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

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,