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Um diário do ano da peste
Nessa obra, o autor recria ficcionalmente a Grande Peste de Londres de 1665, e, em forma de um diário-reportagem, somos levados a um emaranhado de recordações, anedotas, estatísticas oficiais e relatos de sobreviventes de uma epidemia de peste bubônica que marcou definitivamente a história da Inglaterra. O escritor, aliando o rigor jornalístico à exuberância da forma, dramatiza magistralmente aquela que podemos descrever como situação-limite.
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E, ao nos deparamos com nossa própria história, fica-nos a pergunta: o que podemos aprender do passado?
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E, ao nos deparamos com nossa própria história, fica-nos a pergunta: o que podemos aprender do passado?
272 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 1722
About the author
Daniel Defoe
4,034 books1,695 followersDaniel Defoe (1659/1661 [?] - 1731) was an English writer, journalist, and spy, who gained enduring fame for his novel The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe: of York, mariner (1719). Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest practitioners of the novel and helped popularize the genre in Britain. In some texts he is even referred to as one of the founders, if not the founder, of the English novel. A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote more than five hundred books, pamphlets, and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural). He was also a pioneer of economic journalism.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,483 reviews
April 9, 2020
Because writing is an expression of human character, what is true of one's character is true of one's writing as well. A person's strengths and weaknesses are often two sides of the same coin—the sympathetic character is often permissive, the assertive unreasonable, the ardent rash—and the same thing can be said of an author's beauties and his faults. A brief study of Daniel Defoe's book on the London plague of 1665-1666 illustrates this principle.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about “A Journal of the Plague Year" is that it is an extraordinarily convincing account narrated by the voice of a mature, solid citizen—thoroughly respectable and reliable--who has personally witnessed the extraordinary and often horrific incidents he describes. Defoe, however, although did he live in London at the time, was born in 1660, and was therefore only five years old when the Hand of Death fell upon the city of London.
Defoe creates a convincing persona by making his narrator a stolid burgher who fears his God, respects his fellow Londoners, and admires his city, an unimaginative man who above all reverences reliable testimony and verifiable facts. “Plague Year” is crammed with rolls of the dead and other helpful lists, as well as page upon page of city regulations governing the duties of citizens, the conduct of the inspectors, etc. Although there are many vivid glimpses of life during plague—crazed sufferers expiring in the streets, healthy families shut up in their houses by decree, diseased individuals defying city orders, open pits waiting for wagons stacked high with the dead—-these scenes are often obscured by heaps of accumulated detail, piles of haphazardly organized materials. The book, although impressive, is inelegant, its organizational principles unclear; it appears to be the work of a literate layman, not a professional writer. Paradoxically, it is precisely this impression of amateurishness that makes the voice—and therefore the work itself—so powerful and convincing a performance.
As with “Robinson Crusoe,” so it is with “A Journal of the Plague Year”: I can never decide whether Defoe is merely an unsophisticated novelist, addicted to lists and repetitive details, or whether—like the poet satirists of his own 18th Century—he is a master at constructing personae that convince the reader with their sincerity and authority.
Is the hobbling, inartful appearance of “Plague Year” a strength or is it a weakness? I for one think it's a toss up. Two sides of the same coin.
