TIME AND THE SIBYL IN MARY

SHELLEY’S THE LAST MAN

TIMOTHY RUPPERT

Eleven years ago, the late Betty T. Bennett asserted that Mary Shelley’s
1826 novel The Last Man epitomizes its author’s belief that “through
imagination one can re-see the world” (54) because the work “enfranchises
a new world order and a new world understanding” (82) facilitated by the
natural and vital power of creative thought. On this basis, Bennett cautioned
against pointedly selective readings of the piece since such treatments “often
uncritically replicate the [unfavorable] reception history of the novel when
it was first published” and are “inconsistent with the abiding philosophy in
Mary Shelley’s works” (73). Shelley’s philosophy, for Bennett, involves a
commitment to sociopolitical critique guided by an unwavering faith in the
imagination’s ability to better the world. In her best fiction generally, and in
The Last Man especially, Shelley engages the timely and the topical not simply
for their own sakes but as a way to spark in her readers the visionary alacrity
that revolutionizes the self and so forever transforms a part of humankind.
Bennett’s optimistic reading of Shelley’s third published novel may at first
seem startling, given that The Last Man recounts how by the year 2100 a virulent
pandemic kills all human life on earth save the narrator, an Englishman named
Lionel Verney, who chronicles the history of the disease from its provenance
to its cessation. Belonging in part to a body of European literature that includes
Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague
Year, Albert Camus’s The Plague, and Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh
Seal, The Last Man has been most commonly read over the last decade as a
critique of empire, a chilling requiem for an England ineluctably entangled
in the shared fate of all brutal and chauvinistic imperial states.1 Insofar as it
registers the imperialist mindset of the time, the novel indeed “rehearses long-
standing concerns about the Asiatic corruption of the British body politic,
along with more immediate fears about the potentially global ramifications of

Studies in the Novel, Volume 41, number 2 (Summer 2009). Copyright © 2009 by the
University of North Texas. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
142 / RUPPERT

‘colonial disease’” (Watt 139). But to read The Last Man solely as an index of
its day’s anxieties and ideologies is to risk the sort of selective analysis against
which Bennett warned. In contrast, Anne K. Mellor incisively mediates between
what the novel reveals of pre-Victorian England and what it says regarding
the timeless promise of human renewal. By studying the moment when
Verney contracts plague from a dying black man vis-à-vis the protagonist’s
surprising recovery, Mellor recognizes the redemptive possibility implicit in
the work: “This episode suggests that if human beings were forced to embrace
the racial Other rather than being allowed to define it exclusively as ‘foreign’
or ‘diseased,’ then they might escape the final destruction threatened by both
the biological and the sociological plague” (144) of which Verney writes. In
The Last Man, the potential for universal solidarity in the face of nightmarish
distress becomes realizable because Shelley blends contemporary critique with
her vision of the ameliorative imagination and so fosters, in Mellor’s words,
“the possibility of alternative beginnings, of never-ending new births” (144).
Taken together, Bennett’s and Mellor’s comments remind Shelley’s
twenty-first-century readers that, for as much as it reflects the sociopolitical
and cultural milieu of late Romantic England, The Last Man serves principally
to dramatize its author’s theory of the human imagination as a legitimate source
of both personal and public reformation. I assert this point not to discredit
current trends in Shelley scholarship but to recast them in light of the idea
that Shelley’s denunciation of empire in The Last Man gestures beyond the
particulars of the pre-Victorian moment to the recurring historical challenge
of shaping new and better human communities against paradigms of violence,
repression, and despair. For Shelley, the imagination is crucial to answering
this challenge because creative thought inspires and sustains new sociopolitical
paradigms; in this sense, she finds in the imagination a transformative quality,
or, more precisely, the power to effect lasting and meaningful renovation both
within the mind and beyond it. By reading her novel primarily as an indictment
of British imperialism, many Romanticists fail to note that Shelley presents a
unique vision of solidarity in the face of global catastrophe and so neglect the
narrative innovations through which she crafts that vision. In what follows,
I wish to discuss these innovations as they represent Shelley’s faith in the
imagination’s power to give birth to a new world astride the grave of empire.
Shelley’s interest in the imagination as an agent of positive change places
the novel within the tradition of British Romantic visionary poetics, that is to
say, of the literature of vision and prophecy as it appeared in England between
1789 and 1832 (to use the traditional framing dates for the Romantic period).2
During this era, poets and prose writers shared a keen fascination with the
creative possibilities conferred by the national legacy of literary prophecy,
an inheritance drawn from authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Philip Sidney,
Edmund Spenser, and especially John Milton, the erudite Puritan iconoclast
whose hatred of kings so crucially swayed both political and artistic thought
 SHELLEY / 143

