Verney, the last man

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Title page of the first English edition

Verney, the Last Man (Original: The Last Man ) is an apocalyptic science fiction novel by Mary Shelley that was first published in 1826. The novel tells of a futuristic world in which an epidemic has wreaked havoc. It was harshly criticized at the time of its creation and was virtually unknown until it made its literary comeback in the 1960s. The novel is notable, among other things, for its semi-biographical depictions of personalities from Mary Shelley's circle during the Romantic period, in particular Shelley's later husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron .

people

Lionel Verney: The Last Man. He is the orphaned son of an impoverished nobleman. Lionel behaves lawlessly at first, is stubborn and bitter about the nobility who have stolen his father from him. However, when he befriends Adrian, he becomes more civilized and educated. Verney is largely an autobiographical character for Mary Shelley .

Adrian: Earl of Windsor. Son of the last king of England. Adrian stands for the values ​​of a republic. He is most motivated by philosophy and philanthropy. His character is based on Percy Bysshe Shelley .

Lord Raymond: An ambitious young nobleman. Raymond is known for his military efforts in the battle of the Greeks against the Turks. Instead of pursuing his goal of becoming the King of England, however, he opts for love and becomes Lord Protector before returning to Greece . Raymond is driven by passion and ambition rather than principle. His character is based on Lord Byron.

Perdita: Lionel's sister and Raymond's wife. Growing up as an orphan, she is independent, suspicious and proud. Her love for Raymond, to whom she is very loyal, makes her softer.

Idris: Adrian's sister and Verney's wife. She enjoys caring for others, is motherly and self-sacrificing.

Countess of Windsor: Adrian and Iris mother. She is an Austrian princess and former Queen of England. She is arrogant and ambitious and tries to keep the monarchy with the help of her children.

Evadne: A Greek princess who Adrian falls in love with, but who loves Raymond. She is sincere and proud even when she is impoverished.

Clara: Raymond and Perdita's daughter.

Alfred and Evelyn: sons of Verney and Idris.

Ryland: leader of the popular Democratic Party. Before the plague breaks out, Ryland has big plans to ban the nobility, but he doesn't want to rule England during the plague.

Lucy Martin: A young woman who, instead of waiting for true love, decides to marry a disgusting candidate. This is how she can provide for her aging mother. The loyalty to her mother almost leads to her being left behind in England after her exile.

The Imposter: A false prophet without a name who founds a radical, religious sect against Adrian in France.

Juliet: A young noblewoman who joins the impostor's party to care for her baby. She is killed after revealing the scam.

action

introduction

In the introduction to the novel, Mary Shelley cites a fictional source: prophecies written on leaves by the Sibylle of Cumae , which she claims to have discovered in the cave of the Sibylle near Naples in 1818 . On the basis of these notes, she then wrote the modern novel from a man's point of view towards the end of the 21st century.

part 1

Lionel Verney's father, originally a friend of the king, was cast out because of his gambling addiction and took his own life. In his suicide note, he asked the king for support from his family, but the letter was never delivered. So his children Lionel and Perdita grow up poorly educated without parental control. Lionel develops strong resentments against the royal family.

When the king abdicates , the monarchy is abolished and a republic is established. Nevertheless, the countess tries to raise their son Adrian to be heir to the throne; however, he defends himself and refuses to become king. In Cumberland he meets Lionel, whose aggressiveness is soothed by Adrian's good nature and his assurance that his father's letter was only recently discovered. They even become friends, and under Adrian's influence, Lionel develops into a civilized and philosophically interested person.

Back in England, Adrian's lover Evadne and Lionel's sister Perdita fall in love with the war hero Lord Raymond, who has just returned to England with political ambitions from the war between Greece and Turkey . However, Raymond plans to marry Idris, with the help of Countess Lionel's lover, in order to get closer to his goal of becoming king. In the end, however, he married Perdita.

When the Countess learns of the love between Idris and Lionel, she plans to stun Idris and abduct her to Austria , where she is supposed to enter into a politically motivated marriage. However, Idris discovers the plan, flees to Lionel and marries him.

Adrian and the others live happily together until Raymond receives the office of Lord Protector . His wife Perdita soon befriended her newfound social position, and Raymond became a popular, benevolent leader. When he finds out that Evadne is now impoverished and lives anonymously in London, he tries to secretly support her with artistic commissions and takes care of her when she falls ill. When Perdita discovers this and accuses Raymond of infidelity , he separates from her; he resigns from office and is involved in the war in Greece . Rumors spread quickly in England that he had been killed. Perdita remains loyal and lets Lionel take her to Greece with her daughter Clara to find Raymond.

