Infectious Fiction: Plague and the Novelist in Arthur Mervyn and The Last Man

Opponents of the burgeoning novel often compared its effects to the plague. Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799) and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) overturn these accusations by demonstrating that the distinctive occupation of novel-writing promotes survival amidst the devastation of apocalyptic contagion. Both Brown and Shelley used writing as therapy after great loss, and their protagonists similarly survive by becoming novelists. Arthur Mervyn and Lionel Verney continue to record and to imagine when all other systems of communication collapse. Brown and Shelley suggest not only that novel-writing offers medication against the world’s infections, moral and otherwise, but also that it has the potential to prevent future outbreaks. This effect is especially evident in The Last Man, in which Lionel’s writing travels through time with the result that the apocalyptic future that he records could be prevented due to the particular infectiousness of the novel form.