Memory and Mortality: The Influence of Charles Maturin’s Global Necromanticism on Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826)

Abstract

In one of his published sermons, Charles Robert Maturin writes: ‘Life is full of death; the steps of the living cannot press the earth without disturbing the ashes of the dead – we walk upon our ancestors – the globe itself is one vast churchyard.’ Travelers in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) are drawn to ruins, to historical texts, and to spectacles of death, all in an imperfect attempt to comprehend, recall, and communicate the mystery of suffering and mortality on a global, transnational scale. Drawing from Paul Westover’s seminal study of ‘necromanticism’ in which he discusses Romantic-era practices of memorializing and communing with the dead via historical writing and travel, I will read Mary Shelley’s plague novel The Last Man (1826) as a text that borrows from Maturin’s theory of the tenuous communicability of historical memory. I argue that Shelley echoes Maturin’s interest in a global necromanticism in which the living seek to remember and commemorate the dead through language, extending this practice of commemorative remembrance on a transnational scale. In so doing, Shelley also incorporates Maturin’s darker critique of these global commemorations as at once compulsive yet insufficient.