March 30, 2024
In the crowded unhealthy unclean foul, pest dominated filthy city of London the Black Plague breaks out in 1665, no surprise it had occurred before in fact just a few years previously but this escalates, felling some say 100,000 people who never rise again. Daniel Defoe the inventor of the English language novel (Robinson Crusoe, 1719) yet because of his earlier employment, was more a journalist than a novelist, writes a memoir of this catastrophe almost sixty years later. The author was only five -years old at the time, but his Uncle Henry Foe ( Defoe added De, to make himself seem a gentleman, his father was a butcher) takes this eyewitness account from this relative's journal, the narrator is only described as H.F. The alarmed inhabitants of the city mostly flee for their lives the rich first, King Charles the Second to Oxford, others to the nearby countryside the poor survive in the woods, old ruined shacks or in tents even outside, the locals don't help at first afraid to get sick too. Many refugees starve to death, some succumb to the unmerciful disease the very brave stay in London those that work for the city government, the least well off remain also nowhere to go the hardest hit and die frequently in the streets, their minds inflamed by illness babbling words incomprehensible before dropping to the ground. The Dead- Carts pick up the victims and bury them in deep holes, mass graves are quickly covered and another one dug for the next batch. The narrator's brother had urged him to get out of town like him, but H.F. had a store to run , a house to take care of with servants and warehouses full of his goods; how could he? Still his sister would welcome him, she lived faraway in a different city. The curious yet frightened man roams the streets, seeing the dead scattered everywhere, hearing unearthly screams from ill women in their homes, windows opened, moans flowing from above dazed men in nightshirts cursing, groaning people asking God to save them why did he not leave? Whole families dying inside a house fathers, mothers, children, servants the stench of the bodies spreading to passersby they keep walking. Londoners afraid to come near strangers they believe are infected by their polluted air not knowing the diseased rats, and flees that bite them and the many citizens of the city are the real killers. Pitiful beggars abound asking for help, houses are shut with the owners inside either by the government, with the sick there or healthy ones trying to avoid the deadly plague by hiding . Vicious thieves break into the empty homes stealing all, not afraid of the danger so desperate the situation, nothing to lose thinking everybody is doomed. And the Dead-Carts continue to roll down the pestilent streets the drivers throwing the deceased in, filling it to the top until no more living humans are left? A splendid glance back to a depressing time with little medicine, more ignorance and superstitions that dominated the scene a mirror into yesteryear.
September 3, 2019
In 1664, Borif De Pfeffel Jonffon was the Mayor of London. He was widely popular with his flowing blonde wig and extravagant ruff. Having invented the highly successful sport of peacock wiff-waff, where live cocks were thwacked across a bronze table with scimitars, then skinned and served whole to the victors, his electoral success was secured. In spite of his various mistresses, several of them chambermaids and lower-ranking countesses, his re-election the following year seemed certain. He promised the electorate new steam-powered horse and carts, a plumbing system that reduced pong by 34%, a complete ban on orange jerkins, and a promise to invent peroxide by 1669. A year later, Borif was re-elected. Everyone loved his extravagant, lying ways. He was such a character! He was such a cad, a bounder, a cuddly fluffy bugger-upper, such a British bumbler! Two weeks into his second term as Mayor, the Plague erupted across the city. Borif promised a million vaccines. He promised a hundred tubes of Savlon per household. By the end of the year, 70,000 people had perished from the plague. In 1666, Borif claimed a rousing victory at having seen off the virus single-handedly, with hardly no assistance from his recently sacked adviser Dominick Cummingf. A few weeks later the Great Fire broke out, and Borif promised 100,000 water cannons to arrive within the hour. By the end of the year, 436 acres of London was destroyed. At the next election, Boris was re-elected with a landslide, wherever there was land or people left. History teaches us nothing.
May 11, 2020
It was a very ill time to be sick in…
My pandemic reading continues with this classic work about one of the worst diseases in European history: bubonic plague. Daniel Defoe wrote this account when the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction were looser. He freely mixes invention, hearsay, anecdote, and real statistics, in pursuit of a gripping yarn. Defoe himself was only a young boy when the Great Plague struck London, in 1664-6; but he writes the story in the person of a well-to-do, curious, if somewhat unimaginative burgher, with the initials “H.F.” The result is one of literature’s most enduring portraits of a city besieged by disease.
Though this account purports to be a “journal,” it is not written as a series of dated entries, but as one long scrawl. What is more, Defoe’s narrator is not the most orderly of writers, and frequently repeats himself or gets sidetracked. The book is, thus, rather slow and painful to read, since it lacks any conspicuous structure to grasp onto, but approaches a kind of bumbled stream-of-consciousness. Even so, there are so many memorable details and stories in this book that it is worth the time one spends with it.
The Great Plague carried off one fourth of London’s population—about 100,000 souls—and it was not even the worst outbreak of plague in the city. The original wave of the Black Death, in the middle ages, was undoubtedly worse. Still, losing a quarter of a city’s population is something that is difficult for most of us to even imagine. And when you consider that the Great Fire of London was quick on the plague’s heels, you come to the conclusion that this was not the best time to be a Londoner.
