Lionel Verney - Ambivalent Narrator?

While reading through Volume II of The Last Man, I was struck by Lionel Verney’s comments on the class bigotry that the Countess of Windsor (the ex-Queen of England) displays when she returns home from Europe. I am especially interested in the “deconstructive” potential of this passage:

False was all this – false but all the affections of our nature, and the links of sympathy with pleasure or pain. There was but one good and one evil in the world – life and death. The pomp of rank, the assumption of power, the possessions of wealth vanished like a morning mist. One living beggar had become of more worth than a national peerage of dead lords – alas the day! Than of dead heroes, patriots, or men of genius. There was much of degradation in this: for even vice and virtue had lost their attributors – life – life – for the continuation of our animal mechanism – was the alpha and Omega of the desires, the prayers, the prostate ambition of the human race (212).

In the novel, the plague functions as an epistemological tool that scrapes away layers of artificial (“false”) human behavior to reveal an essential nature underneath. Ostensibly, Verney despises the Countess (“haughty lady”) for her pride, which prevents her from recognizing her condition and her common bond with others who share it. But even Verney seems resistant to recognizing this condition. Though he criticizes the Countess for trying to maintain an illusory class system, he laments the fact that now, in this new apocalyptic economy, one beggar is worth more than a nation of dead aristocrats. He also expresses dismay that traditional moral values no longer exist in a world centered on self-preservation.

Verney criticizes the Countess for clinging to values the world can no longer sustain, but he seems to make indict himself by revealing his own longing for the preservation of those values. Last class period, we briefly discussed differences between Mary Shelley the author and Verney the narrator, as well as the possibility that Shelley undermines her protagonists' beliefs. I am wondering then, how, Shelley uses Verney - who is both connected to and separated from the English monarchy - to comment on the English political relations of Shelley's day. Can we read The Last Man as a Shelley's ambivalent commentary on political institutions?