in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the time of the French
Revolution, Milton was no less than a Whig saint, as Jared Richman has
recently suggested (396). The subversive and transformative elements of the
vatic tradition in England, particularly as established by Milton’s aesthetically
and politically radical work, appealed to both first and second generation
Romantic authors who sought not simply to describe their times but to remake
them. To such minds, prophecy offered a historically authoritative genre
equipped with unique artistic principles and a seemingly timely interventionist
ethic, whether turned to the renovation of individual men and women or of
whole nations. Miltonic literary prophecy therefore represented a way for art
to come to terms with conflict, parochialism, and disenchantment in an age of
serious historical crisis. For readers today, the visionary tradition elucidates
relationships among Romantics such as William Blake, the Lake Poets, and
Lucy Aikin, whose Epistles on Women (1810) sets forth her claim that she is “a
daughter of Milton,” as Jane Spencer has noted (4).
Although many Romantics looked to Milton as their salient national
forebear, the image of him as England’s most inspired and most courageous
anti-royalist poet was tellingly revivified in the work of such politically radical
post-war writers as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley. After
the Battle of Waterloo brought the curtain down on the Napoleonic drama on
18 June 1815, concluding more than twenty years of international bloodshed,
Byron and the Shelleys (who in 1816 spent the summer together in Geneva)
responded in part to the renewed absolutism of the post-Napoleonic milieu by
positing Milton and his literary legacy as the crux of their oppositional writing
(epitomized by Byron’s use of Milton as a noble counterexample to the Lake
Poet Robert Southey in the 1819 “Dedication” to Don Juan).3 For these young
authors, Milton served as a beneficent guide whose art helped to frame new
literary visions created in the face of anachronistic governance in Europe and
of intensified Tory repression at home.
After Napoleon’s final loss, Romantic visionary poetics reflected the fact
that the second wave Romantics, as Stuart Curran writes,

…survived the intellectual terrors of a quarter-century of war that devastated

and impoverished Europe within a pervasive metaphorical assumption.
Napoleon pitting himself against that amalgam known as the Holy Alliance
was the Satanic rebel defying the upholders of orthodoxy. The Napoleonic
Wars appeared to the sensitive minds of the age as a reality whose imperatives
were no less categorical for being fruitless, but more so, enforced with
historical urgency. (227)

Because the restoration of monarchical authority in effect transported Europe

backward in time to the ancien régime (Cox 55, Bainbridge 178), Mary Shelley
and her circle evoked the Miltonic tradition in works designed to inspire both
immediate sociopolitical change and permanent transformations in the human
mind and heart.
144 / RUPPERT

In light of these remarks, we may better appreciate that Shelley’s The Last
Man stands not only as a record of the British imperial psyche in the years
preceding the book’s publication but as a capstone achievement in British
visionary literature. In her late Romantic prophecy, Shelley explores the
subversive potential of the visionary imagination, thus carrying forward the
spirit of her literary coterie as that spirit manifests itself in such works as Percy
Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Byron’s The Vision of Judgment
(1822). At the same time, in the first of her novels to appear after the deaths
of her husband and Byron (in 1822 and 1824, respectively), Shelley surpasses
her contemporaries by restoring the Sibyl, a prophetic female voice from
Western antiquity, as a principal vatic authority. Through this reconfiguration,
she suggests that visionary poetics originates not in patriarchal scriptural
history (particularly as Milton interpreted it) but in a distinctly matriarchal
pagan past. As The Last Man’s fictional “Introduction” explains, Verney’s
text has been recovered, collated, and published by an Englishwoman whose
tour of Naples in 1818 occasions a visit to the Sibyl’s desolate coastal cave,
where she discovers the fragmented chronicle inscribed on scattered and long
unread leaves. Shelley’s Romantic traveler thus finds an image of the future
in a place of the past and presents it to the eyes of the present. This seemingly
vertiginous narrative experiment allows Shelley to unsettle hierarchical, linear
understandings of human temporality and so to present history as founded
indecisively on disrupted time. Shelley thus assays various notions of literary
and temporal continuity to show that humankind’s fate, despite history’s
myriad nightmares, is never foreordained; accordingly, her Last Man is less a
doomful prediction of imperial decay than a prophecy of hope justified by the
regenerative power of the human imagination.
Because an adventurous Englishwoman (who forthrightly protests
her interpretative limitations) redacts the sibylline leaves she has found
into Verney’s plague-chronicle, The Last Man invites speculation on how
a nightmarish future might look without requiring that this apocalypse be
accepted as a direct revelation of literal truth. Rather, the Verney account is
a story nested within a story that interweaves past, present, and future into
“simultaneous time-scapes” (Mellor 144) and so connects the history of what
occurs between 2073 and 2100–the “last year of the world” (Shelley 363)–
to both the ancient and contemporary worlds. Verney’s narrative is in reality
the composite product of three minds separated by more than two thousand
years: the Cumaean Sibyl (who does not appear as a flesh-and-blood character)
allows an intelligent and ambitious young Romantic to recover the work of a
person either long dead or as yet unborn. For this reason, Verney’s sketch of the
future, in its nihilistic forecasting of a single pattern for history, fails to speak
the last word on humankind’s destiny.
In this sense, Verney’s chronicle is not a message in a bottle brought
either forward or backward in time to 1818 Italy; rather, the work represents
 SHELLEY / 145