What is most striking about reading this book now is how familiar it is. The coronavirus is no bubonic plague, but it seems our reactions to disease have not come a long way. There are, of course, the scenes of desolation: empty streets and mass graves. The citizens anxiously read the statistics in the newspaper, to see if the numbers are trending upwards or downwards. And then there are the quacks and mountebanks, selling sham remedies and magical elixirs to the desperate. We also see the ways that disease affects the rich and the poor differently: the rich could afford to flee the city, while the poor faced disease and starvation. And the economic consequences were dreadful—shutting up business, leaving thousands unemployed, and halting commerce.
Medical science was entirely useless against the disease. Nowadays, we can effectively treat the plague with antibiotics (though the mortality rate is still 10%). But at the time, little could be done. Infection with the bacillus causes swollen lymph nodes—in the groin, armpits, and neck—called buboes, and it was believed that the swellings had to be punctured and drained. This likely did more harm than good, and in practice the plague doctors’ only useful purpose was to keep records of the dead.
Quite interesting to observe were the antique forms of social distancing (a term that of course did not exist) that the Londoners practiced. As now, people tried to avoid going out of their homes as much as possible, and if they did go out they tried to keep a distance from others and to avoid touching anything. Defoe describes people picking up their own meat at the butcher’s and dropping their money into a pan of vinegar to disinfect it. There was also state-mandated quarantining, as any house with an infection got “shut up”—meaning the inhabitants could not leave.
Ironically, though these measures would have been wise had the disease been viral, they made little sense for a disease communicated by rat fleas. (Defoe does mention, by the way, that the people put out rat poison—which probably helped more than all of the distancing.)
One more commonality is that the disease outlasted people’s patience and prudence. As soon as an abatement was observed in the weekly deaths, citizens rushed out to embrace each other and resume normal life, despite the warning of the town’s physicians. Not much has changed, after all.
So while not exactly pleasant to read, A Journal of the Plague Year is at least humbling for the contemporary reader, as it reminds us that perhaps we have not come so far as we thought. And it is also a timely reminder that, far from a novel and unpredictable event, the current crisis is one of many plagues that we have weathered in our time on this perilous globe.
October 1, 2023
That's one of Gainsbourg's favorite books—a clinical, almost naturalistic story. There is no pathos. The style is cold as death—exciting reading in these times of epidemic.
July 14, 2020
The year is 1665, and the plague has come to London. It has come like a thief in the night, stealing into town one or two fatalities at a time and then growing to a level that is uncontrollable and unimaginable. The account is fiction, since Devoe was too young to have remembered most of the events he covers, but it is so obviously based on the first-hand memories of those who did survive and the records of the time, that it reads like non-fiction. The voice of the narrator reinforces the feeling of reality by inserting from time to time his assertions that this is his own recollection, not necessarily the only truth or full truth, but the truth as he can tell it, as it seemed to him at the time.
What I found the most interesting about this account was the correlations I could draw to the attitudes and reactions to the disease, as it pertains to our own situation with the COVID-19 pandemic. If anything would make you feel better about the current situation, it would be hearing the details of what people endured during this one. We think social distancing and sheltering in place is difficult, but imagine being locked into your house, and having your children confined with you, because one person in the household has the disease. Instead of removing the sick person and caring for the well, the sound were penned inside with the ill, and in almost every house that experienced this scenario, every person inside died.
There were looters (sadly this has not changed), who took advantage of the emptied houses and businesses that were unable to function. What a sad commentary on mankind that these people would be willing to steal, even at the risk of contracting this horrid disease.
The power of avarice was so strong in some that they would run any hazard to steal and to plunder; and particularly in houses where all the families or inhabitants have been dead and carried out, they would break in at all hazards, and without regard to the danger of infection, take even the clothes off the dead bodies and the bed-clothes from others where they lay dead.
There were charlatans who preyed upon the desire of people to get well or avoid getting sick. There were, happily, also those who risked their own lives in caring for the sick, in feeding those who fled in hopes of outrunning the plague, in carrying away the dead bodies so that they did not rot in the houses and streets and endanger even more of the population. This kind of courage we also see today.
I think it ought to be recorded to the honour of such men, as well clergy as physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, magistrates, and officers of every kind, as also all useful people who ventured their lives in discharge of their duty, as most certainly all such as stayed did to the last degree; and several of all these kinds did not only venture but lose their lives on that sad occasion.
