There were only two last man works of literature that could properly be termed atheistic, involving a true rejection of divine action ending the world or redeeming humanity at the end of time. Vijay Mishra, a literature professor, has compared traditional “millenarian” works with the Gothic apocalyptic, noting that “a millenarian end affirms history and our place in a larger design, [while] Gothic apocalypse narratives portray a world exhausted and otiose.”49 While last man works written from a purely atheistic perspective were rare, they are notable for illustrating how Christian apocalypticism inspired reflections on a secular apocalypse and how these secular visions of the world differed from later scientific conceptions of the End.
Of the two atheistic works, the most explicit rejection of a supernatural ending for the world was found in Lord Byron’s poem “Darkness.” Byron, a legend in British literary circles even during his own time, wrote the poem while in a moody funk after the end of his marriage, but the poem damaged his image, earning him epithets such as the “head of the Satanic school.” Byron’s poem lacked an explanation for the apocalypse and did not feature a millennium following the eschaton. As contemporaries of Byron noted, “Darkness” included apocalyptic elements that resonated with prophetic passages from Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Revelation.50 Byron wrote his poem during the summer of 1816, a year that many called “the year without a summer,” because of its unusually cold temperatures and dark skies. Not known to Westerners then, the eruption of a volcano in Tambora, Indonesia, the prior year had caused the seemingly apocalyptic climatic conditions. The idea for Byron’s poem came to him on a particularly dark day that summer when candles had to be lit to provide light enough for writing and reading even at noon.51 The portrait of the last days that Byron painted was harsh and barren:
The world was void,
The populous and the powerful—was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths.52
What is important about Byron’s use of biblical imagery is “what Byron did not take from the Bible,” as Morton Paley, a scholar of Romantic literature, notes.53 Byron’s poem raises the hopes of a millennium by playing with biblical imagery to describe the actual End. For instance, men and women in Byron’s poem had “but one thought—and that was death” as total darkness fell upon the Earth; similarly, Revelation reports that “and in those days shall men seek death” but according to biblical account, men “shall not find it.”54 Byron’s vision disturbed his contemporaries, and commentators suggested that he had broached a topic that was unthinkable. Byron’s idea of humanity living and dying in an empty and meaningless way remained unimaginable to the Westerners who later articulated a scientific apocalypse.
Mary Shelley was a close friend of Byron’s; her novel The Last Man tells of a tight-knit group of couples that slowly experience the end of the world due to an inexplicable plague. By the end, only the narrator, Lionel Verney, remains, as the last man. Verney occupies his isolation by writing a personal history of his life and of the last days of humanity. He remarks on the futility of writing: “I … will write a book, I cried—for whom to read?—to whom dedicated? And then with silly flourish (what so capricious and childish as despair?) I wrote, ‘DEDICATION / TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD. / SHADOWS, ARISE, AND READ YOUR FALL! / BEHOLD THE HISTORY OF THE / LAST MAN.’”55
While Verney questions the very possibility that his account will be read, Shelley as author formally addressed the issue by transforming the account into a prophecy. The “author’s introduction” tells readers that the author discovered Verney’s narrative, which takes place in the year 2100, on a trip to Naples in 1818 upon a visit to “Sibyl’s Cave,” with “Sibyl” a reference to a legendary female prophet in ancient Rome.56 While Shelley redresses the problem formally, she does not escape the dilemma that is embedded in the last man genre; in their implicit assumption of a readership, fictional narratives of a last man suggest a resistance to an end of the world without design. Documenting the final days of human life on Earth is an attempt to make sense of the event and, as Verney attempts to do, leave an epitaph for humanity.
Shelley wrote her novel after the deaths of her husband, Percy Shelley; their friend Byron; and two of her children. The Last Man is an expression of her despair and loneliness in the aftermath of these losses. It also expresses the idea that humanity itself is alone, without any deity to provide comfort or meaning. Shelley’s atheism was empty and not humanistic, unlike later atheistic formulations. The last man’s account of the end of days as well as his desperate search for other survivors illustrates this bleak worldview that Shelley shared with Byron. Scientific apocalypticists, writing after Darwin, in many ways mirrored the attempts of Verney to understand his predicament, but Shelley’s novel itself was a performance for her contemporaries rather than a prophecy in itself, unlike how later end-of-the-world novels would position themselves.
These two atheistic last man works, while in the minority, laid a foundation for later scientific apocalyptic fiction, at least in terms of themes. One survivor (or a small group of survivors) of an apocalypse roaming the world in search of others is a theme that appears again in twentieth-century end-of-the-world literature. While there were no American last man fictional explorations, American Gothic writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Robert W. Chambers, and H. P. Lovecraft approached the darkness of Byron and Shelley.
Poe’s fantastical works, such as “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839) or “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), reproduced the horrors humans could inflict upon themselves or each other, even before the Civil War had birthed the dark supernatural fictions of Ambrose Bierce. Chambers’s 1895 short-story collection, The King in Yellow, connects several of its stories through the device of a book that turns readers insane and engineers their deaths. If Poe’s stories captured the irrationality and turmoil of human nature, Chambers’s stories hinted at malevolence in the world unexplainable by common sense or scientific thinking.
Lovecraft, who has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years, wrote what has been called “weird” fiction, works in the 1920s and 1930s that encompassed the horror and mystery of Poe and Chambers but also grasped the unimportance of humanity in a vast universe. Lovecraft “crafted a new gothic, linking it with science fiction, releasing a raw power of despair and disgust,” according to James Goho, an independent scholar.57 Modern atheists have adopted one of Lovecraft’s creations, a monstrous godlike hidden creature called Cthulhu, who in his fiction surreptitiously influences human existence, as a symbol of their unbelief. Though Lovecraft was a materialist, supernatural terror underpins his stories published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales. The men and women in his stories suffer from madness and eccentricity brought about by exposure to the inexplicable and nightmarish, and known science hardly limited Lovecraft’s imagination.
Though Lovecraft influenced later American horror writers like Stephen King and modern-day “weird fiction” authors like China Miéville, the scientific apocalyptic derived not from the terrible unknown but from the fearful implications of an evolutionary theory underpinned by natural selection. The despair of Byron and Shelley without a God to guide human history, echoed in the works of Americans like Chambers and Lovecraft, is not a strand followed in early scientific apocalyptic works. Until the nuclear age, most Western writers used science to mitigate the threat of a meaningless existence and purposeless end. After 1945, British apocalyptic works formed a literature of despair that might have pleased Byron and Shelley, but American apocalyptic works remained distinguished in their relative optimism throughout the twentieth century.
At the same time that Byron and Shelley visualized ends of the world without God, British Christians were devising a detailed system of premillennialism that Americans would adopt and revise. At the beginning of the nineteenth