“The Chain that Make our Life”: Prophecies of Constantinople in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

Mary Shelley compels us to view her novel The Last Man (1826) through a classical aperture: the tale is framed as a sybilline prophecy. A central source for Shelley is the treatment of Constantinople in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . Yet while narrator Verney regards himself in the mode of Gibbon’s “philosophic spectator,” Shelley also draws on Greek tragedy to suggest that her characters have inherited a curse that originates with Constantine the Great. Constantinople looms over the novel, emblematic of decline, but Verney cannot decide whether events unfold by causation or contingency.