an intricate trans-generational collaboration properly associated with the

visionary poetics tradition. Recognizing the Sibyl’s cave to be a nexus of
collapsed time-states, the cusp at which past, present, and future blend in an
extraordinary continuum, the frame narrator describes her artistry in revising
the sibylline leaves:

Sometimes I have thought, that, obscure and chaotic as they are, they
owe their present form to me, their decipherer. As if we should give to another
artist, the painted fragments which form the mosaic copy of Raphael’s
Transfiguration in St. Peter’s; he would put them together in a form, whose
mode would be fashioned by his own peculiar mind and talent. Doubtless
the leaves of the Cumæan Sibyl have suffered distortion and diminution of
interest and excellence in my hands. My only excuse for thus transforming
them, is that they were unintelligible in their pristine condition. (Shelley 8)

“What is important,” Joseph Anthony Wittreich writes, “is a decipherer–

someone to integrate and explain and give continuity to the fragments. Prophetic
works are, by definition, fragmentary, the particles of a vision that receives
articulation and definition only to the extent that an author of a prophecy is
able to make its fragmentary parts cohere, each with the others” (51). The
Englishwoman’s endeavors thus accord with Wittreich’s description of how
visionary artists remake their respective literary inheritances (Milton xv).4
Just as St. John of Patmos engages and recreates his scriptural predecessors
or as the Romantics study and rewrite Spenser and Milton (as well as biblical
seers such as Revelation’s author), so the traveler to the Sibyl’s cave resets
Verney’s thoughts and words within the scope of her own vision of life. Thus
the linearity, cohesiveness, and finality of the plague tale are illusory, simply
impressions rendered through the Englishwoman’s diligent redaction of the
fragmented chronicle. The future collapses into a past recovered in the present
by a woman whose collative art suggests that she is not unlike the seer-poet
who intervenes in past visions to create new ways of seeing and being.
If in the novel Shelley “asserts the urgent necessity of collective psychic
transformation,” as Kari E. Lokke claims (133), then she does so with the
visionary’s faith in the value of human life and the openness of human history.
By design, Shelley challenges the deterministic, even fatalistic perspective
of history as the record of absolute necessity. Clearly, her novel is neither a
fictional reiteration of the1650s debate between Thomas Hobbes and Bishop
John Bramhall regarding chance and necessity nor a revisiting of the early
eighteenth-century conflicts between the philosophers Anthony Collins,
a necessitarian, and Samuel Clarke, a Newtonian libertarian. At the same
time, the book touches upon a polemic in English philosophy (of concern to
William Godwin, Shelley’s father, and Percy Shelley alike) that allows Shelley
to explore both the question of humankind’s role in history and the idea that
history realizes possibilities rather than circumscribes them.5
146 / RUPPERT

What distinguishes The Last Man from like-minded Romantic calls for
transformation is its use of the Sibyl, the revered pagan seer, as its principal
visionary ancestress. By transferring vatic authority from the patriarchal Judeo-
Christian scriptures to the matriarchal sibylline leaves, Shelley meaningfully
questions the masculine bias in Romantic prophecy: consider, for example,
that Byron’s The Vision of Judgment features an all-male cast (insomuch as
saints, angels, and devils can be identified by gender). She thus places “the
whole prophetic tradition, previously withheld from women,” into contact
with “a newly emerging female literature” (Wittreich, “The Work of a Man’s
Redemption” 50).6 Although he looks past women writers such as the British
spiritual mystic Joanna Southcott, who asserted herself as a female visionary in
her religious writings during the Romantic period (and whom Byron mocked
in The Vision), Wittreich recognizes that Shelley, by pointedly refashioning
British prophecy’s longstanding patriarchal idiom, significantly and lastingly
amplifies the tradition to accommodate female authors and their perspectives.7
Shelley’s purposeful evocation of the Cumaean Sibyl carries with it a
network of well-known historical associations, not the least of which is the
fact that her prophecies were gathered into sacred books to which the classical
Romans turned in times of crisis. Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price state
that “many innovations were inspired by the Sibylline Books, the collections
of oracles, kept and consulted by the duoviri sacris faciundis, which served
both to initiate change and to provide [legitimacy] for what might otherwise
have been seen as deviations from the ancestral tradition” (62). Beard, North,
and Price specify that these writings, rendered in Greek verse (62), later came
to be associated with the Cumaean Sibyl and “were believed to contain the
destiny of the Romans” (62), a people whose empire included parts of Asia
and North Africa as well as most of Europe. The sibylline prophecies enjoyed
a special status in imperial Rome because they were written down, and “the
Roman empire,” David Potter reminds us, “was an empire of the written word”
(95). The Cumaean Sibyl thus was distinguished from other sibyls by virtue of
the cultural faith that the Romans showed in her visions as these were recorded
in written language.8
Shelley thus recovers the sibylline prophetic tradition partly to challenge
the patriarchal aspects of Romantic visionary literature without departing from
historical precedents. It should be noted that this interpretation countervails
Samantha Webb’s contention that, by 1826, the Sibyl had become a powerless
symbol of Western antiquity. For Shelley’s audience, Webb claims, “the Sibyl
does not carry the prophetic authority she once did. Therefore the editor, as the
figure who grounds the frame of reference for this novel in the contemporary
world, receives the Sibylline text as an artifact, a historical curiosity from
a bygone era, which achieves its value as a rare object, not as a prophetic
warning” (132). She likens Shelley’s frame narrator to Walter Scott’s Peter
Pattieson, who, in the 1816 novel Old Mortality, “reworks” the title character’s
 SHELLEY / 147