People were asked to distance themselves from one another, but many defied the warnings and mingled at will, some had no choice but to go abroad to obtain necessities, some had jobs (nursing, carrying off the dead, supplying the houses that were locked down, ministering to the people) that prevented them from distancing. Many fled the city into the country, and as a result were either prohibited from passing through towns and died of want, or inadvertently spread the disease to areas that might have otherwise escaped the blight. More than a few paid with their lives.
I enjoyed reading most of this account. There was a tendency toward repetition, and there was no attempt to make the narrator anything other than an observer, so there was no central figure on which to hang one’s hopes or emotions. It was a recounting of the most horrible things that could have and did happen during this tormenting event. I confess to being brought to a gasp by the killing of all the animals: dogs, cats and ponies, in an effort to stop the spread of the disease. This, without any understanding that a flea was most likely responsible for the disease in the beginning. This was simply a measure I had not considered when imagining what had happened during the battle against the plague, and one that took me off-guard more than all the human suffering, which I was entirely braced for.
If you ever think there is something going on in this world that has never been experienced before, it is good to turn to history and realize you are wrong. Others have endured all this and more. It is good to be grateful for what has changed; it is odd to realize how little has changed. It is the story of your life, but perhaps it is just the story of life.
What I found the most interesting about this account was the correlations I could draw to the attitudes and reactions to the disease, as it pertains to our own situation with the COVID-19 pandemic. If anything would make you feel better about the current situation, it would be hearing the details of what people endured during this one. We think social distancing and sheltering in place is difficult, but imagine being locked into your house, and having your children confined with you, because one person in the household has the disease. Instead of removing the sick person and caring for the well, the sound were penned inside with the ill, and in almost every house that experienced this scenario, every person inside died.
There were looters (sadly this has not changed), who took advantage of the emptied houses and businesses that were unable to function. What a sad commentary on mankind that these people would be willing to steal, even at the risk of contracting this horrid disease.
The power of avarice was so strong in some that they would run any hazard to steal and to plunder; and particularly in houses where all the families or inhabitants have been dead and carried out, they would break in at all hazards, and without regard to the danger of infection, take even the clothes off the dead bodies and the bed-clothes from others where they lay dead.
There were charlatans who preyed upon the desire of people to get well or avoid getting sick. There were, happily, also those who risked their own lives in caring for the sick, in feeding those who fled in hopes of outrunning the plague, in carrying away the dead bodies so that they did not rot in the houses and streets and endanger even more of the population. This kind of courage we also see today.
I think it ought to be recorded to the honour of such men, as well clergy as physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, magistrates, and officers of every kind, as also all useful people who ventured their lives in discharge of their duty, as most certainly all such as stayed did to the last degree; and several of all these kinds did not only venture but lose their lives on that sad occasion.
People were asked to distance themselves from one another, but many defied the warnings and mingled at will, some had no choice but to go abroad to obtain necessities, some had jobs (nursing, carrying off the dead, supplying the houses that were locked down, ministering to the people) that prevented them from distancing. Many fled the city into the country, and as a result were either prohibited from passing through towns and died of want, or inadvertently spread the disease to areas that might have otherwise escaped the blight. More than a few paid with their lives.
I enjoyed reading most of this account. There was a tendency toward repetition, and there was no attempt to make the narrator anything other than an observer, so there was no central figure on which to hang one’s hopes or emotions. It was a recounting of the most horrible things that could have and did happen during this tormenting event. I confess to being brought to a gasp by the killing of all the animals: dogs, cats and ponies, in an effort to stop the spread of the disease. This, without any understanding that a flea was most likely responsible for the disease in the beginning. This was simply a measure I had not considered when imagining what had happened during the battle against the plague, and one that took me off-guard more than all the human suffering, which I was entirely braced for.
If you ever think there is something going on in this world that has never been experienced before, it is good to turn to history and realize you are wrong. Others have endured all this and more. It is good to be grateful for what has changed; it is odd to realize how little has changed. It is the story of your life, but perhaps it is just the story of life.
July 24, 2016
One of the problems with reviewing the earliest authors of fiction is that they were writing at a time before the rules had been properly worked out. Novels took on the form we know and love because of these writer’s successes and because of their failures. It was up to them to forge the templates, and if a certain template didn’t work then they could try a new one with the next book.