Volume 2

Lionel and Raymond go to battle near Constantinople and meet Evadne mortally wounded. As she dies, she predicts Raymond's death. Because of a plague outbreak in Constantinople, Raymond moves into the city alone and is killed in a fire.

The plague spreads across Europe and America, and Lionel and Adrian flee to England when the plague arrives there too. The new Lord Protector falls victim to her, and Adrian takes command and maintains order and humanity in England. But now ships with survivors from America dock in Ireland, plunder through Ireland and Scotland and then invade England. Adrian sets up a military unit, but is ultimately able to resolve the conflict peacefully.

Volume 3

The few survivors are looking for Lucy Martin. Surprised by a snow storm, Idris dies, weakened by years of stress and existential fears. At her grave, Lionel meets the Countess again and is reconciled with her. He returns with Lucy; the group reached Dover on the run and crossed to France.

There, former emigrants have divided themselves into different camps, including a fanatical religious sect whose followers believe they will be spared the disease. When Adrian united most of the other groups in Versailles, the sect declared war on him.

Lionel wants to save Juliet from Paris, but the sect leader has taken the child. When the child falls ill, it is revealed that the impostor is keeping the effects of the plague a secret from his followers. Juliet warns the followers but is killed in the process, and the cult leader commits suicide.

The followers return to the other displaced persons in Versailles , and they all travel to Switzerland to find shelter from the plague in its cooler climate. On arrival, only Lionel, Adrian, Clara and Evelyn are still alive.

You spend a relatively happy time in Switzerland, Milan and Como. Eventually Evelyn dies of typhus , and Clara and Adrian drown in a sea storm on the crossing to Greece. Lionel can save himself and is now the last human alive.

subjects

Biographical elements

Many of the main characters are based entirely or in part on people from Shelley's circle of acquaintances. Since her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, had forbidden her to publish a biography of her husband, she immortalized him and other acquaintances in The Last Man . The fictional Adrian, Earl of Windsor, who leads his followers in search of a natural paradise and dies when his boat sinks in a storm, therefore represents a fictional portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley . Other supporting characters, however, also contain traces of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Lord Raymond, who leaves England to fight for the Greeks and dies in Constantinople, is based on Lord Byron. In her novel, Mary Shelley processes the grief over the loss of her circle of acquaintances, whom she also referred to as "the Elect". Lionel Verney is an outlet for Shelley's sadness and boredom after the death of her friends and their children.

Shelley may have found inspiration for the name of the novel in Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's Le Dernier Homme from 1805, which was translated into English as Omegarus and Syderia in 1806 .

Questioning the political ideals of romanticism

With the novel Verney, the Last Man , Mary Shelley not only comes to terms with the loss of her friends, but also questions their political ideals of romanticism. In the novel , the plague is the reason for the disintegration of the ruling class from within. In the romantic era, the ruling class was broken by the revolution . Mary Shelley sees this decline in the weakness of human nature. The literary scholar Kari Lokke says: Because the human being is not in the center of the universe in Mary Shelley's novel and the privileged position of humans in relation to nature is questioned, the novel challenges the worldview of Western society. Mary Shelley also refers to the mistakes of the French Revolution and attacks the Enlightenment belief in the inevitability of progress.

isolation

Hugh Luke believes that "because Shelley's novel ends with the image of the last inhabitant of the earth, almost the entire novel is based on the idea that human existence is always lonely and therefore always tragic." This element of tragic loneliness can be found in Shelley's works as well as in Lord Byron's and William Wordsworth's poetry .

Science and medicine

Not only Mary Shelley's best-known novel Frankenstein (1818) deals with scientific questions. The novel Verney, The Last Man , also deals with the field of science . In contrast to the warnings against Faust- like exaggeration in Shelley's earlier works, this novel criticizes the devastating apocalypse and with it the backwardness of medicine and science. The ineffective astronomer Merrival, for example, faces the terrifyingly productive Victor Frankenstein. Even if Lionel's immunity remains the subject of critical debate, the novel, on the other hand, shows a deep understanding of medicine. This is particularly evident in relation to the development of smallpox vaccination and in relation to the various theories of disease transmission in the 19th century.

