Revolution and Ruin: The Last Man

The Mary Shelley discussion begins here

Hello, and welcome to Revolution and Ruin: Reading the European 19th Century! We’ll be recording our part of the discussion soon, but we wanted to give people a space to begin to chat, debate whether the Rebecca Solnit intro to the new Penguin Classics edition contains any insight at all into the text, collect some supplementary materials, etc.

The podcasts and videos of the discussion will be freely available, but the comment chat here, list of supplementary materials, and references will be after the paywall.

Just a note to say that Substack is pretty inflexible, so we’re going to have to experiment a little with facilitating chat. Apologies if it’s awkward to use the comments section, we’ll see if there’s something else we can do if it becomes intolerable.

The Last Man by Mary Shelley

Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich

In the late 21st century, England is in tumult. The monarchy is over, and there is great discussion about how and with what to replace it. The son of the final king, Adrian, finds company with sibling descendants of the impoverished nobility Lionel and Perdita, the ambitious nobleman Lord Raymond, and his own sister Idris. They are engaged in great discussions about how to live a life, how to organize a country, how to best fulfill ambitions great and small. Then comes the plague.

Their already small group dwindles down to one solitary survivor as they wander a ravaged Europe, looking for mercy and companionship. They encounter conmen, prophets, scientists, and lovers, and yet all will fall away. Finally Lionel is left alone to contemplate what the human project was even for if this is how it ended.

Originally published in 1826 after the death of her husband, her dear friend Lord Byron, two of her children, and a miscarriage, Mary Shelley depicts a world tilting into chaos, where neither god nor philosophizing nor art making nor love can bring relief. Shelley herself was born at the tail end of the French Revolution and would die in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution. With Mary Wollstonecraft (who died giving birth to her) and William Godwin as her parents, she spent her life deeply engaged in ideas about conformity and rebellion, authenticity and philosophy, art and living.