Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel, The Last Man, was published eight years after the first edition of Frankenstein. Written in the wake of the deaths of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and three of Mary’s children, this elegiac work—described by Anne McWhir as “at once a personal, even autobiographical and confessional meditation and a prophetic, encyclopedic, philosophical vision”—revisits many of the thematic concerns and philosophical questions of its more popular predecessor, only perhaps with a more pervasive sense of pessimism (xiii). Here, the role, importance, and power of education is once again interrogated, yet at a larger scale and with higher stakes. Frankenstein illustrated the failures in the education of a few characters, with only minimal consequences for broader society. Relatively few people die as a result of Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment, and the Creature’s self-imposed exile and plan to immolate himself neutralizes what his creator feared would be a threat to the future of mankind. However, with what McWhir calls a “focus [that] is at once narrow and sweeping,” The Last Man studies not only the failed or ineffective educations of a few individuals, but also studies the failure or impotence of education at a national and global level (xiii). Though in one sense the failed education of a few leads to the extinction of the human race, there is another sense in which even successful and universal education would have had no power at all to stop the relentless advance of a worldwide Plague. More troubling, there is even the implication that education can create or exacerbate the same personal and societal problems it seeks to solve. However, Shelley does not entirely dismiss education as an act of futility or hubris, and lets the ideal of humanistic education retain some of its nobility and promise. This makes The Last Man, as Kari E. Lokke has written, “a complex and ambivalent critique of Romantic ideologies” (117).

​The Last Man, in the characters of Adrian, Lord Raymond, and the astronomer Merrival, entertains a Godwinian hope in a future utopia. However, the greatest obstacle to this utopia is most accurately identified by Adrian and Raymond’s political opponent, Ryland. When Adrian declares that, with another “twelve months” of peace, “earth will become a Paradise,” Ryland retorts: “When men’s passions are dead, poverty will depart” (L 172, italics added). Indeed, throughout the novel, man’s untamed passions are identified as the root of civilization’s problems. These passions fall roughly into two categories: pride, associated with the mind and the seeking of god-like power, on the one extreme, and generalized passion, associated with the body and the surrendering to animal impulses, on the other. Regarding the passion of pride, Lokke writes that “The Last Man reveals a vision of human nature as ruled by a will to power that overwhelms all other human impulses of love, compassion, generosity, and justice” (119). However, aside from the toxic presence of “will to power” in the novel, there is also an epidemic of an overall lack of self-control. Some characters are controlled by their passions, some by their pride, and most disastrously, some are controlled by both passion and pride.

​The novel’s first victim of uncontrolled passion is introduced in the first few pages, setting the pattern and precedent for the many other victims that are to follow. Lionel and Perdita Verney’s father is described as

one of those men whom nature had bestowed to prodigality the envied gifts of wit and imagination, and then left his bark of life to be impelled by these winds, without adding reason as the rudder, or judgment as the pilot for the voyage. . . . My father’s impulses [were] never under his own controul. (L 7)

Without “reason” and “judgment” and “controul,” the elder Verney’s “gifts of wit and imagination” are wasted by his addiction to “impulses.” Verney’s gambling addiction and debts ultimately cause his children to be orphaned and impoverished, which only aggravates the passion-driven, impulsive traits that Lionel inherits from him.

​In contrast with the elder Verney, another parent in the novel, the Countess, former queen of England and mother of Adrian and Idris, is controlled not by impulsive passions but cold, calculating pride. In fact, the Countess uses pride, and the ambition to reclaim the monarchy for her son, to master her other passions: “To the love of rule and haughty pride of birth she added determined ambition, patience, and self-control” (25). However, pride is as much an all-controlling tyrant as the other passions, tragically turning the Countess’s “patience” and “self-control” into a means of vice. Verney declares,

Never did any woman appear so entirely made of mind, as the Countess of Windsor. Her passions had subdued her appetites, even her natural wants . . . . There is something fearful in one who can thus conquer the animal part of our nature, if the victory be not the effect of consummate virtue. (57, italics added)

In The Last Man, any self-mastery without “consummate virtue” is as dangerous as no self-mastery at all. The Countess is the very embodiment of mind over matter, but this does not imply that her mind is sound.