‘A Journal of the Plague year’ is a case in point. Although Defoe was alive at the time of plague, this is actually a fictional account written sixty years later – but one which relies heavily on anecdotal reportage. Defoe gives us a narrator to guide us through, but this man is just a cipher, a pair of eyes and ears to relate what he sees and hears. We know where he lives, what he does, how many servants he has and that he has a brother, but not much else about him. He is there to tell the tales Defoe heard, to describe scenes that Defoe saw (or at least had described to him by others). But the fact he has little definable character means there’s an odd vacuum at the centre, a distance that stops the reader fully empathising. It’s a decision few authors of a later vintage would have taken, if only because they’d learnt from this book’s mistake. In addition, as perhaps befits the first person account of a tradesman, the tale is not separated into chapters and rambles constantly down odd little cul-de-sacs. With the result that it can often be an irritating read.
That’s not to say that there aren’t good things in this book: the descriptions of the mass graves and a populous so caught in madness they will proclaim their own sins in the middle of the road will certainly stay with me. But this is not the most accessible of fictional histories and is a book that really makes you work hard for the treasures it has.
‘A Journal of the Plague year’ is a case in point. Although Defoe was alive at the time of plague, this is actually a fictional account written sixty years later – but one which relies heavily on anecdotal reportage. Defoe gives us a narrator to guide us through, but this man is just a cipher, a pair of eyes and ears to relate what he sees and hears. We know where he lives, what he does, how many servants he has and that he has a brother, but not much else about him. He is there to tell the tales Defoe heard, to describe scenes that Defoe saw (or at least had described to him by others). But the fact he has little definable character means there’s an odd vacuum at the centre, a distance that stops the reader fully empathising. It’s a decision few authors of a later vintage would have taken, if only because they’d learnt from this book’s mistake. In addition, as perhaps befits the first person account of a tradesman, the tale is not separated into chapters and rambles constantly down odd little cul-de-sacs. With the result that it can often be an irritating read.
That’s not to say that there aren’t good things in this book: the descriptions of the mass graves and a populous so caught in madness they will proclaim their own sins in the middle of the road will certainly stay with me. But this is not the most accessible of fictional histories and is a book that really makes you work hard for the treasures it has.
March 26, 2024
Daniel Defoe was a Master Orchestrator.
Recalling his own horrid experiences, encountered when living Right in the Thick of London during the cataclysmic devastation wrought by the Bubonic Plague in 1665, he melded memory with meticulous research -
A full sixty years later!
It was like, "Houston, we've got Rats!" No kidding.
This book therefore floored me. Think COVID is bad?
It was nowhere NEAR as ugly and odiferous!
***
I'm not a little glad I wasn't there.
Whadda book. If a ten star rating existed, I'd give it!
Yikes. Brave is not the word for Defoe.
***
Know WHY Defoe stayed in London, against the earnest wishes of his loving brother, who was safely living in the country?
Research again.
He assembled all the pros and cons for leaving London - again super-focused and objectively - and, hearing the preachings of his born-again congregation each Sunday, being an earnest non-conforming believer:
He BELIEVED staying put was the Will of God.
You know, I'd do the same in an Armageddon now -
No kidding -
I'd stay put and PRAY MY HEART OUT.
Recalling his own horrid experiences, encountered when living Right in the Thick of London during the cataclysmic devastation wrought by the Bubonic Plague in 1665, he melded memory with meticulous research -
A full sixty years later!
It was like, "Houston, we've got Rats!" No kidding.
This book therefore floored me. Think COVID is bad?
It was nowhere NEAR as ugly and odiferous!
***
I'm not a little glad I wasn't there.
Whadda book. If a ten star rating existed, I'd give it!
Yikes. Brave is not the word for Defoe.
***
Know WHY Defoe stayed in London, against the earnest wishes of his loving brother, who was safely living in the country?
Research again.
He assembled all the pros and cons for leaving London - again super-focused and objectively - and, hearing the preachings of his born-again congregation each Sunday, being an earnest non-conforming believer:
He BELIEVED staying put was the Will of God.
You know, I'd do the same in an Armageddon now -
No kidding -
I'd stay put and PRAY MY HEART OUT.
