ABSTRACT
Two decades after the publication of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, Mary Godwin took up the relation between population and plague once more in Of Population, subtitled, indefatigably, An Enquiry concerning the Power of Increase on the Numbers of Mankind, being an Answer to Mr. Malthus’s Essay on that Subject. Godwin’s argument against the Malthusian principle of unlimited proliferation turns on the scarcity of mothers, the race that ensures “the continuance of the race.” The Last Man dooms its readers to extinction in the year 2100. The spread of global infection mapped the paths of improved communications as well as contemporary imperial and commercial activity—military campaigns, trade, immigration, and even tourism—not to mention the Greek Wars of Independence, which provides the bridgehead for the transmission of plague from east to west in The Last Man.