Publication history and reception

Two editions of The Last Man were published by Henry Colburn in London in 1826, and one edition appeared in Paris in 1826, published by Galignani. A pirated copy was published in America in 1833. The Last Man received the worst reviews of any of Mary Shelley's novels: most critics found the end-time theme of the novel, which had become very popular over the past two decades, to be out of date. Individual critics labeled the book as "nauseating", criticized its "stupid atrocities" and described the author's ideas as "pathological". These reactions terrified Mary Shelley, who then promised her publisher that her next book would be more mass-produced. Nonetheless, she always spoke of The Last Man as one of her favorite works. The novel was not published again until 1965. In the twentieth century it gained new attention among literary critics, possibly because the awareness of the transience of human existence had in the meantime become more explosive.

A first German edition with the title Verney, the last man was published in 1982 by Bastei Lübbe Verlag, translated by Ralph Tegtmeier. The translation was criticized partly because of its numerous omissions and abbreviations.

A first unabridged German edition, translated by Maria Weber, was published under the title The Last Human in 2018.

literature

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  • Bannet, Eve Tavor. "The 'Abyss of the Present' and Women's Time in Mary Shelley's The Last Man ". Eighteenth-Century Novel 2 (2002): 353-81.
  • Bennett, Betty T. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8018-5976-X .
  • Bennett, Betty T. "Radical Imaginings: Mary Shelley's The Last Man ". Wordsworth Circle 26.3 (1995): 147-52.
  • Blumberg, Jane. Mary Shelley's Early Novels: "This Child of Imagination and Misery" . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993. ISBN 0-87745-397-7 .
  • Cantor, Paul A. "The Apocalypse of Empire: Mary Shelley's The Last Man ". Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after "Frankenstein": Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Birth . Eds. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O'Dea. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997.
  • Canuel, Mark. "Acts, Rules, and The Last Man". Nineteenth-Century Literature 53.2 (1998): 147-70.
  • Clemit, Pamela. The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-811220-3 .
  • Eberle-Sinatra, Michael. "Gender, Authorship and Male Domination: Mary Shelley's Limited Freedom in Frankenstein and The Last Man ". Mary Shelley's Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner . Eds. Michael Eberle-Sinatra and Nora Crook. New York: Macmillan; St. Martin's, 2000.
  • Fisch, Audrey A. "Plaguing Politics: AIDS, Deconstruction, and The Last Man ". The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein. Eds. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor. New York: New York University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-507740-7 .
  • Haggerty, George E. "The End of History": Identity and Dissolution in Apocalyptic Gothic ". Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 41.3 (2000): 225-46.
  • Hopkins, Lisa. "Memory at the End of History: Mary Shelley's The Last Man ". Romanticism on the Net 6 (May 1997).
  • Hopkins, Lisa. " The Last Man and the Language of the Heart". Romanticism on the Net 22 (May 2001).
  • Hutchings, Kevin. "'A Dark Image in a Phantasmagoria': Pastoral Idealism, Prophecy, and Materiality in Mary Shelley's The Last Man ". Romanticism 10.2 (2004): 228-44.
  • Johnson, Barbara. "The Last Man". The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein. Eds. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor. New York: New York University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-507740-7 .
  • Kilgour, Maggie. “'One Immortality': The Shaping of the Shelleys in The Last Man ”. European Romantic Review 16.5 (2005): 563-88.
  • Lokke, Kari. " The Last Man ". The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley . Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-521-00770-4 .
  • Lomax, William. "Epic Reversal in Mary Shelley's The Last Man : Romantic Irony and the Roots of Science Fiction". Contours of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Eighth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts . Ed. Michele K. Langford. New York: Greenwood, 1994.
  • McWhir, Anne. "'Unconceiving Marble': Anatomy and Animation in Frankenstein and The Last Man ". Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives . Eds. Helen M. Buss, DL Macdonald, and Anne McWhir. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001.
  • Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, her Fiction, Her Monsters . London: Routledge, 1990. ISBN 0-415-90147-2 .
  • Nellist, Brian. "Imagining the Future: Predictive Fiction in the Nineteenth Century". Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors . Ed. David Seed. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995.