September 5, 2022
A journey through London’s “plague year” of 1665 might offer some valuable lessons for the people of 2022, living as we have been through a pandemic disease outbreak of our own. Such, at any rate, were my reflections after reading Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel A Journal of the Plague Year.
Defoe is well-known to modern readers as the author of classic novels like Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722). These books helped to define the novel as a literary genre – a long-form prose fiction narrative in which one main plot is artfully interwoven with a number of subplots. But Defoe had already done a great deal of important work as a man of letters in early-18th-century England before he began composing those classic novels in his later years.
A religious nonconformist, at a time when failing to subscribe to the tenets of the Church of England was a prosecutable and punishable crime, Defoe fearlessly stood up for the right of individual conscience; placed in the stocks once for his nonconformist ways, Defoe was cheered as a hero, and London crowds placed flowers on the stocks in which Defoe had been confined. The ordinary people of London, and of England, knew that he cared about them, and they loved him for it.
A Journal of the Plague Year, published in the same year as Moll Flanders, should not be misinterpreted as being an autobiographical account of Defoe’s actual experiences during the 1665 outbreak of bubonic plague in and around London; after all, Defoe was but a child of five years’ age when the plague struck the city. Rather, A Journal of the Plague Year works mainly as an historical novel, combined with elements of what we might nowadays call creative nonfiction. He conducted extensive research, drew upon his own gifts for observation of human character, and crafted a compelling narrative of a terrible time.
Inspired in part, perhaps, by a plague outbreak in Marseilles in 1720, A Journal of the Plague Year begins by introducing the reader to the book’s narrator, one “H.F.” (whose initials may refer to Defoe’s real-life uncle Henry Foe). H.F. tells the reader of how, in September 1664. he heard of the plague being back in Holland, after a violent outbreak of the disease the year before:
We had no such thing as printed News Papers in those days, to spread Rumours and Reports of Things; and to improve them by the Invention of Men, as I have liv’d to see practis’d since. But such things as these were gather’d from the letters of Merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now. (p. 1)
Once the plague arrived at London, the bills of mortality for the various parishes throughout the city showed an immediate increase in the number of deaths. In response, those Londoners who could leave the city did so; and H.F. recalls how this mass evacuation “was a very terrible and melancholy Thing to see, and as it was a Sight which I cou’d not but look on from Morning to Night; for indeed there was nothing else of Moment to be seen, it filled me with very serious Thoughts of the Misery that was coming upon the City, and the unhappy Condition of those that would be left in it” (p. 6).
H.F.’s older brother advises him to follow the exodus, get out of London, and seek shelter from the plague in the country. In response, H.F. expresses a fear of losing his trade and his goods if he leaves – the sort of anxieties that might afflict many people who are trying to decide how best to respond to the onset of a new pandemic – and says, in the spirit of Defoe’s belief in a benevolent personal God, that he wants to trust that God will protect his health. H.F.’s brother replies with impeccable logic: “[I]s it not as reasonable that you should trust God with the Chance or Risque of losing your Trade, as that you should stay in so imminent a Point of Danger, and trust him with your Life?” (p. 8)
Yet H.F. stays – inevitably, perhaps, for the sake of the main plotline of the book – and therefore he has the chance to bear witness, for the reader’s benefit, of how quickly and how completely the plague changes the life of London:
Sorrow and Sadness sat upon every Face....Tears and Lamentations were seen almost in every House, especially in the first Part of the Visitation; for towards the latter End, Mens Hearts were hardned, and Death was always so before their Eyes, that they did not so much concern themselves for the Loss of their Friends, expecting, that themselves should be summoned the next Hour. (p. 14)
When one takes into account the wide range of strange and downright irrational ways in which some people responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, I suppose we cannot be surprised when Defoe, through his “H.F.” narrator, describes comparably unreasoning responses to London’s bubonic plague epidemic of 1665: “The Apprehensions of the People, were likewise strangely encreas’d by the Error of the Times; in which, I think, the People, from what Principle I cannot imagine, were more addicted to Prophesies, and Astrological Conjurations, Dreams, and old Wives Tales, than ever they were before or since”. (p. 18) Defoe’s narrator sums up by saying that “These things serve to shew, how far the People were really overcome with Delusions” (p. 21)
Indeed, it is disheartening to note how assiduously the quacks of London offered plague “cures” to the less-educated members of the city’s terrified public:
“INFALLIBLE preventive pills against the Plague. NEVER-FAILING Preservatives against the Infection. SOVEREIGN Cordials against the Corruption of the Air. EXACT Regulations for the Conduct of the Body, in Case of an Infection: Antipestilential Pills. INCOMPARABLE Drink against the Plague, never found out before. An UNIVERSAL Remedy for the Plague. The ONLY-TRUE Plague-Water. The ROYAL-ANTIDOTE against all Kinds of Infection”; and such a Number more that I cannot reckon up, and if I could, would fill a Book of themselves to set them down. (p. 27)
All those who remember the pandemic lockdown – empty streets; empty office buildings and factories and shopping malls; entire populations sheltering at home, with at most an occasional trip to the grocery store – will note with interest the anti-plague precautions undertaken by the London city government in 1665 – for instance, “THAT all Plays, Bear-Baitings, Games, singing of Ballads, Buckler-play, or such like Causes of Assemblies of People, be utterly prohibited, and the Parties offending severely punished by every Alderman in his Ward” (p. 40).
