Strange Future

I am still trying to understand whether Shelley’s vision of the future in The Last Man is purposefully inaccurate. In my original draft for a paper on this novel, I wrote the following:

"Early in the second chapter, the narrator completely disrupts the sense of time by discussing the year 2073 in past tense. However, to modern readers the text’s description of world in 2073 is obviously, almost laughably, false. Most interesting, it appears Shelley never really attempted to present a true vision of the future. For instance, despite the openings of railways in Britain and America prior to the writing of the novel, the text contains no images of trains, railways, or even steam engines. When characters in the novel decide to travel long distances quickly, they utilize a hot air balloon with feathered wings. Much of the novel’s plot revolves around the Greek and Turkish wars. Moreover, many of the early events in the text take place in a world that can only be described as pastoral, with no sense of modern industrialization. Surely this is not Shelley’s best guess at the state of the world over 250 years in the future. "

However, after reading Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks Tour, I am no longer feel quite so confident about this statement. The time just before Shelley wrote the novel feels as alien as the future would have seemed to her. Moreover, technology has allowed the world to move forward at a constantly accelerating speed. Shelley would have known about the railway, but may not have had any clue about how quickly society would accelerate technologically. On the other hand, she may have been aware of the upcoming changes, but been more interested in preserving Britain in its current state.

Does Shelley lack foresight? Or does she purposely maintain her vision of Britain in an attempt to raise Britain to the level of Greece and Rome as eternal cities?