In 1826, Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) published a less well-known novel - The Last Man - that was set around 2100 and was an apocalyptic story about a world devastated by plague.

It received a shock horror reaction from the critics and was a popular disaster. In Mary’s plague world, only one man was left alive, but apart from that difference (hopefully) with today, she does a very good job of prophesising the implications of a pandemic and social and political behaviour.

 “Nations, bordering on the already infected countries, began to enter upon serious plans for the better keeping out of the enemy. We, a commercial people, were obliged to bring such schemes under consideration; and the question of contagion became matter of earnest disquisition.”

“These reflections made our legislators pause, before they could decide on the laws to be put in force. The evil was so wide-spreading, so violent and immedicable, that no care, no prevention could be judged superfluous, which even added a chance to our escape.”

“O, for some medicinal vial to purge unwholesome nature, and bring back the earth to its accustomed health!”

 In Mary’s world view it was a triumph of nature over the impermanent works of mankind.

 “Nature, our mother, and our friend, had turned on us a brow of menace. She shewed us plainly, that, though she permitted us to assign her laws and subdue her apparent powers, yet, if she put forth but a finger, we must quake. She could take our globe, fringed with mountains, girded by the atmosphere, containing the condition of our being, and all that man's mind could invent or his force achieve; she could take the ball in her hand, and cast it into space, where life would be drunk up, and man and all his efforts for ever annihilated.”

As Frankenstein failed in his attempt to usurp God, so ultimately, humanity should never become complacent and assume that we are in charge. The quote from Milton on her front page: “Let no man seek/ Henceforth to be foretold, what shall befall/ Him or his children” is designed to put us all in our place.