Trying to keep people from gathering together for public entertainments while a contagious epidemic disease is ravaging an entire city is certainly a rational response. Unfortunately, not all public-health measures undertaken by the London authorities were quite as well-considered – for instance, the Lord Mayor’s order that all cats were to be killed on sight. We know now that Yersinia pestis, the plague bacterium, spreads mainly through bites from fleas that are carried on rats; therefore, it is clear today that killing cats was the worst anti-plague measure imaginable.
Defoe, through narrator H.F., takes particular issue with the practice, by city authorities called “Examiners,” of shutting up the homes of the infected, confining entire families of non-infected people with an infected family member. As H.F. points out, this practice encouraged family members to seek any escape possible from homes that had become prisons – and when these people escaped, they often carried the plague with them and spread the disease further.
H.F. says that he was compelled to work for a time as one of the Examiners, but dispensed with the work as soon as he possibly could. As Defoe always spoke his mind without fear, it should be no surprise that H.F. publicly takes issue with the city's policy of shutting up whole families in the homes of a single plague-infected family member:
In the execution of this Office, I cou’d not refrain speaking my Opinion among my Neighbours, as to this shutting up the People in their Houses; in which we saw most evidently the Severities that were used, tho’ grievous in themselves, had also this particular Objection against them, namely, that they did not answer the End, as I have said, but that the distemper’d People went Day by Day about the Streets; and it was our united Opinion, that a Method to have removed the Sound from the Sick in Case of a particular House being visited, wou’d ha’ been much more reasonable on many Accounts, leaving no Body with the sick Persons, but such as shou’d on such Occasion request to stay and declare themselves content to be shut up with them. (p. 151)
Defoe works like Moll Flanders - the story of an impoverished woman who must survive by her wits in a society that does not care whether she lives or dies - show the author’s compassion for the poor. A Journal of the Plague Year similarly shows the author expressing sympathy and understanding for the poor, while at the same time acknowledging that poverty can drive people to the most difficult of choices:
It must be confest, that tho’ the Plague was chiefly among the Poor; yet, were the Poor the most Venturous and Fearless of it, and went about their Employment, with a sort of brutal Courage; I must call it so, for it was founded neither on Religion or Prudence; scarse did they use any Caution, but run into any Business, which they could get Employment in, tho’ it was the most hazardous; such was that of tending the Sick, watching Houses shut up, carrying infected Persons to the Pest-House, and which was still worse, carrying the Dead away to their Graves. (p. 79)
A striking moment in A Journal of the Plague Year comes when two people, John the biscuit baker and his brother Thomas the sailmaker, engage in a bit of dramatized dialogue about whether to stay in London or try to leave the city, at a time when Londoners are being ordered to stay home, and residents of neighbouring towns are telling Londoners to stay away:
Tho. You talk your old Soldier’s Language…but this is a serious thing. The People have good Reason to keep any Body off, that they are not satisfied are found, at such a Time as this; and we must not plunder them.
