Mary Shelley fictionalizes some of the most prominent topoi from Cuvier’s famous Discours préliminaire in order to explore their social and human consequences. The proleptic nature of the novel, which makes it stand out from other plague and “last man” narratives, is a means to accomplish a thought experiment about such consequences. In so doing, Shelley critically engages with it in such a way as to maintain her place in the Romantic
intelligentsia, even as the Romantic Era was coming to an end. She also follows in the tradition of Romantic thinkers, such as her parents, who saw literature as a means of actively participating in the social realm. Cuvier similarly sought a popular venue for his ideas, demonstrating the porous nature of science writing across genres and audience in the early nineteenth century.
Although Shelley is writing The Last Man in a Cuvierian framework, she is by no means simply popularizing or translating his work. A number of divergences are evident, moments where Shelley discards Cuvier’s ideas or critiques his methodological principles. So, for instance, while Cuvier views natural revolutions as potentially multicausal, but finally reducing to the actions of oceans, Shelley treats natural catastrophes as irreducible,
overdetermined, and beyond human understanding—a seeming denial of scientific parsimony. Cuvier discusses, famously, the “thread of operations” of natural processes,
286 Bannet, 364-65.
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which is limited to a single “operation” in Kerr’s translation.288
Either way—“thread” or “operation”—the reduction is refuted by Shelley. Likewise, while Egypt—possibly the birthplace for the plague, and a recent site of conquest and pillaging by France—is a source of concrete evidence for Cuvier, of fossils that validate his theories, it is a source of
indeterminacy for Shelley. This ‘other’ location is not so easily comprehended or contained, despite a number of (failed) attempts by the characters in The Last Man to articulate a systematic explanation. Nature, likewise, is demonstrated as being more powerful and unknowable than human explanatory modes can encompass.
The plea for greater awareness of natural and societal systems in The Last Man, combined with its punctuated temporal structure, suggests an implicit prosocial message as well: society should not need a natural revolution for human society to change its
nonadaptive ways. Why should women be limited to the domestic sphere, British imperialism be the primary force of globalization, the poor and otherwise disempowered suffer unseen, powerful politicians overlook their responsibilities for personal (and sexual) indulgences, and the value of each human life not be appreciated until the end of human society as we know it? Why should such value systems persist into the twenty-first century? If life is
fundamentally uncertain, why should quality of living not be maximized? All of these questions point to the ways that a Cuvierian vision of humanity and temporality can help promote reform. Byron might have modeled despair in the face of Cuvier’s topoi, but Shelley explores such rhetorical themes more thoroughly and accomplishes a more interesting and perhaps unsettling vision, though one that received less attention over time.
From the time Cuvier’s Discours was published and translated until Charles Lyell shifted the scientific conversation in Britain with his 1830 Principles of Geology, a number
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of prominent thinkers worked—sometimes in synchrony, as with P. B. Shelley and Byron, and sometimes in conflict, as with Buckland and Mary Shelley—to situate Cuvier’s work and popularize its implications. Shelley’s The Last Man establishes her place in this tumultuous discourse.
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Chapter 2:
“Politics and Metaphysics: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Opposition to The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in Aurora Leigh”
Often overlooked in scientific and cultural histories, but wildly popular and widely influential, Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) has seldom been analyzed systematically in accounts of nineteenth-century British literary treatments of evolutionary theory. Vestiges was a book that intentionally crossed disciplinary boundaries, affirming “the status of common observation in competition with the
experimental methods of experts” both to establish generalists’ place in the newly important scientific disciplines (and thereby prevent the formation of a dogmatic scientific clerisy) and to establish scientists as the heralds of and leaders in the progressive society envisioned by Vestiges.289 Victorians widely responded to Vestiges and coopted its ideas for a number of