Phantom Memory: Nation and the Absent Body of Idealism in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

Abstract

In the spring of 1796, 70 men landed at Plymouth after having served as part of the 20th regiment in the West Indies. While these sailors were in ‘an unhealthy state’, according to Coleridge who recorded this in The Watchman based upon news reports he first read in the Star, they were ‘the remains of 700 fine fellows, who have been thus reduced by the ravages of the Yellow Fever’ (Watchman, p. 332). This brief account of maritime sickness was recorded alongside reports of battles with the French and marks the extent to which well-being was a matter of concern even and especially during a time of war. As concerned as Coleridge may have been for the crew, his account inevitably reduces them to allegories for a broader understanding of the contemporary crises facing the health of the British nation. Britain’s enterprise with the rest of the world was a boon to its domestic economy and imperial ambitions, but it was also increasingly a source of tropical disease and domestic infirmity. And while Britain did not suffer the pestilential summers the eastern United States experienced during the yellow fever outbreaks of the 1790s, scenes such as this one dramatized how Britons now perceived flows of disease that crossed geographical and national borders with ease, channels of transmission that had long been open but which went largely unacknowledged because they tended only to carry diseases from the old world to the new. What shall it profit Britain to gain the whole world and lose its health? To ask after the national health of the country was to foreground the medical emergencies facing its citizenry but also to mark the ways in which health was always being abstracted as an object of knowledge that risked making the corporeal body disappear into language.