Here, the disease is secondary to the famine caused by the failure of the rains. The climate’s shift toward a desertlike ecosystem has occurred too rapidly for flora or agriculture to adapt, and the plague’s path cuts directly through the bodies of a weakened population. Before long, both the climate and its sidekick, the plague, have swept across Europe into England. This is the point at which the other disorders of civilization, war and colonialism, fall into inconsequence compared to the “eruptions of nature” (232). The people start to balk at catastrophe: “Can it be true [. . .] that whole countries are laid waste, whole nations annihilated, by these disorders in nature?” (233). Orators mislead their countrymen into believing that the English are not subject to the natural disasters as natives of the tropics are:
Countrymen, fear not! [. . .] [Plague] is of old a native of the East, sister of the tornado, the earthquake, and the simoom. Child of the sun, and nursling of the tropics, it would expire in these climes. It drinks the dark blood of the inhabitant of the south, but it never feasts on the pale-faced Celt. If perchance some stricken Asiatic come among us, plague dies with him, uncommunicated and innoxious. Let us weep for our brethren, though we can never experience their reverse. Let us lament over and assist the children of the garden of the earth. Late we envied their abodes, their spicy groves, fertile plains, and abundant loveliness. (233)
This speech, with its sneering blend of false pity and racial pride, screams for correction. It comes on the very next page, where those English who might have envied the “spicy groves, fertile plains, and abundant [ecological] loveliness” of the tropics find, to their dismay, their wish granted (237). In August, the disease in an oddly hot England “gained virulence, while starvation did its accustomed work. Thousands died unlamented; for beside the yet warm corpse the mourner was stretched, made mute by death” (235). Several deadly years on, the four English seasons have fallen completely off their orbit:
Winter was coming, and with winter, hope. In August, the plague had appeared in the country of England, and during September it made its ravages. [. . .] The autumn was warm and rainy: the infirm and sickly died off—happier they. [. . .] The crop had failed, the bad corn, and want of foreign wines, added vigour to disease. Before Christmas half England was under water. The storms of the last winter were renewed. [. . .] But frost would come at last, and with it a renewal of our lease of earth. Frost would blunt the arrows of pestilence, and enchain the furious elements; and the land would in spring throw off her garment of snow, released from her menace of destruction. It was not until February that the desired signs of winter appeared. For three days the snow fell, ice stopped the current of the rivers, and the birds flew out from crackling branches of the frost-whitened trees. On the fourth morning all vanished. A south-west wind brought up rain—the sun came out, and mocking the usual laws of nature, seemed even at this early season to burn with solsticial force. It was no consolation, that with the first winds of March the lanes were filled with violets, the fruit trees covered with blossoms, that the corn sprung up, and the leaves came out, forced by the unseasonable heat. We feared the balmy air—we feared the cloudless sky, the flower-covered earth, and delightful woods, for we looked on the fabric of the universe no longer as our dwelling, but our tomb, and the fragrant land smelled to the apprehension of fear like a wide church-yard. (269–70)
The plague is borne of ecological disturbance first and foremost. The pleasing signs of spring come unearned by the privations of winter, and the missed cycle of cold allows the plague to overwinter without check. The violets, fruit trees, and corn still have English ecological origins, but their rhythms are spun into strange oscillations as the warmer months gain dominance, making evolutionary shifts in species composition inevitable.
This estrangement between humans and their accustomed environment threatens psychological consequences that we are beginning to understand in this age of climate change. What dies is the cognitive comfort of the home ecology, the well-known oikos that carries yearly rituals and passes time in its intelligible, cyclical way. The psychology of disturbance inherits this vacated brain space, as it did for Mary Shelley dwelling beneath the parasol of Tambora’s ash in the lost summer of 1816. With a “global weirding” mentality, we come to expect weather anomalies and look to anthropogenic sources to explain them.2 Chaotic tangles of human and natural activities seem to underlie every event, even the pleasantly warm day in winter. We become less able to enjoy ourselves within the weather, whatever its conditions, because they seem to be signifiers of an inexorable process already on the move, a beast slouching toward Bethlehem.
This beast is borne out by the frequency of objectively measured landmark weather events. As of this writing, the twenty warmest years in the last 130 (when the National Climatic Data Center began measurement) have all occurred since 1983, and every year since 1977 has been above the average set during that 130-year period (NCDC). Habitat shifts result from climate shifts: animal species are migrating about four miles every decade toward the poles, and average temperatures are moving much faster, at thirty-five miles pole-ward per decade (Hansen 146). That is, as each decade passes you need to move thirty-five miles north in the Northern Hemisphere, and south in the Southern Hemisphere, to experience the same average temperatures. At this rate, New York City would have present-day equatorial temperatures in about seven hundred years, and London in just over one thousand years, with summer seasons much more severe than at the equator because of the tilt of the earth’s axis.
Species are also migrating uphill for cooler conditions, which crowds out the former flora and fauna of the highlands. Mary Shelley’s fearsome vision is both ecologically and psychologically prescient. Disease may have been the most convenient and apparent cause of human extinction in her fictional apocalypse, but standing back from the sensations of the plague and colonialism for a moment, we can see that a disturbance in climate is the real baseline point of engagement in this novel.
What mechanism causes the earth’s warming in The Last Man? The novel is silent on this point. The narrative is much more detailed in its description of events as they occur than in any hypothesis of a cause. For a vision of the late twenty-first century, Shelley’s work is surprisingly poor in futuristic detail: there is little advance in technology, industry, or political or social life. With its lexicon stuck in early nineteenth-century conventions, The Last Man’s most prescient features are its disturbed landscapes and altered climate patterns. In a dream vision, a mainstay of the Romantic imagination, Lionel is haunted by a scene of a great feast turned foul, where goblets “were surcharged with fetid vapour” and his friend Raymond, “altered by a thousand distortions, expanded into a giant phantom, bearing on its brow the sign of pestilence. The growing shadow rose and rose, filling, and then seeming to endeavor to burst beyond, the adamantine vault that bent over, sustaining and enclosing the world” (202). Meager though its meaning may seem, this image—half disease, half pollution—is reminiscent of a volcanic eruption and the darkness that follows. The convex sky that shelters life from vacuous outer space is infected from within. Greenhouse gases are the fetid vapors that would push the landscape toward the imagined climate of 2100. Twenty-first-century culture, familiar with climate disturbance, has come to appreciate the apocalyptic vision that makes The Last Man a classic. Shelley’s secular apocalypse became a popular convention in later nineteenth-century fiction, laying a foundation for the two Victorian works discussed in the next chapter, Richard Jefferies’s After London and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.
Shelley’s work is a dirge for her portion of the Romantic period. But even with this funereal, backward-looking exigency, Shelley creates something new in her vision of human fate, and out of a deep personal sadness brings forth a text that arrives at a new way of knowing the world. Her fictional proxy Lionel Verney is touched by an excerpt from Macbeth, which he hears at a London theater during the plague years: “Alas, poor country, almost afraid to know itself. It cannot be called our mother but our grave, [. . .] where violent sorrow seems a modern ecstasy” (4.3.164–70). Shelley’s sorrow is modern because her vision has fused into a valid ecological forecast in this, her future world.
The modern ecstasy of violent sorrow has become a big business in entertainment, with apocalyptic films and