​Verney’s statement about the Countess is echoed in his evaluation of the Greek Princess Evadne: “Alas! That in human nature such a pitch of mental discipline, and disdainful negligence of nature itself, should not have been allied to the extreme of moral excellence!” (90). Evadne, like the Countess, suppresses the body to elevate the mind, and she, too, does not do this for the sake of “moral excellence” but for the sake of her ambitions and lust for power (88). However, unlike the Countess, Evadne is not entirely in control of her animal passions. The story of her father’s downfall mirrors the story of Lionel’s father’s downfall, and Evadne has inherited the same penchant for acting “from impulse” (86-87). Proud, Evadne would rather die than face the shame of her fall from power. Passionate, she has an “ill-regulated love,” and, when she falls in love with Raymond, “she did not pause to examine [her overpowering sensations], or to regulate her conduct by any sentiments except the tyrannical one which suddenly usurped the empire of her heart” (112, 35). This explosive mix of passion and pride will lead to Evadne to her death, to the death of Raymond by her curse, and will be at least partially responsible for the spread of the Plague across the globe.
​Evadne is, of course, not the only passion-and-pride-fueled character culpable for the Plague. The Byronic figure of Lord Raymond is the novel’s supreme example of all the vices of passion and pride. Like Evadne and the Countess, Raymond seeks power, “the aim of all his endeavours” (31). However, though his “selected passion” is “ambition,” Raymond is also entrapped by impulsiveness and the passion of sensual “self-gratification” (113, 35). Passion and pride are thus at war with each other within Raymond’s “over-ruling heart,” and his failure to keep either in check is his ruin (50). In an obvious series of ironic metaphors, Raymond’s passions “[conquer] the conqueror,” “the territory of his own heart escape[s] his notice,” and Raymond cannot “master” himself but is instead a “slave” (113, 90, 117, 50).

​Raymond’s passion and pride not only ruin his own life and bring “a moral tempest” upon his family, but also, arguably, bring about the Plague. Raymond’s unruly soul is called a “contagion” (98). This implies that the Plague is a dramatic representation of the destructive human passions indicted throughout the novel. Moreover, when Raymond is Prime Minister of England, he has others-oriented rather than self-serving ambitions that could have helped to repell the Plague, but these healthy ambitions never come to fruition precisely because of his unhealthy ones. Verney writes that, “Raymond was occupied in a thousand beneficial schemes,” including the “building of canals [and] aqueducts” which, Lauren Cameron notes, would have prevented or slowed down the spread of the Plague in England (L 82; Cameron 183). However, the scandal surrounding Raymond and Evadne, and Raymond’s proud retreat to warring Greece, result in the scrapping of these disease-preventing public works projects. Cameron writes,

Those men who would help humanity—such as Raymond with his plans to improve sanitation, ventilation, and construction in working-class households—cannot do so, because of foolish inclinations to achieve glory through conquest. . . . As consequence, the regret that the English population did not necessarily have to be decimated haunts the ending of the novel. (Cameron 183)

Just as in the old adage that states, “For want of a nail . . . the battle was lost,” for want of Raymond’s self-control, perhaps all England, even all the world, is lost.

​Lest it seem like it is only the proud stubbornness, or rash impetuosity, of a few members of the ruling class that are on trial in the novel, charged with the downfall of man, it should also be noted that passion and pride rule over entire populations. Verney writes that, though the means of establishing a utopia in England are supposedly within reach, “An evil direction still survived; and men were not happy, not because they could not, but because they would not rouse themselves to vanquish self-raised obstacles” (L 82–83, italics added). In their laziness and obstinacy, the English will not make the life-saving and world-improving changes that could be made. Moreover, mankind in The Last Man is guilty not only of passive indolence but of active bloodlust. When Lionel sees the horrors of the war between the Greeks and Turks, he feels “ashamed of [his] species” (141). Finally, with the outbreaking of the Plague comes the outbreaking of anarchy, and the entire world becomes “lawless” (279). In the midst of that lawlessness, passion-ruled despots like the “impostor-prophet” can win followers, exploiting the passions of the masses to advance their own ambitions, while a virtuous “philanthropist” like Adrian struggles to gain a hearing (L 302–303; Wells 226). All of civilization is susceptible to the dangerous vices lurking within each of its members.

