“The Last Man” is set in the year 2100. The novel’s driving conflict is a highly contagious disease. Like the coronavirus, the novel’s plague spreads by a combination of airborne particles and contact with carriers. In both cases, it has been incubated, exacerbated and left unchecked by destructive human behavior.

“The Last Man” has been so influential that you are already familiar with its basic plot even if you have not read it yet. It presents the history of the ostensible sole survivor of a global plague. Much like “Frankenstein,” “The Last Man” has repeatedly been remade in the science fiction and horror genres — from the works of Edgar Allan Poe to countless zombie apocalypse movies inspired by the 1964 film “The Last Man on Earth.” The latter starred none other than the king of horror, Vincent Price. He played the last human left alive on the globe after a virulent contagion turned other people into vampires.

In Shelley’s novel, it is a man named Lionel Verney who finds himself in this extreme and precarious position. In her allegorical reworking of biblical narratives of the fall and rebirth of humankind, Verney is a humble shepherd boy who marries into the royal family at Windsor Castle. He quickly ascends to the top of the leadership ranks. He serves as a trusted adviser to lords, ministers and legislators as the plague breaks out in Constantinople then creeps toward London.

After Verney leads a failed expedition of plague survivors from the crumbled republic of England to the vacant coast of Italy, he is left alone in Rome to contemplate the future. He climbs to the top of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica and carves the year — 2100 — in the stone. From that sublime vantage, he surveys the remains of human civilization. He summons the hope that there must be other survivors somewhere on the planet. In the final frame, Verney departs on an epic sea journey to discover them. For companions, he brings some signs of his humanity: his mutt, and the works of Homer and Shakespeare. Although Verney is not certain that he will find fellow humans, he discerns a deeper obligation to himself and the whole planet to act upon that hope.

In other words, Verney realizes that even if he is the last man on Earth, he must live as though he is not. He must sustain humanity by acting upon his profound sense of the interconnectedness of his fate with other forms of life — human or not.