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Passages #1: The Last Man (1822)

I’m going to kick off Passages, a new ongoing series, with the opening para­graph of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man:

I am the native of a sea-​surrounded nook, a cloud-​enshadowed land, which, when the surface of the globe, with its shore­less ocean and track­less con­tin­ents, presents itself to my mind, appears only as an incon­sid­er­able speck in the immense whole; and yet, when balanced in the scale of mental power, far out­weighed coun­tries of larger extent and more numerous pop­u­la­tion. So true it is, that man’s mind alone was the creator of all that was good or great to man, and that Nature herself was only his first minister. England, seated far north in the turbid sea, now visits my dreams in the semb­lance of a vast and well-​manned ship, which mastered the winds and rode proudly over the waves. In my boyish days she was the universe to me. When I stood on my native hills, and saw plain and mountain stretch out to the utmost limits of my vision, speckled by the dwell­ings of my coun­trymen, and subdued to fer­tility by their labours, the earth’s very centre was fixed for me in that spot, and the rest of her orb was as a fable, to have for­gotten which would have cost neither my ima­gin­a­tion nor under­standing an effort.

As descrip­tions of the British Isles go, “a sea-​surrounded nook, a cloud-​enshadowed land” is about as evoc­ative and true as anyone could possibly want. More passages from Mary Shelley’s writings will follow, I’m certain.

A very good hyper­text edition of The Last Man pub­lished by Romantic Circles can be found here; and the novel can be down­loaded in a variety of elec­tronic formats from its page on ManyBooks.net.

A fac­simile of the title page of the pirated edition of The Last Man that was pub­lished in America in 1833, seven years after the novel’s author­ised pub­lic­a­tion in both London and Paris. (Source)