​Turning attention away from the global epidemic of passion to the microcosm of Lionel Verney, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, it is apparent that Lionel struggles with the same passion and pride as everyone else. Before he encounters the benevolence of Adrian, young Lionel is much like Raymond, unable to “tame [his] eager spirit,” and having an “appetite for admiration [ruled by pride] and small capacity for self-controul [ruled by passion].” The volatile nature of will to power is best expressed by Lionel as he reflects upon his own former Nietzschean worldview: “I owned but one law, it was that of the strongest, and my greatest deed of virtue was never to submit” (11). In another case of the novel highlighting the dangerous split of ambition from virtue (the Countess, Evadne, and Raymond being the other chief examples), Verney writes that, “greatness, at least to my distorted perceptions, was no necessary associate of goodness” (15). Thus Verney, in the opening pages of the novel, is the epitome of man at his monst brazenly power-hungry and most dangerously unrestrained.

​So great is Verney’s adolescent willfulness that it raises the specter of the threat of the animal passions overtaking the reason of civilized man. Verney “wanders among the hills of civilized England as uncouth a savage as the wolf-breed founder of old Rome” (11). “My life,” he writes, “was like that of an animal, and my mind was in danger of degenerating into that which informs brute nature” (15). The theme of man’s relationship to the animal is crucial throughout the text. Cynthia Schoolar Williams writes that, “Shelley reveals the extent to which human being is defined over and against the irreducible animal other. In so doing, her text exposes the predation that lies at the root of Western humanism” (Williams 138). If man’s animal passions can reduce Verney to “a savage,” and if the Greek army, representing the onward march of Western civilization, can commit violent acts that make Verney “ashamed of [his] species”—note that he writes “species” and not “mankind”—then the very definition of what it means to be human is at risk of being lost (Lokke 122; Williams 147). This risk is revisited multiple times throughout the novel, and has serious implications for the idea of a humanistic education.

​Having described a preponderance of evidence that The Last Man views man, in his unmastered pride and passions, as his own greatest threat, it must be asked whether education is able to restrain these vices and replace them with virtue. Education, the shaping of the reason, seems to be the only solution presented by the text for the problem of man’s self-destructive bent. This solution is based on William Godwin’s belief, expressed in his work on Political Justice, that

Sound reasoning and truth, when adequately communicated, must always be victorious over error: Sound reasoning and truth are capable of being so communicated: Truth is omnipotent: The vices and moral weakness of man are not invincible: Man is perfectible, or in other words susceptible of perpetual improvement. (Rounce 2)

The Last Man entirely rejects these Godwinian notions. However, that is not to say that there are not places in the text where man attains to at least some “improvement.” There are a few instances where “sound reasoning and truth” are “adequately communicated,” and where virtue and strength do replace “vices and moral weakness.”

​The potential transformative power of education is seen most clearly in the life of Lionel Verney, who just earlier was described as “an animal.” The example of Verney is evidence that, though Mary Shelley did not have what Johanna M. Smith calls her father’s “moments of sunny optimism,” she did not dismiss the things he advocated for as entirely useless (9). When Adrian finds Lionel, he is able to quickly win him over because, as Verney describes it, “he was deep read and imbued with the spirit of high philosophy” (L 20). Even in his near-animalistic state, Verney is able to recognize something compelling in this man whom he previously regarded as an enemy, and he later attributes Adrian’s grace and charisma directly to his education. (To make a brief digression, it should be noted that this also shows the power of education in Adrian’s life as well. The power-hungry Countess of Windsor wanted to educate Adrian to be a monarch, but her plan backfired when that education led him to “entertain republican principles” instead (15). The implication is that education can have a naturally democratizing effect.) Adrian proceeds to educate Lionel, bringing him into civilization (20–21). The resulting intellectual change, as described by Verney, is like a religious conversion account (22). Williams notes that Verney receives a “humanist education” (Williams 144). Verney himself claims that, quite literally, “I now began to be human. I was admitted within that sacred boundary which divides the intellectual and moral nature of man from that which characterizes animals” (L 22). The idealistic promise of education could hardly be described in more elevated terms.

