The Last Man (1824), Mary Shelley's third published and fourth written novel, is impure. Most obviously, this is true of the novel's subject matter: a bubonic-type plague which wipes out the entire human race with the exception of the title character, Lionel Verney. This ‘impurity’ is transgressive (literally, ‘a going beyond or over a limit or boundary’), the result of a fatal and extremely contagious crossing of boundaries. In anthropological terms, it is about ‘dirt’, which Mary Douglas defines as ‘things out of place’; perhaps symptomatic of this contagion, the novel seemed ‘dirty’: The Monthly Review called it ‘The offspring of a diseased imagination, and of a most polluted taste’, while Blackwood's termed it an ‘abortion’. The novel's filth, or to use its own term, its ‘corruption’, operates, as I hope to show, on many levels; and this corruption is not merely thematic or even overdetermined, but is intrinsic to the novel, part of its very ‘conception’.

One of the levels on which corruption is conceived in the novel concerns Lord Byron. The character of Lord Raymond, a Byron figure, experiences passion in ‘strange fits’ as he alternates between his political ambitions, his love for Lionel's sister, and his infatuation with a Greek woman, Evadne. The Shelley circle held Byron responsible for the death of his daughter Allegra in a notoriously unhealthy, Italian convent and for blighting the future of Claire Claremont. Byron abandoned another mistress in order to join the struggle for Greek independence.