“biased history into an ‘authoritative’ one” (Webb 132); consequently, the frame
narrator “refuses to appropriate the scattered Sibyl’s leaves for the prophetic
purpose they would have carried in ancient Rome–as a kind of revelatory
sacred document that inscribes the end of the world by merely describing it”
(Webb 132-33).
By portraying Shelley’s Englishwoman as an antiquarian (132-33),
Webb misses the fact that she is also a modern-day chresmologue, that is,
a collector who facilitated the circulation of prophetic texts in the classical
Roman world (Potter 95-96). “The chresmologos,” Potter states, “did not claim
authority as a prophet for himself (as far as we know this seems to have been
an overwhelmingly male profession): his claim to importance rested upon his
credibility as an accurate purveyor of ancient wisdom” (95). Although the
chresmologue seldom redacted the prophetic books within his possession, he
contributed significantly to the promulgation of these works, as Potter notes by
stating that “it was the ubiquitous chresmologos who spread the wisdom of the
inspired sages throughout ancient society” (96). As Shelley’s “Introduction”
suggests, the unnamed Englishwoman performs a similar role by presenting
what she has recovered from the sibylline leaves not because the plague-
chronicle is a historical oddity but because the work possesses a visionary
importance imparted to it by the spirit of the Cumaean Sibyl.
The Sibyl and her legacy therefore offer Shelley a superb exemplification
of an expressly non-Christian European tradition that nevertheless upholds
several tenets of the British visionary genre, key among which is that literary
prophecy is not by nature predictive.9 Prediction differs from written prophecy
in that the former presupposes a single direction or pattern for human history,
whether at the personal or communal level, whereas the latter posits history as
unsettled and changeable. By extension, the poet-seer is neither a soothsayer,
like the one who forewarns Shakespeare’s Caesar, nor a supernatural
clairvoyant, like any one of the Weird Sisters in Macbeth. To elucidate this
point, we may look at one of the central scenes in English vatic literature,
namely Adam’s vision of the human future in the two closing Books of
Paradise Lost, as illustrative of how prophecy reveals the pliancy of history
and summons humanity to intervene rather than to acquiesce. “As Adam learns
from Michael’s historical drama,” David Loewenstein asserts, “the history of
the human race involves no linear process; rather it consists, as Adam himself
observes, of men in successive ages treading ‘Paths indirect’” (XI.631, 97).
Adam’s vision, as Morton Paley argues, helps to illuminate The Last Man’s
shape and tone (115). Shelley draws her novel’s epigraph from the penultimate
Book of Paradise Lost (XI.770-72); the verses she selects are an especially
piteous outcry: “Let no man seek / Henceforth to be foretold what shall befall
/ Him or his Children.” Since she writes her mature work from a post-Waterloo
perspective, we may speculate fairly that Shelley uses these lines with some
thought to those verses that follow:
148 / RUPPERT

I had hope
When violence was ceas’t, and War on Earth,
All would have gone well, peace would have crown’d
With length of happy days the race of man;
But I was far deceiv’d; for now I see
Peace to corrupt no less than War to waste. (XI.779-84)

If the novel were linearly predictive, her explicit and implicit allusions to
Paradise Lost would support Paley’s claim that Shelley evokes visionary
principles to lament rather than to celebrate humankind’s destiny (115). But
this criticism, in light of both Loewenstein’s analysis and Milton’s poem itself,
proves at best the right finding from the wrong premise. We need look only
one hundred lines further into Book XI to find, with Loewenstein (97), the
redemptive and benevolent imagery that moves Adam, after witnessing five
strife-filled visions (including the vision of the lazar-house), to rejoice in the
promise of a new covenant, to come after the Great Flood, between humankind
and God:

O thou who future things canst represent

At present, Heav’nly instructor, I revive
At this last sight, assur’d that Man shall live
With all the Creatures, and their seed preserve. (XI.870-73)

Michael’s prophecy blends the sweet promise of halcyon days with bitter
scenes of hopelessness, thereby diversifying the significances to which the
spectacle of history points (Loewenstein 124). Literary prophecy in fact
disallows the closure of history to possibilities. Thus Adam and Eve depart
Eden with “the World…all before them” (XII.646) and so enter history, as
Loewenstein suggests, “with humility and courage” (125). Despite what Adam
has seen with his eyes and what Eve has seen in her dreams, hope continues
because history promises myriad possibilities rather than a single, inevitable
outcome. Seemingly paradoxical, what the Archangel reveals to the first
people matters less as a description of the future than as a summons to the
human imagination to seize historical opportunity, to dream and to enact new
realities for humankind. The prophecy, in other words, encourages imaginative
transformation.
Just as the concluding verses of Milton’s poem complicate the idea that
history follows a pre-established course, the few pages comprising Shelley’s
“Introduction” transform the notion of unidirectional history that Verney’s
chronicle of the future advances for some readers. If the frame narrator feels
little worry after her look at the twenty-first century (a point of concern for
Audrey A. Fisch), it is because she knows she has simply gazed into one
possible future, and she realizes that what she has seen is best interpreted as
a general delineation of human truths rather than as a precise description of
what awaits humankind in the years ahead.10 By recasting the sibylline leaves,
 SHELLEY / 149

the frame narrator prophetically intervenes into the plague-chronicle and, by

extension, into history itself. More exactly, she knows that what she presents
to her readership warns rather than damns, cautions rather than condemns. She
restores Verney’s story to persuade her audience of the imagination’s capacity
to generate dreams that may countervail the world’s nightmares. Surely,
cataclysm cannot be prevented merely by foretelling it, and history’s crises
and catastrophes are myriad. Nevertheless, Shelley’s frame narrator (here
reflecting her author’s faith in human creativity) seeks, like the Archangel
Michael, to move her audience to rethink human community against the image
of its discontinuation.
In this respect, The Last Man renders a prophecy within a prophecy, or rather
a vision of history within a vision of history. Verney and the Englishwoman’s
stories come together across time, imperceptibly intertwining in a way too
complex to dismiss as authorial legerdemain or as a prose version of Chinese
boxes or matryoshka dolls. As the Englishwoman intimates, a part of this effect
owes to her editorship and a part owes to the prophetic influence conveyed by
“the slight Sibylline pages” (Shelley 8): “Scattered and unconnected as they
were, I have been obliged to add links, and model the work into a consistent
form. But the main substance rests on the truths contained in these poetic
rhapsodies, and the divine intuition which the Cumæan damsel obtained from
heaven” (Shelley 8). Because the Sibyl remakes time’s linear structure to allow
the Englishwoman access to the Verney account in 1818, a general temporal
distortion recurs throughout The Last Man, intensifying as the piece moves
beyond its initial roman à clef drama (in which Verney’s intimates, who lead
the newly inaugurated English republic, resemble members of the Shelley-
Byron circle) to the bedlam sparked by the plague’s appearance in England
and finally to the eastward flight of the British people to the shores of a Europe
where almost no human life remains.
The Last Man reaches a particularly poignant moment as Verney–soon
to find that he is hopelessly alone in a plague-savaged world–records the
movements of the last few English survivors across a depopulated continent:

We loitered along the lovely Vale of Servox; passed long hours on the
bridge, which, crossing the ravine of Arve, commands a prospect of its pine-
clothed depths, and the snowy mountains that wall it in. We rambled through
romantic Switzerland; till, fear of coming winter leading us forward, the first
days of October found us in the valley of La Maurienne, which leads to Cenis.
I cannot explain the reluctance we felt at leaving this land of mountains;
perhaps it was, that we regarded the Alps as boundaries between our former
and our future state of existence, and so clung fondly to what of old we had
loved. (331-32)

