Mary Shelley Invented the Pandemic Novel

It begins in the twenty-first century. England has become a republic. Europe is politically unstable. A mysterious plague spreads from Constantinople, but the English reassure themselves that it is happening somewhere else. Macedonia and Thrace might as well be on the moon. Distance will protect them. Then winter will. Quarantines appear. People flee. Religious fanatics promise salvation. Wealth buys time, but not exemption. Eventually the question is no longer how civilization will defeat the plague. It is what remains when civilization begins to disappear.

The novel was published in 1826.

Its author was Mary Shelley.

I’ve taught Mary Shelley and her cinematic afterlives for twenty years, so I’ve watched Frankenstein become newly prophetic every few years. Cloning, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence: sooner or later, somebody invokes the monster. We remember Shelley as the teenager who imagined one of the central problems of modernity, human beings acquiring the power to create something before acquiring the wisdom to live with what they created.

But Frankenstein wasn’t the only future Mary Shelley imagined.

Eight years later, Shelley published The Last Man, a novel beginning in 2073 and moving toward the end of the twenty-first century. Scholars have called it the first post-apocalyptic pandemic novel.

Yet unlike Frankenstein, The Last Man largely disappeared from popular memory. A pirated American edition appeared in 1833, and then the novel went unreprinted until a scholarly revival in the 1960s.

Its afterlife is easier to see if you stop looking for direct adaptations. Frankenstein became one of the most visibly adapted novels in film history. The Last Man had a more anonymous afterlife, its premise passing through M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend into Night of the Living Dead and the modern pandemic apocalypse. We didn’t exactly forget Mary Shelley’s second future. We forgot that it was hers.

Even Shelley presents the book as something more than an ordinary novel. In her introduction, she describes visiting the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl near Naples and discovering scattered leaves covered with prophetic writing. She gathers, deciphers and arranges the fragments into the narrative we are about to read. Contemporary advertisements called the book a “new Romance, or, rather Prophetic Tale.”

Calling Shelley a prophet now is almost irresistible. She gives us a twenty-first century of political instability, quarantine, mass migration, strange weather and a pandemic that people initially believe will remain safely somewhere else. But Shelley did not need supernatural powers to imagine epidemic disease. What she understood was how people behave when catastrophe is coming toward them.

By then, catastrophe had already come for her.

Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in 1822. Lord Byron died two years later. Three of Mary’s four children were already dead. Her half-sister Fanny Imlay had died by suicide. The extraordinary group of young people we remember gathered around Lake Geneva — the summer of ghost stories that produced Frankenstein — had largely vanished. Mary Shelley was twenty-eight years old.

That makes The Last Man a strange inversion of Frankenstein. At eighteen, Shelley imagined a man attempting to create life without women. At twenty-eight, after burying so many of the people she loved, she imagined a man remaining alive while almost everyone else disappeared.

Shelley’s plague does not announce itself as the end of humanity. It happens somewhere else first. People hear about it and calculate their distance from it. They expect geography to hold. They expect the season to change. They expect the structures around them to continue functioning because they always have.

Then they adjust.

That may be the most unnerving thing Shelley gets right. Catastrophe becomes ordinary long before it becomes complete. We live with pandemic memory, climate change, war, authoritarianism, ecological collapse, artificial intelligence, institutions less capable of promising the futures they once did — and none of it means we’re living through Mary Shelley’s apocalypse. It means we know the particular sensation of receiving signals that the future may not resemble the one we expected, while still having to buy groceries on Tuesday.

Readers in 1826 hated The Last Man. One critic called the author’s imagination “diseased.” Its pessimism seemed excessive, indecent even, the theme of lastness already worn thin by other writers of the period. Two centuries later we’re still telling the same story, and we’ve stopped being able to hate it. Station Eleven keeps art and performance moving through the wreckage. The Last Of Us bets everything on one relationship. Silo hoards knowledge like contraband. Fallout keeps asking whether anything worth keeping can be built from the values that destroyed the old world. The catastrophe itself has become background. What matters is what people decide to carry through it.

Shelley was already there in 1826.

Mary Shelley didn’t predict the end of the world. She already knew what it felt like to survive one.

Believing himself the last human alive, Lionel writes down what happened. Then he gathers provisions and books, finds a boat, and sets out across the Mediterranean looking for another person. He has no evidence anyone is out there.

He goes anyway.

Preserve the memory. Take the books. Look for someone else.

That was Shelley’s whole answer, and it was enough to outlast her.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading Andy Might! This post is public so feel free to share it.