The Last Man

About The Last Man

Shelley's narrative joins intimate attachment to a scale of loss that political ambition cannot master. The retrospective voice gives early happiness a fragile quality, while changes in place and season track a world under pressure. Its plague is more than a device for suspense: it forces questions about what remains valuable when collective projects falter.

Reading focus

Read a speculative plague narrative that measures political ideals and private attachments against an expanding threat to human continuity.

This reading edition contains 175,563 words in 31 original sections. Read the text online with adjustable type and three colour themes, or keep a printable PDF.

Author: Mary Shelley. Language: English. Reading edition: 28 October 2026.

Opening excerpt

I visited Naples in the year 1818. On the 8th of December of that year, my companion and I crossed the Bay, to visit the antiquities which are scattered on the shores of Baiæ. The translucent and shining waters of the calm sea covered fragments of old Roman villas, which were interlaced by sea-weed, and received diamond tints from the chequering of the sun-beams; the blue and pellucid element was such as Galatea might have skimmed in her car of mother of pearl; or Cleopatra, more fitly than the Nile, have chosen as the path of her magic ship. Though it was winter, the atmosphere seemed more appropriate to early spring; and its genial warmth contributed to inspire those sensations of placid…

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