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Note: the following article on Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is a modified excerpt (pp. 70-74) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is an apocalyptic tale that, as the title suggests, deals with the possibility of someone being the last person left in the world after a plague has annihilated the human race. The trope of immortality is not only present, but also seen in a context of loss, destruction, and forlorn hope. Although Lionel Verney, the surviving character of The Last Man, is not an immortal in the strict sense of the word, he effectively possesses immortal status: he survives the death of everyone he knows, to the point that he apparently outlives every single person on the planet. In The Last Man, death is presented as preferable to staying alive.

The novel features a remarkably complex temporal scheme. Not only does it follow the typical narrative mechanisms of the Gothic canon – discovered manuscripts, multiple narrators, dubious objectivity – but also a time flow so chaotic that it verges on incoherence. The reader discovers that in the universe of The Last Man, time exists on more than one layer, as Albright argues:

Shelley frames her novel as an ancient prophecy by the Cumæan Sybil, written on Sibylline leaves (in various ancient and modern languages) found in a hidden cave in 1818 by an anonymous “author” … It is an ancient prophecy of a future apocalypse written retrospectively by its lone survivor, who looks back upon the final decades of the human race’s existence from the year 2100. By narrating the close of human history, the novel reconfigures and humanizes time. Since history is now complete, we can perceive it in its entirety. (2009, 133–134)

Newton’s Wildest Fantasy

The direct implication of the textual organization of The Last Man is that the reader – and, from Shelley’s perspective, the English reader of the 1820s – is in that very position: an accidental judge of humankind, who must survey the past and assess the future (or a future, in any case) and reach certain conclusions. For Verney time has ceased, as the history of the human race has reached its final chapter, and he is the last human being on Earth, responsible for compiling the final narrative.

Essentially, Verney mans the figurative station of the Newtonian deterministic universe, where all the prior conditions are known and the mathematical but cold truth of the cosmos is in plain sight. As he claims, “[t]ime and experience have placed me on a height from which I can comprehend the past as a whole; and in this way I must describe it, bringing forward the leading incidents, and disposing light and shade so as to form a picture in whose very darkness there will be harmony” (Shelley 1826).

On The Last Man and Temporal Implications

In Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, the nature of time is so intrinsically connected with culture and society, that one could argue that time becomes the main protagonist of the novel. Furthermore, as a result of the apocalyptic setting of the story, the concepts of culture and society are promoted so that they essentially refer to the sum (both temporally and spatially) of the human cultures, that is, the entirety of humankind itself. The collapse of objective time in The Last Man is effectuated metatextually, with the authors of the text (Shelley herself included) being vague about time measurement, as if time is rendered insignificant due to the events in the story.

Perhaps more notably, however, temporal distortion is also displayed through puzzling and alarming changes in nature. The weather in December resembles spring, the autumn is excessively warm, the winter lasts only three days, and overall, temporal patterns and seasonal changes appear as strikingly abnormal (Albright 2009, 138). An interesting point to underline, however, is that the alarm caused by such changes in the weather is precisely due to the inability to be certain about their cause. The novel leaves ambiguously open the possibility that nature is somehow infected as well as, for example, chapter V of volume II opens with a description of how “some disorder had surely crept into the course of the elements” (Shelley 1826).

Temporal Regression

Furthermore, facilitated by the dystopic surroundings, a sense of temporal regression is obviously at work. As calendar time is vague, unreliable and ultimately not pertinent, events are described increasingly more in terms of seasonal changes or time elapsed since a prior event. Despite its worrying behavior, nature becomes the primary way of measuring time in The Last Man, something clearly alluding to the opposition between the industrial, modern time measurement, and the agricultural, traditional one. In addition, it is important to underline the significance of the summer solstice in the novel, as Albright observes:

Several important events take place during this month, and it is a tumultuous month in The Last Man, filled with cosmic phenomena and portents, particularly around the time of the solstice. This celestial event has traditionally been endowed with cosmic significance from the time of the Druids – and invocation of what Heidegger would term primordial time. (2009, 137)

Although Albright perhaps implies it, he does not explicitly emphasize the importance of this conclusion. In a story that is spiritually and existentially charged, to substitute mechanical time with agricultural, and to accentuate the importance of the solstice is a direct reference to paganism. The cyclical nature of pagan time is also present, even in this “end of days” scenario. For although Verney is the Last Man, at the same time he automatically becomes the First Man. The metaphorical clock of the humankind has been reset, back to the mythological time of Adam, and the end has become the beginning once again (Albright 2009, 152).

A Temporal Synthesis

Effectively, the novel resolves the past/future conflict by synthesizing them into a new form. The eternal now of Verney absorbs the past, as the regression to older, pagan temporal schemes shows. This regression, however, is not a simple reversal (that would simply imply that the present is substituted by the past). Instead, it incorporates the future as well, in the form of a future that is, once again, open to possibilities and outcomes. However, the crucial element here is that this new beginning appears to be possible only when looked upon from an external perspective.

The Eternal Now as a Resolution

For Verney, there is no real resolution in sight, and the text remains problematic regarding issues of subjective experience in this synthesized temporal scheme. Mishra argues that in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man “[i]t is only through the Gothic dream that the sole survivor of the end of the world can present the unpresentable, the world’s end, the narrative of apocalypse in the making” (1994, 173). After all, from Verney’s subjective position, time continues to be linear as long as it includes the hope of a change.

At the end of the novel, he decides to begin wandering the earth, hoping to find some other human being. He explicitly rejects the form of eternal present that surrounds him, claiming “the monotonous present is intolerable to me … [F]ierce desire of change lead me on” (Shelley 1826). He also admits his desire to look for changes in nature and the weather, which is a plan with distinct tones of tragic irony – to look for linearity in a characteristically cyclical mode of temporal expression.

Still, the most telling confession of Verney is his very last sentence: “angels, the spirits of the dead, and the ever-open eye of the Supreme, will behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney – the LAST MAN” (Shelley 1826). It is a direct, explicit desire of the last man: to be an object, for that would also entail that he is still a subject. What Verney fears the most is not only the lack of change, but also the lack of exchange, in terms of a subject/object split. The kind of eternal now thrust upon him is very different from the divinely mediated form of the pre-Enlightenment period, as it appears desperately void and does not entail the assurance of a pre-destined future. Verney, calling upon “the ever-open eye of the Supreme”, essentially wishes that the end is predetermined: that he will eventually find death and salvation.

Works Cited

Albright, Richard S. Writing the Past, Writing the Future: Time and Narrative in Gothic and Sensation Fiction. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2009.
Mishra, Vijay. The Gothic Sublime. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.
Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Project Gutenberg. 1826. Web. Accessed on 29 May 2015. <http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18247/pg18247.html >.

Read more: Angelis, Christos. “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Doctoral Dissertation. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 2017. Available from the repository of the Tampere University Press.