47 pages • 1 hour read
The Last Man
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Background
Authorial Context: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley (1797-1851) was a writer, editor, and journalist best-known for her groundbreaking science fiction novel, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). She was born to two intellectuals, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the political theorist William Godwin. Wollstonecraft died shortly after giving birth to Mary. Godwin always encouraged the younger Mary’s literary pursuits, while Wollstonecraft’s legacy remained a great influence in Mary’s life and thought. Growing up, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was surrounded by her father’s friends, many of whom were great writers and thinkers of the time. One of these friends was the radical poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, with whom she fell in love when she was a teenager.
Although Shelley was married, the two eloped to Europe with Wollstonecraft Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont. When the trio returned to England, they faced financial difficulties and social scandal over the adulterous elopement. Claire eventually had a brief affair with Lord Byron. Near Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, Claire and the Shelleys visited Byron, and the group famously had a ghost story writing competition, in which Wollstonecraft Shelley developed the idea for Frankenstein. Though her earlier work was published anonymously, she eventually began to publish under the name Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, paying homage to both her mother and her husband.
Wollstonecraft Shelley’s early life was marked by great tragedy. Between 1815 and 1819, she lost several pregnancies and children. While writing Frankenstein, her half sister Fanny Imlay and Percy Shelley’s legal wife, Harriet, both died by suicide. In December 1816, Percy and Mary married. They spent the next several years traveling widely and living abroad together, particularly in Italy. In 1822, Percy died in a boating accident off the coast of Italy, and in 1824 Byron died fighting for Greek independence. Shortly after hearing of Byron’s death, Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote in her journal, “the last man! [...] Yes I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me” (Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mary. The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844. Oxford, 1987). She was attempting to publish a posthumous edition of Percy’s poems at the time, but her estranged father-in-law prevented this from happening.
The following year, she began work on what would become The Last Man. For this novel, Wollstonecraft Shelley completed extensive research, including visiting locations for settings in the novel and sitting in on sessions of Parliament. Wollstonecraft Shelley published several more novels, poems, and journals after The Last Man, including finally editing an edition of Percy’s poems. She died in 1851 from a brain tumor. She has been an important part of the English literary canon since her groundbreaking novel Frankenstein.
Literary Context: Romanticism
Romanticism was a cultural and intellectual movement in Europe in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. The movement was a reaction to the rational Age of Enlightenment that had preceded it, as well as the increasing industrialization and imperialization of the era. Romantics rebelled against Enlightenment ideals by valorizing emotion, creativity, the natural world, and the glorification of the past. Politically, the Romantic movement was strongly associated with the revolutionary movements of the time period, drawing inspiration from the French Revolution and radical ideologies that questioned the traditional social and political hierarchies of European cultures.
The British Romantic Era in particular was focused on the idea of the author as a solitary genius. The main writers of the movement are generally divided into a “first generation,” featuring foundational writers such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake, and a younger “second generation” to which Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats belonged. In poetry, the Romantic movement was often concerned with expressing individual emotion and experience, placing a heavy emphasis on the poet’s subjectivity. In fiction and drama, Romantic writers frequently explored themes such as the tensions between individuals and society, the sublime, and the complexities of human freedom.
As the wife of a famous poet and an accomplished novelist in her own right, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was at the heart of the “second generation” of British Romantic writers. Her famous debut, Frankenstein, reflects both the attractions of scientific developments and the skepticism with which many Romantic writers regarded the idea of scientific and technical “progress.” The Last Man, written in the years after Percy Shelley and Lord Byron’s premature deaths, is often interpreted as a lament for lost Romantic idealism.
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