​This humanizing education, particularly because it is complemented by the wise and compassionate example of Adrian, causes Lionel’s passions to be replaced with self-control, and his proud ambition to be replaced with virtue. Regarding self-control, Verney writes that Adrian “taught me by [the] means [of history and philosophy] to subdue my own reckless and uncultured spirit” (24). Regarding virtue, Verney writes, in a reversal of his proto-Nietzschean morality, “This . . . is power! Not to be strong of limb, hard of heart, ferocious, and daring; but kind, compassionate, and soft. . . . Doubt me not, Adrian, I also will become wise and good!” (22). Education replaces the will to power with a will to serve mankind. Moreover, in the words “wise and good,” there is not only a unity of head and heart, knowledge and virtue, but also an echo of Godwin’s dictum to his daughter Mary, that she be “great and good” (Clemit 29).

​One component of Verney’s education that should be highlighted is that it is literary. His schooling begins in a library, and the novel ends with him sailing away with copies of Shakespeare and Homer (L 20, 367). His bookish education is reflective of Mary Shelley’s own, and of the pedagogical emphasis on classical texts that was common in her time (Bennett 13–14; Ross 417–418). Verney develops a strong love for reading and for writing, and he makes a case for the character-shaping value of both:

I was convinced that . . . no man’s faculties could be developed, no man’s moral ​principle be enlarged and liberal, without an extensive acquaintance with books. To me they stood in the place of an active career, of ambition, and those palpable excitements necessary to the multitude. . . . As my authorship increased, I acquired new sympathies and pleasures. I found another and a valuable link to enchain me to my fellow-creatures. (L 120)

In short, for Verney, reading and writing are crucial in the shaping of both private and public virtue.
​Another component of Verney’s education is that it is social. Verney’s growing knowledge through reading is accompanied by his growing friendship with Adrian, who is a near-perfect role model. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, Verney does not learn in isolation. This may be one of reasons why, though both novels begin similarly, each with an account of the narrator’s formative education, they diverge so sharply, with Verney gaining virtue from his education while Frankenstein does not. Here Shelley would seem to be in agreement with her father who, according to Eva M. Pérez Rodríguez, increasingly acknowledged the importance of community for cultivating reason and virtue, and “grant[ed] importance to example” (83). Rodríguez quotes The Enquirer, where Godwin writes that “private education is almost necessarily deficient in excitements. Society is the true awakener of man” (83). It is the society of Adrian that awakens Lionel, not only to knowledge, but to virtue.

​In The Last Man, the ideal education shapes head and heart, and is literary and social. Moreover, it is focused on creating self-knowledge. If, as Stewart Peterfreund writes, Frankenstein is typified by “an all-but-epidemic lack of self-knowledge,” the same can be said of The Last Man (95). Lionel’s formative self-knowledge is that he is “an unprotected orphan,” and this shapes his violent “war against civilization” (L 10, 14). It is through the benevolence of Adrian that his self-knowledge must be changed so that he views himself as one who has security and community. The old Socratic dictum, “Know thyself,” resurfaces in a few other scenes. When Raymond descends into debauchery while still holding political office, Adrian challenges him, “Know yourself” (116). Unfortunately, Raymond chooses impulse over self-reflection. Strangely, he nevertheless has the gall to ask Lionel to confront his estranged wife, Perdita, on his behalf, and “present her with a mirror, in which she may know herself” (118). As hypocritical as this request may be, Lionel’s subsequent education of Perdita does bring about some self-knowledge. He writes,

After awhile she discovered . . . her own character, which formerly she fancied she thoroughly understood . . . . Erringly and strangely she began the task of self-examination with self-condemnation. And then again she became aware of her own excellencies . . . . I . . . watched with anxiety the result of these internal proceedings. (121–122)

Clearly, self-knowledge can reveal parts of the self that are painful to discover. However, Shelley suggests that such discomfort is necessary if pride and other the passions are to be reformed by the process of education.

