The tone in the passage quoted above echoes a Malthusian worldview, which helped Charles Darwin envision how survival itself was a virtue that affected evolutionary progress. Malthus’s “Essay on the Principles of Population” (1798) proposes that the plight of human experience (war, famine, disease) could not be wholly extirpated by Enlightenment institutions such as democratic government, intensive technological farming, and enhanced medical technology. Shelley’s father, William Godwin, an Enlightenment political idealist, wrote a lengthy refutation of Malthus’s essay. However, Mary Shelley’s novel consistently builds and then systematically destroys schemes of Enlightenment-rational and Romantic-imaginative hope developed by her male characters (Paley xv). The Last Man is a Malthusian work without recourse to salubrious progressive evolution. In describing the capricious moods of nature, Shelley figures Mother Earth as the author of both jeremiads and idylls; her duplicity is all the more unsettling. For chilled British readers, there is a notable irony that a warmer world resembling colonies in the British Indies (both East and West) may dress up like paradise, but the climate change is an epidemiological nightmare. Shelley takes the Malthusian notion one notable step further by envisioning a world in which even Edenic, productive, and nurturing Nature offers no succor to the cursed human race. Much worse than providing a challenge to survival, Lionel Verney comes to know the pleasant natural world as a set of false signs that belie a fate of death by disease. Order and balance seen in nature are illusive hopes, manifestations of overwrought human cognition rather than a true mirror of larger intelligible forces at work in the cosmos. Verney’s narrative repeatedly returns to microcosmic images of order and containment lost to the catastrophe of universal human decline.
Part of this lost control over the ecological world seems attributable to the lost cultural control of the imperial power. Alan Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease devotes a long and thorough chapter to The Last Man’s epidemiology. England harbors ships that have landed on every continent, bringing their stores of trade goods, humans and other animals, and mi-crobes. Each one of these categories has a quality of invasiveness to it. Goods from other climates invade the British identity and change consumer appetites, a trend particularly suspect in the nineteenth century, with the import of addictive opium and foods reliant on slave labor (coffee, sugar, chocolate). Foreign men contribute to the worldliness of London, but their settling in England provides an early glimpse of immigration debates, which often took a pointedly racialized tone. Globalization allows the easy traversal of disease from more resistant populations to more vulnerable ones. Colonial history shows that most diseases were carried from Europe to the native populations of colonized lands, but in Shelley’s novel this pathway is reversed. The plague arrives in England from an American trade vessel, and in Italy from the nearest Eastern country: Turkey. Europe is laid open to the world’s diseases as a porous, susceptible body.
Part of the novel’s paranoia must be accounted for by the very real concerns about urban sanitation in the nineteenth century. Cholera arrived in England six years after the publication of Shelley’s novel, during the second cholera pandemic. The first pandemic affected India, China, and Indonesia, including British colonial regions where there was a large military presence (Paley xiii). The second pandemic reached London and Paris in 1832 from its origin in the Ganges River Delta, and it claimed sixty-five hundred lives in London and a hundred thousand in France (Rosenberg 101). Cholera remained a serious water-borne threat in Europe until 1851, the year of Shelley’s death. Her generation directly experienced how global trade routes served as disease vectors that could rapidly and efficiently carry bacteria from locales of origin into vastly different climates and populations, moves that often dramatically increased a disease’s virulence.
Shelley’s depiction of the rapid spread of disease in the mysteriously warmer English climate of 2100 aligns with present-day epidemiological concerns about how pathogen habitats will be expanded via climate change. As Frederick Buell notes, environmental despoilment in the twenty-first century involves a constant network of exchange among macro-, meso-, and microbiological conditions: “Raising the likelihood of a substantial increase in serious infectious disease are trends like climate change, development, habitat destruction, pollution, overpopulation, urban slummification, the industrialization of agriculture, and the rise of global transport and mobility. A host of decisive human modifications of natural and social environments—rapidly expanding modifications that lead not just to the destruction of macroecosystems but also to deeply problematic alterations in microbiological environments, are thus responsible for the rise of infectious disease” (129–30). This twenty-first-century perspective shows how the ecology of disturbance operates at many scalar equivalencies simultaneously—the macrocosmic issue of global epidemiology must consider microcosmic conditions in local climates and the immune capacities of local populations. Even as antibiotics have dramatically curtailed individual suffering from infections, they have the epidemiological side effect of promoting mutant bacteria. Liberated from intraspecies competition, our antibiotics select survivor microbes, or “superbugs,” that become the next generation to infect human populations.
Nineteenth-century theories of miasma suggested that unhealthy environments had certain characteristics, particularly fog and dampness that incubated “bad air.” Miasmatic theory was used to explain the cholera outbreaks in large European cities and provided the basis for major renovations that cleared out stagnant waterways in urban areas and drained wetlands in the country. These measures did indeed improve the sanitary and health situation, but not for the reasons miasmic theory cited. When John Snow discovered in 1854 that the epicenter of the London cholera epidemic had been the Broad Street pump in Soho, cholera transmission was correctly linked to waterborne germs, and the ground was laid for the identification of microbes as the causes of illness. Shelley’s treatment of Lionel’s inoculation certainly relies on the contemporary “bad air” conventions of miasma, but the scene is much more complex than the cliché of the damsel catching a chill from her evening walk in the moors. He enters a dark room in London: “A pernicious scent assailed my senses, producing sickening qualms, which made their way to my very heart [. . .]. I lowered my lamp, and saw a negro half clad, writhing under the agony of disease, while he held me with a convulsive grasp. With mixed horror and impatience I strove to disengage myself, and fell on the sufferer; he wound his naked festering arms round me, his face was close to mine, and his breath, death-laden, entered my vitals” (336–37). Here, it is not London’s bad breath that is infectious but the racialized encounter that throws the Englishman into the arms of the African, in a gust of colonial breath and tropical disease. Plenty of racial anxiety is revealed through the quasi-intimacy of their entanglement; this could not be an arbitrary choice of disease vector. This scene speaks to British anxiety about the effects of colonialism, which is the most popular interpretation of the novel. What is missing from these colonial and epidemiological readings is an account of how a disturbed nature provides the stage for this drama. There would be no disease exchange in this encounter between racial others if the climate had not already begun to shift away from established patterns.
The unnatural global warming estranges Europeans from their environments of adaptation, heightening their susceptibility and bringing them into an intimate common fate with the world’s other peoples. Contagion makes the other into brother. The Last Man’s global warming theme begins with descriptions of war-torn Constantinople, gateway between East and West:
The southern Asiatic wind came laden with intolerable heat, when the streams were dried up in their shallow beds, and the vast basin of the sea appeared to glow under the unmitigated rays of the solsticial sun. Nor did night refresh the earth. Dew was denied; herbage and flowers there were none; the very trees drooped; and summer assumed the blighted appearance of winter, as it went forth in silence and flame to abridge the means of sustenance to man. [. . .] All was serene, burning, annihilating. [. . .] The sun’s rays were refracted from the pavement and buildings—the stoppage