The Last Man

A plague empties the world in the last decades of the twenty-first century, and one man is left to write the record. Mary Shelley published it in 1826, four years after Shelley drowned and eight after Frankenstein; the friends who die in it are Shelley and Byron under other names. It was despised at the time and forgotten for a century. Fifty-eight plates of Constable and Friedrich, from Flatford Lock to the Riesengebirge, follow the novel's turn from crowded cities to a landscape emptied of people.