Mary Shelley's Global Atmosphere

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The Last Man's description of the atmosphere's role in spreading apocalyptic plague poses a problem for scholarly arguments associating the plague with the sins of empire. This article argues that the relationship between the plague's miasmatic transmission and imperial trade can be understood in relation to Romantic aeronautical imagery and the emergent concept of international airspace. Whereas late eighteenth-century depictions of atmosphere tended to portray national air as isolated from that of the rest of the world, the invention of balloon flight had helped usher in an era in which Britain's “pure air” could be seen as entangled with that of its current and former colonies. Like some contemporary abolitionists, Shelley draws on the idea of a shared planetary atmosphere to suggest that fates of “the inhabitants of native Europe” and “the swarthy African” (332) are linked, and that Britain's toleration of slavery elsewhere in the world will contaminate the moral atmosphere of the nation. Through her depiction of the realization, and subsequent destruction, of the navigable air balloons “foretold in by-gone time by . poets” (55), Shelley is also raising the question of whether literature can shape a better future, or whether the best efforts of writers will, in the end, be unable to overcome the poisonous atmosphere generated by human greed. The Last Man thus serves as an example of how the Romantics used atypical forms of space such as the atmosphere to meditate on the relationship between national cultures and global circulation.