For Verney, Europe’s sovereign mountains figure tellingly both in landscape

and in timescape, the latter collapsing and coalescing past, present, and future
150 / RUPPERT

into a temporal state within which, to borrow Verney’s later remark, “each
moment contain[s] eternity” (Shelley 345). The Alps emblematize a division, in
the here and now of Verney’s narrative, between the post-monarchical English
past (Verney’s story begins where the history of England’s royalty ends) and a
stateless future, or rather a future in which monarchy reappears in the abstract,
whether universalized (the narrator’s plague-as-world-queen metaphor, which
I shall discuss) or particularized (late in the book, Verney likens himself to
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, “that monarch of the waste”) (Shelley 347).
That the Alps suggest to Verney a clear delimitation in the English refugees’
sense of their own history is unsurprising since he often describes temporal
matters in spatial terms. For example, as he and his companions prepare to
sail from Dover to Calais, Verney notes that “death had hunted us through the
course of many months, even to the narrow strip of time on which we now
stood; narrow indeed, and buffeted by storms, was our footway overhanging
the great sea of calamity” (289-90). And long before Adrian–England’s Lord
Protector, Verney’s closest friend, and an avatar of Percy Shelley–arranges the
survivors’ evacuation to France, Verney claims: “Time and experience have
placed me on an 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 209).
In tracing out his approach to historiography, Verney casts light also on his
sense of history itself. By using a topographical metaphor to express historical
perspective, he appears to posit human history as a closed pattern; seemingly,
the pandemic discontinues the relation of the past with the present and so by
extension with the future. Although the natural world’s deep time is unaffected
by the plague–animals live on, the seasons change, the seas maintain their
magnificence and the mountains their grandeur–human history, in Verney’s
eyes, seems to have ceased.11
As the plague-chronicle continues, this idea of history becomes
significantly unsettled by the sibylline influence that is everywhere throughout
The Last Man. In her analysis of Mary Shelley’s thoughts on history vis-à-
vis Sir Walter Scott’s, Deidre Lynch notes that the novel “challenges such
closure” as one finds in Scott’s Waverley (1814) “by running the tape of history
backward” (139): “the convention that diagrams time’s linear, progressive
advance as a westward migration of civilization from Greece to Rome to
England to America” is put “into reverse” when “the plague arrives in England
on a ship that has voyaged east across the Atlantic from Philadelphia” (140).
Lynch suggests that Shelley purposefully counters the chronologically orderly
and mistily nostalgic method that Scott prefers (see also Lynch 135-50).
As a Romantic visionary artist, Shelley seeks to discredit the idea that
history is linear and unidirectional; for her, history must not be organized
by the same logic that cites the past as an authority for dynastic succession,
 SHELLEY / 151

primogeniture, imperialist aggression, and whole traditions of oppression.

To borrow from Ina Ferris’s discussion of Romantic-era Irish writers such as
Lady Sydney Morgan and Michael Banim, the “sense of the past as unclosed,
as an ongoing power that might be turned to present account, prompt[s] an
understanding of history writing as neither memorializing remembrance (as
in nationalist historiography) nor as impartial knowledge (as in the emerging
Rankean model) but precisely–and romantically–as active recollection”
(141-42). Accordingly, these authors create “a model of history as a pointed
intersection of the horizons of past and present directed to shaping of the
horizon of the future” (Ferris 142). By virtue of her novel’s sibylline timescape,
Shelley achieves what Anne McWhir calls a “visionary synchronicity” (xxvii)
that complicates history as a resource for institutional forms of power.
Time collapses throughout Verney’s account of the pandemic that
devastates humankind in the late twenty-first century. For example, upon
revisiting the now empty home of his late sister, Perdita, Verney says, “The
time when in proud and happy security we assembled at this cottage, was
gone–soon the present hours would join those past, and shadows of future
ones rose dark and menacing from the womb of time, their cradle and their
bier” (201-02).12 Later, in one of his last moments with her, Verney gently
admonishes his wife, Idris, who has been imagining their love’s continuation
in the afterworld: “Let us not…neglect the present. This present moment, short
as it is, is a part of eternity, and the dearest part, since it is our own unalienably.
Thou, the hope of my futurity, art my present joy” (266). In both instances,
Verney articulates his emotions through thoughts and words that point to time’s
indistinctness; in essence, he sees his world and the people around him as
belonging to a reordered temporal scheme in which past, present, and future
commingle to the point of inseparability.
This reconfiguration of time appears also in Verney’s passage on the last
plague victim’s interment in the ice caves at Chamonix, the “rocky vale” at
which the disease’s “barbarous tyranny” finally ceases (330). Verney dryly
commemorates the nightmare’s passing, unable to forget the tremendous scope
of the pandemic’s ravages: so far as he knows, only four people outlive the
disease. He likens the now spent plague to a female ruler: “She abdicated her
throne, and despoiled herself of her imperial sceptre among the ice rocks that
surrounded us. She left solitude and silence co-heirs of her kingdom” (330).
This metaphorical representation provides an ironic counterpoint to his much
earlier notation of the King of England’s abdication in 2073 and the subsequent
creation of an English republic. By likening the plague to a royal person,
Verney brings his chronicle back to its beginning; less an insight into Verney
as a political thinker than as a man struggling to make sense of time, history,
and human mortality, the plague-as-world-queen metaphor bridges the novel’s
last moments with its first (see McWhir xxxiii-xxxiv).
Chamonix thus takes on a twofold significance, serving as both the site of
the last plague-grave and as a cradle of civilization, a place of human nascence.
152 / RUPPERT

