same seven years that cholera wreaked havoc in Asia, Shelley’s nameless plague decimates all of mankind, except for Verney. The plague that vanquishes the globe seems much like Ainslie’s cholera, which

spare[s], […] neither age nor sex nor condition; it appears sometimes to travel with the wind, [...] it seems to be so capricious in its nature, if the phrase may be used, that it makes selections of particular tracts and villages, leaving others, though in the vicinity, altogether undisturbed. It has swept over thousands of miles, through countries and climes extremely dissimilar [...] [I]t has come again, like an unglutted monster, to terrify and destroy. It attacks with most fury, when least expected; so differing from the plague and yellow fever, which we know have their peculiar periods of visitation.[22]

The nature of cholera is one of unprecedented devastation. Cholera was a disease that struck “suddenly and unpredictably” and death could arrive within hours of the first spasm of pain, anywhere from 10 to 24 hours.[23] It took the body’s heat, “twisting muscles into spasms and cramps, producing insatiable thirst, […] liquefied a body as fluids streamed uncontrollably, […] quickly wrung the water from the body, leaving a shriveled form and thickened blood. All this in a few hours.”[24] James Annesley, another physician in the East India Company, located in Madras, stated “There are few diseases which have excited more interest among medical men, or more terror in the mind of the Indian community at large, than the epidemic cholera.”[25] The number of deaths could have been anywhere from one to two million in India.[26]

The plague that kills millions in the novel is similar to cholera. Various descriptions of the plague ring synonymously with the symptoms listed above: Verney’s own experience, with “fever producing torpor, heavy pains, sitting like lead on my limbs, […]. An irritating sense of thirst,”[27] seems to coincide with cholera. Yet, the fever and muscle aches also resemble typhus. It is worth mentioning that Verney contracts the plague from a Negro who accosts him in Windsor, mirroring Arthur Mervyn’s encounter with a Negro infected with yellow fever in Brockden Brown’s novel, which seeks to continue the same racialized divide that is associated with the plague. Verney’s wife, Idris, suffers from what can be classified as consumption, but her appearance resembles the effects of cholera: “her cheeks were sunk, her form emaciated […]. Her hollow eyes and worn countenance had a ghastly appearance.”[28] These sunken features, together with the emaciated, strung out form, all fit representations of cholera victims.[29] Verney recovers from his bout with the plague and while the novel does not provide medical reasons for his survival, for narrative purposes he survives to relate his transformation into the last man. Despite recovering, Verney at one point suffers a psychological, perhaps psychosomatic, illness that also resembles cholera. While on their exodus to regions free from pestilence, he responds to news that plague has struck their party, “a sickness of the soul, contagious even to my physical mechanism, came over me. My knees knocked together, my teeth chattered, the current of my blood, clotted by sudden cold, painfully forced its way from my heavy heart.”[30] Most, if not all, of these symptoms are choleric – the spasms, the thickening of the blood (not seen until a postmortem autopsy), and an extreme cold of the limbs, along with mental anxiety and depression were often the first signs of illness.

This Asiatic epidemic was hard to define, and believed to have originated specifically in India, it was linked with filth, barbarism, and the hot, sultry climate of the southern regions of the continent. As “an invader of continent, state, or town, cholera violated a sense of European identity that was being applied to other places as they succumbed to civilization;”[31] Shelley’s plague exacts and enacts the same properties, for it too invades all surrounding locales. Shortly after Raymond’s death, a ship arrives in Portsmouth from Philadelphia (breeding ground of Brockden Brown’s yellow fever epidemic), with only one man aboard; whether the infirm man, was suffering from the plague is irrelevant, for the epidemic has been loosed. After the promising winter that Verney said would cleanse Constantinople, the city falls, “for every one who has ventured within the walls has been tainted by the plague,”[32] and it quickly spreads to Athens. This, the location of liberty in the novel, falls to disease, soon followed by America. Wherever European civilization left its mark, it too eventually succumbs to disease.

England, however, remains impenetrable. In the 19th century, it would remain exempt from this strain of Asiatic Cholera until 1831, well after Shelley gave everyone a picture of disease and devastation. In the novel, the narrator and other public figures assume that their isle will be free from taint until the faceless enemy actually arrives. Until this moment, the plague is a “disease about them, not us.”[33] It is thought that the plague is a ‘native of the East’, and 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.”[34] Because of this xenophobic mentality, the disease is converted into a racial marker. The plague is linked with forces that only occur in the nations of Asia – the earthquake, the simoom, and the tornado –the plague becomes a natural force outside of Europe. Unfortunately, the great leveler does not know any bounds, especially those of race or climate. All the same, the ‘pale-faced Celt’ has his own diseases. Europe faced typhus, dysentery and smallpox throughout the early 19th century. Even though cholera was seen as a disease that stemmed from improper hygiene, poor sanitation, contaminated air and a different culture, Shelley’s contemporaries suffered from the same conditions, which lead to several diseases.

