The Last Man

Late in the twenty-first century, Lionel Verney rises from poverty into a charmed circle of friends — among them the idealistic Adrian, heir of England’s last king, and the brilliant, restless Lord Raymond, who will leave to fight for Greece. For a time their lives are full of love, ambition, and the politics of an imagined future republic. Then a plague comes out of the East. It cannot be cured or outrun, and year by year it empties the world.

The Last Man follows that slow extinction to its end, until Verney walks alone through a depopulated Rome as the single survivor of his species. Beneath its imagined future lies a private grief: written after the deaths of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and of Lord Byron, Mary Shelley wove portraits of both men into her characters, resurrecting her lost circle on the page only to let the world end around them.

Savaged at its publication in 1826 and long neglected, the novel has been rediscovered as a pioneering work of apocalyptic and pandemic fiction — and as one of literature’s most haunting studies of mourning and solitude, written decades before the genre it helped invent had a name.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the book’s composition, reception, and method, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.