‘A Dark Image in a Phantasmagoria’: Pastoral Idealism, Prophecy, and Materiality in Mary Shelley's The Last Man

Abstract

I. GENERIC CONTEXTS In Thomas Campbell’s short poem ‘The Last Man’ (1823), published three years before Mary Shelley’s novel of the same title, we witness a significant conjunction of Christian prophecy and millenarian pastoral. Selfrighteously defiant in the face of his own impending demise, Campbell’s narrator-protagonist stands ‘prophet-like’, the last remaining human witness of the earthly apocalypse. According to a contemporary reviewer, Campbell’s Last Man behaves in a manner entirely worthy of respect and emulation, embodying indeed the very ‘spirit of religion’. To a certain extent, the poem was understood to merit such praise because, following orthodoxy, it situates a restored Edenic pastoral not on the materially corrupt Earth but in a spiritually redeemed millennium or heavenly afterlife. As Campbell’s narrator piously explains,