At Chamonix, though, the waters of life are suspended in icefalls, séracs, and
the Mer de Glace. Amid this glacial icescape, Verney further explores his
conflicted sense of temporality and history:

My present feelings are so mingled with the past, that I cannot say
whether the knowledge of this change visited us, as we stood on this sterile
spot.…The coming time was as a mighty river, down which a charmed boat
is driven, whose mortal steersman knows, that the obvious peril is not the
one he needs fear, yet that danger is nigh; and who floats awe-struck under
beetling precipices, through the dark and turbid waters–seeing in the distance
yet stranger and ruder shapes, towards which he is irresistibly impelled. What
would become of us? O for some Delphic oracle, or Pythian maid, to utter
the secrets of futurity! O for some Œdipus to solve the riddle of the cruel
Sphynx! Such Œdipus was I to be–not divining a word’s juggle, but whose
agonizing pangs, and sorrow-tainted life were to be the engines, wherewith to
lay bare the secrets of destiny, and reveal the meaning of the enigma, whose
explanation closed the history of the human race. (330)

For Verney, history appears to be at an end; the future promises little save
further cause for fear and trembling. But his loss of heart is put into question
by his invocations of the classical world. Verney associates vatic power with
antiquity, that is, with a past so far removed from the current moment that
no recourse to prophecy, to the transformative imagination, now exists. His
readers, however, realize that the Cumaean Sibyl’s continuingly vital power
governs the recovery and reconstitution of his text. A hallmark of the Sibyl’s
legacy involves the simultaneity of time states, as Olga Peters Hasty points out
in her discussion of the twentieth-century Russian author Marina Tsvetaeva
(who wrote a cycle of poems on the Sibyl): “measured time is transcended
by the eternal voice, and temporal divisions are done away with as past,
present, and future converge” (197).Verney acquiesces in hopelessness without
realizing that the very prophetic authority that he laments as irretrievably lost
in the past in fact prevents his account of humankind’s future from becoming
irretrievably lost in the past (see Lynch 142).
Shelley’s rethinking of time in The Last Man reflects an acute interest
not only in the Sibyl and her legend but also in questions regarding the
temporality of human life, questions which, as several scholars recently have
shown, received serious consideration in the literature of the Romantic period.
William Wordsworth’s nocturnal poetry, for example, is haunted by the “de-
sanctification” and “secularization” of human time by “the clock-reckoning
of modernity,” as Christopher Miller asserts (3). Karen Hadley writes that
the predictability and regularity of time as measured by clocks and watches–
and as taxed by William Pitt in the late 1790s (693)–led Romantic authors to
ascertain a conflict between what William Deresiewicz, in Jane Austen and
the Romantic Poets, calls “Bergsonian temps–linear, unidirectional clock-
time” (37) and what John Wyatt, in Wordsworth and the Geologists, refers to
 SHELLEY / 153

as deep time, that is, the unquantifiable time of the earth and the cosmos (157).
Such humanly produced records of time and history as the clock, the timeline,
the archive, and the museum typically register the principal ideologies and
powers of the moment (the Great Exhibition of 1851 being a familiar case in
point, see Laurie Kane Lew). In The Last Man, Shelley overturns artificially
kept time and chronological history, thereby undermining two basic props of
both conventional English literature and the British worldview in the years
following the Napoleonic Wars.
Although partly emblematic of a shared interest among the Romantics,
Shelley’s reworking of linear time and chronology in The Last Man uniquely
speaks to late Romantic literature and culture. After her 1823 homecoming, as
Bennett notes, Shelley unhappily realized that England “was quickly solidifying
around a materialistic value system in which women’s lives were increasingly
restricted” (84). This England–repressive, intolerant, John Bullish–came into
being after the French wars closed with Napoleon’s loss in the countryside
near Mont-Saint-Jean (see Woolf, esp. 94). Although Waterloo and the 1815
Treaty of Paris promised a new age of peace for England, the reality was that
Wellington’s victory and Viscount Castlereagh’s statecraft simply resuscitated
and refortified the old absolutism that the French Revolution initially contested.
Further soured by the less-than-admirable political stance struck by the Prince
Regent (who became King George IV in 1820), the nation’s new day must have
seemed horribly anachronistic in the eyes of a liberal intellectual like Shelley,
whether she looked from home or abroad (see Orr 250). The Prince Regent’s
backward notions of royal governance, joined to his autocratic temperament
and corroborated by Tory policy-makers such as Castlereagh, Liverpool,
Sidmouth, and Eldon, fostered an authoritarian post-war climate worsened by
poor harvests, significant unemployment, public disaffection, and incidents of
bloody violence such as the Peterloo Massacre. Furthermore, by the time The
Last Man appeared in print, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Byron all were
dead, Southey had received the Poet Laureateship, and Wordsworth actively
supported the Earl of Liverpool’s Tory administration (which controlled
Parliament since Spencer Perceval was assassinated in 1812). The Last Man
reflects the fact that Shelley, by the age of twenty-nine, witnessed not only
wartime violence and postwar authoritarianism but also the moment of British
Romanticism’s greatness flicker (see Hilton 235-80).
At the same time, The Last Man is best approached neither as a prose séance
couched in a roman à clef nor as a record of the pre-Victorian imperialist mind.
Whether an expressly Godwinian performance, as Pamela Clemit suggests
(196), or a self-assertive quest for authorial identity in a swiftly changing
literary world, as Webb claims (120), the novel establishes Shelley as a key
voice in the tradition of British visionary poetics. Through the work, Shelley
intervenes into this tradition by challenging its elemental biases, not for the
sake of mere contradistinction but to nurture, in a phrase from Kathy L. Glass’s
154 / RUPPERT

