Last Man, The.
FIRST AMERICAN EDITION
Shelley, Mary W. The Last Man. Author of “Frankenstein,” &c. &c. In two volumes. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1833.
Two volumes; 8vo.; contemporary ownership signatures on the front endpaper of each volume; original blue paper-covered boards, lightly soiled; linen spine affixed with printed title labels, darkened; edgeworn. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First American edition, published seven years after the London edition; with 24 pages of publishers advertisements in the rear of the first volume. This is Shelley’s third novel, set in the 21st century. It focuses on the negotiation of public and private issues in the lives of six characters, who were considered to belong to the last generation on earth, and comes to a head when a plague destroys all people on earth except the narrator, Lionel Verney. Shelley admitted that two of the characters were modeled after her husband and Lord Byron, and it has been noted The Last Man that other characters resembled Claire Clairmont and Myron. Betty Bennett describes as a “highly political work of fiction, with its graphic scenes of death and war, [which] received almost universally scathing reviews. Dismissed as another end-of-the-world work of the kind then popular, with its fundamental thesis of the imagination as curative and its parable of personal and societal politics, the novel was alien to contemporary critics.” Alkon, Origins of Futuristic Fiction, p. 188-190; Anatomy of Wonder (1976) p.1-48, (1981) p.1-51, (1987) p.1-85 and (1995) p.1-85. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 2020. Clarke, Tale of the Future (1978), p.3; Lewis, Utopian Literature, p.177; Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p.194; Negley, Utopian Literature: A Bibliography 1025. Bleiler (1978), p.178; Reginald 13003; Block p.213; Woolff 6281; Lyles B1c.
Though it is set in the future, Shelley begins her Introduction with a look toward the past. She explains that she and a companion crossed the Bay of Naples to visit old Roman villas at Elysian Fields and Avernus, and explored caves. She says that after this visit, she had “been employed in deciphering these sacred remains. Their meaning, wondrous and eloquent, has often repaid my toil, soothing me in sorrow, and exciting my imagination to daring flights, through the immensity of nature and the mind of man” (vi). She says that her inspiration for The Last Man was drawn from her Napoleonic experience: “I present the public with my latest discoveries in the slight Sibylline pages….But the main substance rests on the truths contained in these poetic rhapsodies, and the divine intuition which the Cumaean damsel obtained from heaven” (vii). She closes by saying she was “not unmoved” by her writing of this book.
Sunstein lauds Shelley’s effort, giving her not one, but two pieces of praise, “With Frankenstein she founded the genre we call science fiction…and enlarged its possibilities in The Last Man, the first futurist catastrophe novel and one of the most ambitious novels ever undertaken by a woman” (Sunstein, Emily. Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality. Maryland: JHU Press, 1991; 4).
(#10898)
OCLC: 13
Bennett, Betty T.. “Shelley , Mary Wollstonecraft (1797–1851).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.
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