First published in 1826, Mary Shelley’s novel, replete with Romantic allusions, imagines the world overrun by plague. It tells the story of Lionel, who at the end of the 21st century watches those around him die off until he finds himself the last human alive. Much criticized at the time it was published (reviewers called it “sickening,” the product of a “diseased imagination, and of a most polluted taste”), The Last Man was long overshadowed by the author’s better known Frankenstein. It was re-published in 1965, as scholars were growing interested anew in the idea of human isolation.