Localized Versions of Disease in the early 1800s

To consider Shelley’s version of the plague as a hybrid of several diseases is to envision it as an epidemic leviathan composed of numerous, interrelated parts. In the 19th century, various diseases were found in the land of the ‘pale-faced Celt,’ each of which wreaked their own form of havoc. Each climate had its pestilence, and the English empire had several with which to contend. If the Monthly Review considered the origins of the novel as stemming from a ‘diseased and polluted’ mind, then it is incredibly and terrifically so, for the air was indeed diseased. News of plagues in various countries and on English soil, the death of Shelley’s son William to typhus in 1819, and Byron’s death in the Eastern climes of Greece in 1824 all contributed to the images of death and pestilence we see in the novel. Like airborne diseases transmitted through the effluvia and miasma, the news and current events of the day inhabited Shelley’s thoughts.

Aside from Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, or Defoe’s A Journal of a Plague Year, (the Great Plague of 1665 continued to loom large in the minds of the British), Shelley may have drawn inspiration from reports on typhus, which was prevalent in Ireland at the time. Three typhus outbreaks in Ireland are relevant to the time frame of the novel’s production: 1816-19, which combined with the relapsing fever resulted in 700,000 cases out of a population of six million. In 1821-22, a typhus outbreak also combined with famine and fever, and typhus struck again in 1826-28.[35] There were also prior instances of typhus during the Crimean War, while Napoleon’s troops suffered from the disease in 1813, the cultural memory of which could be related to the image of Evadne dressed as a soldier, spewing curses and disease. Charles Creighton observes that the period from 1803 until the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 “was one of the worst times of epidemic typhus in the history of modern Europe.”[36]

Throughout Ireland, Scotland, and England, typhus occurred alongside smallpox, dysentery and relapsing fever (a vector-borne disease that is transmitted through the bites of lice or ticks). There was relapsing fever from 1816 to 1828, which Creighton says, “was more obvious in Ireland and Scotland, than in London, Bristol, or elsewhere in England, but was not altogether unobserved in London, whether in 1817-1819 or in 1827-1828.”[37] Dysentery rose above normal levels in 1824, which was a particularly hot and moist summer, yet it was the summers of 1825 and 1826 when dysentery became common in Ireland.[38] Disease of one form or another surrounded England. Whether disease was something that existed in the common cultural memory of the past, like the typhus of the wars, or pervaded the air of the present, for Shelley and for her readers, disease was ever present. It assumed one shape or another, as it traveled through the isle and from abroad. As the novel indicates, much like early 19th century England, disease was literally and figuratively in the air, unavoidable and ready to strike.

Destroyer of Worlds

By the time the plague reaches the supposedly impregnable walls surrounding England, it assumes its original, unspoken and dreaded qualities. People only speak of it in hushed tones, barely uttering its name, until it is mentioned in the newspapers, which disseminates fear and the word they are afraid to speak. However, news of the outbreak is buried, “the paragraph was inserted in an obscure part: ‘We regret to state that there can no longer be a doubt of the plague having been introduced at Leghorn, Genoa and Marseilles.’”[39] The plague remains a great unutterable fear, and to even say the word may result in indirect contamination, or affliction. Verney notes this fear, “I dared not pronounce the word plague, that hovered on my lips, lest they should construe my perturbed looks into a symptom, and see infection in my languor.”[40] One of the symptoms of cholera is “an appearance of overpowering lassitude […] with a pallid, anxious and sorrowful cast of countenance.”[41] When the epidemic does arrive in England, Lord Protector Ryland, the first to flee London, visits Windsor to articulate his fears to Verney and his party. The description of Ryland intimating everyone’s fear is similar to that of a diseased man, for the utterance Plague falls, “involuntarily, from his convulsed lips,” like a victim suffering from cholera, who emits fluids from both ends.

While the plague spreads across the isle, fear and anxiety precede it. Before contracting the plague, Ryland resembles a victim, when he is described as being shriveled and jaundiced by perpetual fear. The news that England is contaminated literally plagues everyone, and it is essential to the novel’s disease discourse that the word alone – plague- can become a disease. Verney even assumes that the reader will be afflicted if fully informed. The power of narration, of disclosure and therefore of psychological, imaginative contamination could result in a stricken appearance, as Verney believes that if he tells his reader what he has seen, they would react with “limbs quivering and [their] hair on end.”[42] It is as if the idea of plague, not the thing itself poses the biggest fear. If the characters fear that the very air is contaminated, then they are already the walking dead. Verney has a vision that echoes this idea, for he has a “vision of Adrian’s form, tainted by pestilence, and sinking in death.”[43] The plague has the ability to sicken the imagination and the soul before it ever harms the physical body. It is also the power of the imagination and of prior narratives that tells Verney what to expect from this plague. He owes his experience with plague to Brockden Brown and Defoe, for they provide him with accounts so vivid that “we seemed to have experienced the results depicted by them.”[44] Verney’s imagination has already been diseased by prior texts, and his first encounter with a victim of the plague causes his limbs to quiver and his hair to rise, much like how he imagines his own readers reacting to his narrative. I believe that Shelley wove her own experiences into the novel, ranging from her own reading to the contemporary reports of disease and the experience of her son’s death. Her readers would have understood Verney’s fears and his reactions to it.