work on the nineteenth-century African American writer Anna Julia Cooper,

“a coalitional consciousness” (45) that could remake history for the benefit of
all. Her focus on the life-affirming power of the imagination permits Shelley
to advance the idea that history, the sum of human choices, always opens
new and better courses to those daring enough to seek them out. Accordingly,
what she invents in Lionel Verney’s nightmare chronicle serves less to encode
imperial destiny than to dramatize the imagination’s transformative power,
how creative thought can redefine the self and the other for the better and so,
ideally, bring about reconciliation and new ideas of human community. In this
light, the piece should be considered not as a valediction forbidding hope but
as a study in beginnings.

SLIPPERY ROCK UNIVERSITY

NOTES
1
Representative critical readings in this vein include Bewell 296-314 and Joseph W. Lew
261-78.
2
The idea of visionary poetics originates with Wittreich; see especially his Visionary
Poetics: Milton’s Tradition and His Legacy. Throughout the essay, the phrases “visionary
poetics,” “vatic literature,” and “British or Romantic prophecy” are interchangeable. Note also
that visionary poetics refers to an aesthetic rather than simply to writing in verse and so pertains
to Mary Shelley’s prose works, including, of course, The Last Man.
3
Particularly relevant are stanzas 10 and 11, lines 73-88, of Byron’s “Dedication.”
4
For perspectives on Wittreich’s theory of a visionary tradition, see Newlyn 15-17 and
Shawcross 71-73. Important to note is the recent work of Miller who persuasively demonstrates
the influence of seventeenth-century British women prophets on Milton and his Paradise Lost
(77-106).
5
For more on this subject, see Chappell. See also Clark, who provides a concise overview
of the Doctrine of Necessity as Percy Shelley understood it from Godwin’s 1793 An Enquiry
concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness and integrated it into
his early poem Queen Mab (published 1813). Clark argues that both Godwin and Percy rely on
the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume and that both “miss totally the subtlety of
Hume’s argument” (408). See Clark 407-09 and Percy Shelley 15-71.
6
Wittreich establishes the context for this assertion in “‘The Work of Man’s Redemption’”;
see particularly 47-48.
7
For her take on Southcott, see Mellor 144-49. For Southcott and the tradition of female
prophecy, see Thomas 52.
8
Consider that the Roman poet Virgil’s evocation of the Cumaean Sibyl in his Fourth
Eclogue so persuasively recapitulates the Sibyl’s foretelling of “the coming of peace…that the
poem has been taken to be an actual prophecy” (Potter 70), a fact reflecting the statures of both
the poet and the prophetess.
9
In her discussion of the younger Romantics, Butler claims that “the English liberal writers
of the post-war period are extrovert not introvert, and pagan not Christian” (123-24).
10
Fisch notes that Shelley’s frame narrator “seems strangely unaware of any public and
political function for the prophetic narrative” (279); consequently, “the manuscript, instead of
offering lessons about politics and survival, instead of functioning as prophecy, has offered
‘solace’” (280). From this perspective, Shelley’s Englishwoman mitigates the visionary power
of the sibylline leaves because she fails to see, or at least neglects to discuss, the recovered
narrative’s revolutionary potential.
 SHELLEY / 155

11
For discussions of the deep time concept, see Brodhead and Wyatt 150-68, especially
155-58.
12
The actress and poet Mary Robinson was known as Perdita, after her most famous stage
role (the part being from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale). It is unclear whether Shelley had
Robinson in mind when naming this character.

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