The Problem of Immunity in The Last Man

This essay challenges recent explanations of the uniquely robust immunology of Lionel Verney, narrator of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. Most readers point to Lionel’s encounter with a dying black man as the source of his immunity to the plague that decimates the rest of humanity in the twilight of the twenty-first century. Because this explanation is inconsistent with the plague’s epidemiology, this paper seeks alternate reasons for Lionel’s resilience and reads Lionel’s encounter with the black man as a moment in which the novel’s models of universal compassion collapse in the face of abject suffering and racial alterity.