How does one battle a disease, which has the ability to “invest [man’s] form, is incarnate in his flesh, has entwined herself with his being”?[45] The plague moves from the physical, biological realm to the inner psychological core. It is no longer restricted to the external world, but as Verney’s vision of Adrian demonstrates, the plague invades everything, even a disease free body. Verney realizes that it is impossible to combat something that can ingrain itself into the human form and render it a vessel for destruction. The inability to determine what the novel’s plague is or is not, how it kills and how to stop it, renders the plague protean, a mystery, like death, and like life. No one in the novel can find an appropriate method for surviving, because they have not discovered exactly what it is that kills them, or what can keep them alive. Similar to Shelley’s readers, the characters’ knowledge of epidemiology is nascent, limited to a few theories. They either believe the air is contaminated or that the plague is transmitted through human interaction, so one is left with the choice of fleeing an area, or isolating oneself. Unfortunately, both alternatives do not offer salvation. In a cruel and imaginative turn, Shelley does not allow for any wiggle room for her characters, since she combines several powerful diseases into one that annihilates nearly everyone, even while 19th century medicine, still trying to understand the spread of disease and its vectors, ensured the survival of whole populations. However, in the novel, the war on the plague is like the war on terror – it is ideological, not real, and therefore impossible to wage.

Using the historical contexts and epidemiological origins of Shelley’s plague, it is possible to move into other readings. Related to Evadne, the plague is linked to the East and its exotic culture. It is also possible to read the trope of the seductive, exotic female, poised to ruin domestic order. In an obvious connection, the plague can represent the consequences of what happens when the West tries to dominate and colonize the East, in particular India. Another relevant trope is the politicization of the plague, for which there are plenty of examples. It can be ‘chained,’ hence quarantined, as well as enforced a ‘term,’ as if a natural agent can be controlled. Once it is ‘dead,’ it is also given monarchical attributes: “she abdicated her throne, and despoiled herself of her imperial scepter among the ice rocks that surrounded us. She left solitude and silence co-heirs of her kingdom.”[46] The plague is attributed warlike vehemence, given a ‘potent weapon,’ ‘shafts’ ‘arrows,’ ‘showering promiscuous death,’ and it remains an invader until the very end. Arnold argues that it is customary to apply military metaphors to diseases, “to speak of their ‘attacks’ and ‘invasions,’ of the ‘devastation’ they cause.”[47] Though the plague is at first represented as an enemy, it eventually becomes more; like the different diseases, which seem to compose it, the plague has the ability to become and to be interpreted as potentially everything and anything.

“To the Illustrious Dead”[48]

The plague is an amalgamation of diseases which Shelley probably had some knowledge of, specifically cholera, with elements of typhus, plague, and yellow fever. Like the Asiatic Cholera epidemic, the plague ravages the earth for seven years. Without mankind to feast upon, the plague disappears. Lacking something to attack, the plague vanishes, but for Shelley’s readers, this is not the case, since disease is potentially everywhere: in the plethora of diseases found outside the pages of the novel in newspapers, in letters from loved ones and in reports from abroad. Yet, within The Last Man, Shelley’s fictional plague reflects its diverse origins through its propensity to constantly mutate. The plague begins as a word, yet it is an entity that cannot be defined or narrowed down because it is continually mutating into different diseases. The plague is always changing, yet the destruction it renders upon mankind never ceases.

If Shelley’s novel is the offspring of a diseased imagination, then it is no accident that her protagonist and alter ego, Lionel Verney, has several moments of imagining the absolute worse. To return to Verney’s dream, it is no surprise after investigating the historical origins of Shelley’s plague that he envisions Raymond’s form “altered by a thousand distortions,” which can be imagined as the various diseases present in the 19th century. The pestilential, immaterial form of Raymond threatening to engulf the world and spread disease and devastation encapsulates the fear of Shelley and her contemporaries at a time when it was difficult to understand and combat something that could not be detected or analyzed. It is the fear of the unknown and the unknowable that carries forth the novel, as well as the fear that what was once a safe haven, be it England, the home, and even the mind, can be converted into a sepulcher.