The Last Man

First published in 1826, and set in 2093, The Last Man by Mary Shelley is an unsettling account of a plague that descends upon earth and wipes out humanity. The novel charts the thoughts and experiences of narrator Lionel Verney, who is left alive when everyone else has died. Just hear this:
"We will fight the enemy to the last. Plague shall not find us a ready prey; we will dispute every inch of ground and, by methodical and inflexible laws, pile invincible barriers to the progress of our foe. Perhaps in no part of the world has she met with so systematic and determined an opposition. Perhaps no country is naturally so well protected against our invader; nor has nature been so well anywhere been assisted by the hand of man. We will not despair. We are neither cowards nor fatalists....remember that cleanliness, sobriety and even good humour and benevolence are our best medicine".
Guh! I wonder what Shelley meant by cleanliness - hand-washing? - and why does she imagine that plague is not of nature, but an unnatural outside force? Scarier still that she published her book almost one hundred years before the 1918 pandemic, and all of the others we had encountered since. However, in the world she created, health and social care did not exist. Whatever, it is a thrilling story, beautifully written and a pleasure to read, filled with rounded characters and cliff-hanging events all the way through. However, the puzzle remains: just why did the story never attain the popularity of Shelley’s earlier novel? In answering this, we have to consider the Victorian psyche. In Frankenstein, the Monster was an outcast from the beginning. Not fully human, a comfortable readership could seize upon the feelings of security that he engendered, a smug thank goodness that I am not like that. No wonder the Monster launched a thousand other similar stories and was ripe for the movie industry when it happened. But Lionel Verney is fully human. He is every man, anywhere, and the majority of readers possibly found it too unsettling to contemplate such an end to humanity. Nor is The Last Man anyway like a techno-thriller of today. There is no pro-activity by a mad scientist here, no dirty bomb, no stray gene. The plague simply descends and annihilates everyone - except Lionel Verney. Like I said - Guh!