​The power and potential of the education that Adrian and Lionel received is seen in the way it equips and motivates them to serve the common good. Both characters exemplify what Catherine E. Ross calls “the commitment to public duty at the heart of classical studies” (402). That education should lead to helping others is another area in which Shelley agrees with Godwin, who wrote in The Enquirer that education should make the student “useful” (Rodríguez 83). In The Last Man, education has the potential to make the student “useful” by redirecting ambition away from power and toward service. Verney writes that he and Adrian are “educated in one school, . . . [that] a ceaseless observance of the laws of general utility [is] the only conscientious aim of human ambition” (L 115). When the Plague comes to England, Adrian makes it his “strange ambition” to do whatever he can to mitigate the suffering of his people, and Lionel travels from village to village educating local leaders in methods of disease prevention (195, 213).

​Nevertheless, for all the good that education achieves in the lives of Adrian and Lionel, and in the lives of others through them, education also continually fails to do what it is expected to do. The Last Man confronts the reader with the stubborn reality that education does not always create virtue and does not always restrain passion and pride. Ironically, it is Verney, the most successfully educated person in the novel outside of Adrian, and the character with the most radical educational transformation, who illustrates the failure of education most painfully. During Lionel’s time on the Continent as an ambassador’s secretary, he “[forgets his] studious hours, and the companionship of Adrian,” and is tempted by vanity and sensuality (28–29). Without Adrian, and far away from his original learning environment, it seems Lionel’s defenses against pride and passion are diminished.

Fortunately, this does not lead to any Raymond-like scandal, and Verney soon returns to England.
​However, the greatest indictment of Verney is his disastrous lapses in judgment, lapses that call the extent of his educated self-control into question. The first lapse in judgment comes with his bizarre treatment of Perdita when he drugs her to smuggle her away from Greece, reusing the very ploy that the Countess tried to use on her daughter, Idris, Verney’s wife. Verney’s actions result in Perdita’s death, and he reprimands himself for his “senseless rashness” and “accursed self-will” (168–169). Verney later holds himself accountable for Idris’s death as well; again, he calls himself “senseless” for “risk[ing] the safety” of a loved one (277). Verney also calls himself “blind,” whereas earlier he had confidently declared himself to be perceptive (277, 136). Cameron writes that, “Although he becomes a reader of people . . . Lionel misjudges many characters in the work, particularly his wife and sister, and probably hastens their deaths as a consequence” (Cameron 194). This blindness, as well as his reversion to destructively impulsive decision-making, shows that even the best-educated—those best equipped to master and know themselves—are fallible, making their education likewise fallible. This recognition of the fallibility of man and his education goes entirely against Godwin’s belief that the latter could perfect the former (Bennett 5). To reverse Godwin’s own words, “Sound reasoning and truth” are not “always . . . victorious over error” (Rounce 5).

​Anne McWhir writes, “Moral and emotional failure, well-intentioned stupidity, thoughtless replication of past failure, unwillingness to read the lessons of history—all these collaborate with ‘plague’ in The Last Man” (xxxiii). These failures are failures of education, being either refusals to learn or failures to learn enough. In this view, education could still be a solution to man’s problems, if only he would listen up or listen more closely. However, upon a closer look at The Last Man, there is also a darker undercurrent suggesting that the problem is not just with the failure to learn, but with the learning itself. Education, presented throughout the text as a possible solution to the problem of human pride and passion, may also be a part of the problem, either creating or exacerbating man’s arrogance.