  • O'Dea, Gregory. "Prophetic History and Textuality in Mary Shelley's The Last Man ". Papers on Language and Literature 28.3 (1992): 283-304.
  • Palacio, Jean de. "Mary Shelley, The Last Man : A Minor Romantic Theme". Revue de Literature Comparée 42 (1968): 37-49.
  • Paley, Morton. " The Last Man : Apocalypse without Millennium". The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein. Eds. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor. New York: New York University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-507740-7 .
  • Peck, Walter E. "The Biographical Elements in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley." PMLA , XXXCIII (1923), 196-220.
  • Mary Poovey : The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. ISBN 0-226-67528-9 .
  • Richardson, Alan. " The Last Man and the Plague of Empire ". Romantic Circles MOO Conference. September 13, 1997.
  • Shelley, Mary . The Last Man . Ed. Morton D. Paley. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1998. ISBN 0-19-283865-2 .
  • Shelley, Mary. Verney, the last man. Translated by Ralph Tegtmeier. Bergisch-Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe, 1982. ISBN 978-3-404-72021-7 .
  • Snyder, Robert Lance. "Apocalypse and Indeterminacy in Mary Shelley's The Last Man ". Studies in Romanticism 17 (1978): 435-52.
  • Spatt, Hartley S. "Mary Shelley's Last Men: The Truth of Dreams". Studies in the Novel 7 (1975): 526-37.
  • Sterrenburg, Lee. " The Last Man : Anatomy of Failed Revolutions". Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33 (1978): 324-47.
  • Sussman, Charlotte. "Islanded in the World: Cultural Memory and Human Mobility in The Last Man ". PMLA 118.2 (2003): 286-301.
  • Thomas, Sophie. "The Ends of the Fragment, the Problem of the Preface: Proliferation and Finality in The Last Man ". Mary Shelley's Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner . Eds. Michael Eberle-Sinatra and Nora Crook. New York: Macmillan; St. Martin's, 2000.
  • Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A. "Performing History, Performing Humanity in Mary Shelley's The Last Man ". Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 42.4 (2002): 753–80.
  • Wang, Fuson. "We Must Live Elsewhere: The Social Construction of Natural Immunity in Mary Shelley's The Last Man ". European Romantic Review 22.2 (2011): 235-55.
  • Wang, Fuson. "Romantic Disease Discourse: Disability, Immunity, and Literature". Nineteenth-Century Contexts 33.5 (2011): 467-82.
  • Webb, Samantha. "Reading the End of the World: The Last Man , History, and the Agency of Romantic Authorship". Mary Shelley in Her Times . Eds. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
  • Wells, Lynn. "The Triumph of Death: Reading Narrative in Mary Shelley's The Last Man ". Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after "Frankenstein": Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Birth . Eds. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O'Dea. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997.
  • Wright, Julia M. "'Little England': Anxieties of Space in Mary Shelley's The Last Man ". Mary Shelley's Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner . Eds. Michael Eberle-Sinatra and Nora Crook. New York: Macmillan; St. Martin's, 2000.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Luke, Hugh J. Introduction. The Last Man by Mary Shelley. Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebraska Press, 1965. xii
  2. ^ Luke, Hugh J. Introduction. The Last Man by Mary Shelley. Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebraska Press, 1965. xi
  3. ^ Luke, Hugh J. Introduction. The Last Man by Mary Shelley. Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebraska Press, 1965. xii
  4. ^ Peck, Walter E. "The Biographical Elements in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley." PMLA. XXXCIII, 1923
  5. ^ Bennett, An Introduction , 74; Lokke, 119; Luke xi – xiv.
  6. ^ Paley, Introduction to The Last Man , 1993. vii-viii
  7. ^ Paley, Introduction to The Last Man , 1993. viii.
  8. ^ Luke, Hugh J. Introduction. The Last Man by Mary Shelley. Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebraska Press, 1965. xii
  9. ^ Science Fiction in France before Verne. Angenot, Marc. In: Science Fiction Studies , accessed January 31, 2016.
  10. ^ Paley: Introduction to The Last Man. 1993, p. 117.
  11. ↑ Lokke: The Last Man. 2003, pp. 128-29.
  12. ↑ Lokke: The Last Man. 2003, p. 116.
  13. ↑ Lokke: The Last Man. 2003, p. 128.
  14. ^ Luke, Hugh J. Introduction. The Last Man by Mary Shelley. Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebraska Press, 1965. xvii
  15. ↑ Wang: We Must Live Elsewhere. 2011, p. 240.
  16. ↑ Wang: Romantic Disease Discourse. 2011, pp. 471-474.
  17. ↑ Verney. The Last Human , In: cbuecherkiste.de , accessed on January 28, 2016.