The Plague Novel Mary Shelley Wrote in 1826

In late January 1826, in the modest Kensington flat she had rented after returning to England from Italy three years earlier, the twenty-eight-year-old widow Mary Shelley finished correcting the proofs of her fourth novel and sent the bundle back to her publisher, Henry Colburn. The novel was a three-volume work of approximately 200,000 words titled The Last Man. It was published on 23 February 1826. It was reviewed across the British press over the following weeks. The reviews were unanimous in their hostility.

The novel is set in the late twenty-first century — Shelley’s plausible future — and follows the gradual extinction of the human species by a global pandemic plague that begins in Constantinople in 2092 and spreads outward over the following seven years until only one human being remains alive, a former English aristocrat named Lionel Verney, who narrates the story from the ruins of Rome in the year 2100. The plague has no microbiological identity, no described mechanism, no available treatment. It simply kills everyone, methodically, with the inevitability of a natural law. The novel ends with Verney walking alone across an empty continent, certain that he is the last person and that his account of what happened will eventually be read by no one.

It is, by reasonable margin, the first major English-language novel of a global pandemic apocalypse. It was Mary Shelley’s most personal book — its three main male characters were direct portraits of her late husband, Percy Shelley, of Lord Byron, and of her own father William Godwin — and it was the only one of her four novels that her contemporaries considered an outright failure.

It sold poorly. The first edition’s three volumes had a print run of fifteen hundred copies. The publisher disposed of the remaining stock as remainders within eighteen months. There was no second edition during Shelley’s lifetime. The novel was effectively out of print from 1828 until 1965, when it was rediscovered by feminist literary scholarship as part of the broader reassessment of female Romantic-era writers.

Why the critics hated it

The 1826 reviews — collected and analyzed by the modern scholar Charlotte Sussman in a 2008 essay — divide into three categories of complaint.

The first complaint was that the premise was absurd. Reviewers in the London Magazine, the Monthly Review, and the Literary Gazette all argued, in similar terms, that the idea of a plague extinguishing the entire human population was so implausible that no serious reader could be expected to engage with the narrative. The plagues that had appeared in human history — including the recent cholera epidemic that had begun in Bengal in 1817 and had been killing people across Europe in waves throughout the 1820s — had always left survivors and had never approached the totality Shelley described. A novel that postulated total extinction was not science fiction (the genre did not yet exist as such) but, in the standard 1820s critical vocabulary, romance of the most extravagant kind.

The second complaint was that the political setting was disrespectful. Shelley’s late-twenty-first century was a republican England — she had abolished the monarchy in the novel’s backstory, set in approximately 2070 — with most of Europe organized as a federation of post-revolutionary republics. The English Tory press of 1826 found this premise unacceptable on principle. The Quarterly Review described the book’s politics as “mischievous.” The Literary Gazette complained that the novel “wantonly insults the institutions of our country” by imagining their dissolution within seventy years.

The third complaint was that the autobiographical material was tasteless. The three main male characters — Adrian, the gentle visionary; Lord Raymond, the charismatic political adventurer; and Verney himself, the narrator — were so transparently Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley herself (with the gender shifted) that nineteenth-century reviewers refused to engage with the novel as fiction at all. They treated it as a thinly-disguised memoir by a widow who was still in mourning and had no business publishing her grief in three volumes. The London Magazine called the novel “a melancholy and indecorous exposure.” Shelley’s circle of literary acquaintances — including Thomas Moore, who had been Byron’s close friend — let her know privately that they considered the use of the Byron character in particular to be unseemly.

The cumulative effect was that The Last Man, by the end of 1826, was considered by the British critical establishment to be a failed novel by an author who had perhaps not fulfilled the promise of Frankenstein eight years earlier. The judgment held for nearly a century and a half. The standard nineteenth-century literary handbooks listed Shelley’s novels as Frankenstein (essential), Valperga (substantial), The Last Man (regrettable), and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (forgettable).

What it actually contains

The novel was, in retrospect, considerably ahead of its critics. The pandemic plot — with its careful attention to incubation periods, infection vectors, quarantine measures, public-health responses, and the eventual political collapse of institutions overwhelmed by mortality — anticipates the structural template of essentially every subsequent pandemic narrative in English-language fiction. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) had been her closest precursor, but Defoe’s plague is local (London 1665) and his narrative ends with the city’s recovery. Shelley’s plague is global and her narrative ends with the species. The shift in scale is the genuine literary innovation.

The autobiographical material — which the 1826 reviewers had treated as a flaw — has since been considered the novel’s other major contribution. The portrait of Lord Raymond (modeled on Byron) is the most psychologically detailed extended fictional treatment of Byron written by anyone who knew him personally. The portrait of Adrian (modeled on Percy Shelley) is the most fully realized fictional version of her late husband in any nineteenth-century text. Shelley reread the novel privately in the late 1820s and early 1830s; her journals record several passages in which she returned to specific scenes involving the Adrian character with deep grief. The autobiographical pressure that the 1820s critics had found indecorous is now widely considered the novel’s emotional spine.

The 1965 critical rediscovery, conducted initially by feminist scholars including Ellen Moers and later by Anne K. Mellor, established The Last Man as one of the more important novels of late English Romanticism. The standard scholarly editions began appearing in the 1970s. The novel is now in print in multiple editions and is part of the standard undergraduate Romantic literature curriculum at most English-language universities.

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2023 produced a surge of new academic and popular interest in the novel — most of it focused on Shelley’s surprisingly modern treatment of pandemic governance, public health, and the social dynamics of a population under sustained mortality pressure. The standard scholarly edition (Oxford World’s Classics) reprinted in 2021 with a new introduction noting the topical resonance. The novel sold more copies in 2020-2021 than in any other two-year period of its existence.

Where the manuscript is

Mary Shelley’s original manuscript of The Last Man has not survived. The corrected proof sheets she sent back to Colburn in January 1826 have not survived either. The earliest surviving text of the novel is the first edition itself, of which approximately three hundred copies are known to exist in libraries and private collections worldwide.

Shelley’s working journal from the composition period of 1823-1826 survives in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The journal contains scattered references to the novel’s progress, the working titles she considered (including The Last Man and the rejected Verney), and several deeply personal passages connecting the novel’s grief to her own — Percy Shelley had drowned in the Bay of Spezia in July 1822, three and a half years before she began the novel; their son William had died of malaria in Rome in June 1819, seven years before. The novel’s plague kills children, husbands, and friends in approximately the order Shelley had lost them.

The last page of the manuscript Shelley sent to Colburn is described in her journal entry of 12 January 1826: Finished the book today. The journal entry then breaks off. There is no entry for the following several weeks. She seems to have not written in it again until late February.