​Multiple critics have noted how the novel deals a crushing blow to anthropocentrism. Williams writes that The Last Man “traces the decentering of man as the raison d’être of nature” (138). Lokke describes the novel’s “refusal to place humanity at the center of the universe,” and calls it “a profound and prophetic challenge to Western humanism” (116). The first paragraph of the first chapter contains a statement assured of man’s greatness and importance— “So true it is, that man’s mind alone was the creator of all that was good or great to man, and that Nature herself was only his first minister”—only to have the novel repudiate that statement repeatedly, so that it can only be re-read as pungent with irony (L 7). The anthropocentrism criticized by the novel was a defining mark of Enlightenment and Romanticism, and this influenced the period’s humanistic vision for education. Ross writes, “The grammar schools [of the Romantic era] were grounded in the ideas that man is the measure of all things . . . and that the world is his to study and master” (417). Education, then, far from curbing man’s pride, can actually be used to justify it.

​Sometimes Verney, clinging to his Romantic beliefs in man—beliefs he probably gained from Adrian and his library—feels convinced that at least a remnant of mankind must be preserved from the Plague—or at the least, that some other sentient beings must come and take their place, as if nature could not exist without someone to behold or master it (L 205, 269). At other times, however, Verney rebukes the anthropocentrism with which he began his story, and the faith he sometimes has in man’s endurance. He writes with bitterness,

In the face of all this we call ourselves lords of the creation, wielders of the elements, masters of life and death, and we allege in excuse of this arrogance, that though the individual is destroyed, man continues forever. (181–182)

The Plague entirely silences these pretensions, and, as Cameron writes, “The traditional anthropocentric vision of the world is replaced by the realization that nature has no need for humans” (187). Verney laments that no earth-ruining cataclysm “accompanied our fall” (L 249). The world keeps turning—and, Williams notes, the animals keep thriving—without any cognizance of man’s disappearance (Williams 143–144). Because of the Plague’s cruelty and nature’s indifference, Lokke reverses Lionel’s opening words: “Nature [is] anything but the minister of man” (125).
​Nevertheless, even in the face of the Plague, man’s arrogance persists. Lokke observes how the English make racist justifications for why the Plague will not come to “the ‘cultivated’ and ‘civilized’ world of Europe,” as they associate the disease with the East and its uneducated ignorance (Lokke 124; L 184). This, too, is a consequence of the popular education that has congratulated the West for its legacy of intelligence, leading to a complacent and arrogant blindness that helps seal the West’s fate (L 195).

​In a fascinating passage that also seems to make education complicit in man’s pride and passions, Raymond says, “We are educated by others, or by the world’s circumstance, and this cultivation, mingling with our innate disposition, is the soil in which our desires, passions, and motives grow” (52, italics added). Raymond does not pit nature and nurture against each other, as Verney does, with the latter refining the former. Instead, he gives nature and nurture equal reign in the shaping of the self. Moreover, he suggests that education, a form of nurture, is involved in the formation of “desires, passions, and motives” that are typically supposed to be natural. Considering that his words are meant as a justification of his reckless behavior, Raymond implies that the desires that education forms are not always positive, Thus, education can fail to weed out dangerous passions, and, troublingly, it can also plant new ones.

​Such indictments of education as either ineffective or even harmful cast a shadow of futility over the second half of the novel as the Plague claims one life after another. However, the futility comes not only from education’s fallibility or culpability, but also from its total inability. Even if all were educated to fully master their pride and passions, and even if that education did not create a more subtle form of hubris—that is, even if the Godwinian ideal for universal, man-perfecting education were attained—the Plague would probably still be victorious. The Plague is a problem that no amount of knowledge attained by man can seem to solve. There is a limit to education, and the Plague stands, imposingly, across a chasm unfathomable by human comprehension. In the face of the Plague, any pursuit of education seems hopeless. Verney describes the education of his son, Alfred, with great enthusiasm and idealism (178–179). All his lofty words about educating Alfred and the next generation of the world’s leaders are rendered hollow and absurd by Alfred’s impending death—and all the more so by the fact that his optimistic projections for Alfred’s future are made even while he knows that the Plague is wiping out entire populations across the Channel.

​Cameron, describing the “extended history” of debate between William Godwin and Thomas Malthus, identifies The Last Man as “inherently Malthusian” (Cameron 177). In contrast to Godwin’s hope in human perfectibility, “both Shelley and Malthus argue [that] humankind cannot be perfected” (183). Moreover, Malthus writes that, “to prevent the recurrence of misery is, alas! beyond the power of man” (183). There is simply nothing that man can do to stop the approach of death. According to Cameron, in Of Population, Godwin believed that, “if an enlightened leader were to take control in countries that suffer from food shortages, such difficulties could be alleviated entirely. His portrait of such a leader and his rise to power resembles Adrian’s in The Last Man” (190). However, despite all his best and most valiant efforts, Adrian cannot save his people. As McWhir notes, Adrian’s “pacifism” and “humanitarianism” are helpless to stop the Plague, and “all the political debates” are just “word- games” (xxxiii). Lokke and Cameron both describe how the novel depicts all governmental systems, even the most democratic ones, as inadequate (Lokke 128–129; Cameron 181–182). As for the “radical discourses of Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s generation,” Lokke writes that they “are exposed as fictions” (128).

​Much more could be said about the futility of man’s efforts—including the futility of his education—in the final pages of The Last Man. Notably, Verney seems to lose much of his love for literature (L 241, 336, 363). As scholars have rightly observed, Verney’s return to a near-animal-like state is a significant counter-narrative to the story of his glorious, humanizing education (Cameron 184; Wells 227; Williams 145). The entire project of education, in its objective to cultivate reason and virtue, would appear to be left without any defense.

​However, remarkably, Shelley still seems to provide a ray of hope. Though she does show that education has its limits and its flaws—some of them very serious—Shelley still makes a case for its continued value. Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor writes that “Shelley recovers an affirmative view, if not of anything so strong as utopian hope, then at least of the insistence on the primacy of human sympathy and sociality” (754). Similarly, Lokke writes that “a purely nihilistic reading [of The Last Man] is insufficient—Mary Shelley may be holding out a possibility that things could be different if only people would do something about it (126). Cameron writes that the novel is “pro-social [and] anti-solipsistic [in its] ethical imperative” (179). Expressed succinctly, doing good—and seeking education in order to learn how to do good—is still a worthwhile pursuit, even in the face of certain extinction.

​Buried beneath all the deaths and lamentations of the second half of the novel—but present nonetheless—are powerful examples of characters still putting their education to good use in the service of others. Again, Adrian and Lionel dedicate themselves to doing whatever they can to reduce even the smallest amounts of suffering. In contrast, the novel condemns Ryland’s cowardly abdication of responsibility for the sake of the illusion of self-preservation (L 191–192). Adrian rejects fatalism, and helps preserve laws and institutions against the threat of anarchy (194, 238). Virtuous action is still upheld as meaningful, and even the Countess finally learns the value of virtue over ambition before she dies (240–241, 301). Lionel writes, “In the midst of despair we performed the tasks of hope,” and, “pertinacious optimism . . . to the last characterized our human nature” (250, 319). Finally, even though his delight in reading is diminished, it is telling that Lionel still retains copies of Shakespeare and Homer (367).

​The novel’s final verdict is the same as the enduring lesson Adrian thought Lionel: “Goodness can be an attribute of man” (351, italics added). Education can foster goodness, and should, even if it can never do so perfectly, and even if it does so in the face of mortality. In the end, McWhir concludes, The Last Man “celebrates gaining wisdom,” even though—and here McWhir ensures that the novel retains its ambiguity—“wisdom and plague have the same source” in man’s pursuit of understanding (xxxv).

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Works Cited
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Cameron, Lauren. “Mary Shelley’s Malthusian Objections in The Last Man.” Nineteenth-​​​Century Literature, Vol. 67, No. 2, September 2012, pp. 177–203. JSTOR,
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Clemit, Pamela. “Frankenstein, Matilda, and the Legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft.” The ​​Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Mary Schor. Cambridge, 2003, 26–44.

Lokke, Kari E. “The Last Man.” The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Mary Schor. ​​Cambridge, 2003, 116–134.

McWhir, Anne. “Introduction.” The Last Man, ed. Anne McWhir. Broadview, 1996, xiii—xxxvi.
Peterfreund, Stuart. “Composing What May Not Be ‘Sad Trash’: A Reconsideration of Mary
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