John. No, Brother, you mistake the Case, and mistake me, too. I would plunder no Body; but for any Town upon the Road to deny me Leave to pass thro’ the Town in the open High-Way, and deny me Provisions for my Money, is to say the Town has a Right to Starve me to Death, which cannot be true.
Tho. But they do not deny you Liberty to go back again from whence you came, and therefore they do not starve you.
John. But the next Town behind me will by the same Rule deny me leave to go back, and they do starve me between them; besides there is no Law to prohibit my travelling wherever I will on the Road….
Tho. You will go away. Whither will you go? and what can you do? I would as willingly go away as you, if I knew whither: But we have no Acquaintance, no Friends. Here we were born, and here we must die.
John. Look you, Tom, the whole Kingdom is my Native Country as well as this Town. You may as well say, I must not go out of my House if it is on Fire, as that I must not go out of the Town I was born in, when it is infected with the Plague. I was born in England, and have a Right to live in it if I can. (p. 109)
Nowadays, there are COVID vaccines and boosters; and even as new variants of COVID-19 have emerged, the numbers of new cases and new deaths from the novel coronavirus have declined greatly from where they once were. But Defoe would no doubt prescribe caution for the people of any community that is coming out of a pandemic, judging from what H.F. describes of the behaviour of Londoners who learned that the bills of mortality from the various parishes were lessening. The physicians advised people “to continue reserv’d, and to use still the utmost Caution in their ordinary Conduct, notwithstanding the Decrease of the Distemper”; but their sound advice was in vain, as ordinary Londoners
…were so possess’d with the first Joy, and so surpriz’d with the Satisfaction of seeing a vast Decrease in the weekly Bills, that they were impenetrable by any new Terrors, and would not be persuaded, but that the Bitterness of Death was pass;’d; and it was to no more purpose to talk to them, than to an East-wind; but they open’d Shops, went about Streets, did Business, and conversed with any Body that came in their Way…neither inquiring of their Health, or so much as being Apprehensive of any Danger from them, tho’ they knew them not to be sound. (p. 200)
It should be no surprise that, as H.F. notes, “This imprudent rash Conduct cost a great many their Lives” (p. 200) – people who had survived the worst of the plague epidemic, and might have lived to see many more years yet.
A Journal of the Plague Year takes the reader back to an epidemic of the past, and encourages the reader to think about the pandemic that we are still living with now. History is supposed to serve, for the people of the present day, as a sort of rear-view mirror; we are supposed to emulate the good things, and avoid the bad things, that people and societies of the past have done. Defoe would want us to benefit from the advice that he set down 300 years ago – advice that remains valuable today.
Defoe is well-known to modern readers as the author of classic novels like Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722). These books helped to define the novel as a literary genre – a long-form prose fiction narrative in which one main plot is artfully interwoven with a number of subplots. But Defoe had already done a great deal of important work as a man of letters in early-18th-century England before he began composing those classic novels in his later years.
A religious nonconformist, at a time when failing to subscribe to the tenets of the Church of England was a prosecutable and punishable crime, Defoe fearlessly stood up for the right of individual conscience; placed in the stocks once for his nonconformist ways, Defoe was cheered as a hero, and London crowds placed flowers on the stocks in which Defoe had been confined. The ordinary people of London, and of England, knew that he cared about them, and they loved him for it.
A Journal of the Plague Year, published in the same year as Moll Flanders, should not be misinterpreted as being an autobiographical account of Defoe’s actual experiences during the 1665 outbreak of bubonic plague in and around London; after all, Defoe was but a child of five years’ age when the plague struck the city. Rather, A Journal of the Plague Year works mainly as an historical novel, combined with elements of what we might nowadays call creative nonfiction. He conducted extensive research, drew upon his own gifts for observation of human character, and crafted a compelling narrative of a terrible time.
Inspired in part, perhaps, by a plague outbreak in Marseilles in 1720, A Journal of the Plague Year begins by introducing the reader to the book’s narrator, one “H.F.” (whose initials may refer to Defoe’s real-life uncle Henry Foe). H.F. tells the reader of how, in September 1664. he heard of the plague being back in Holland, after a violent outbreak of the disease the year before:
We had no such thing as printed News Papers in those days, to spread Rumours and Reports of Things; and to improve them by the Invention of Men, as I have liv’d to see practis’d since. But such things as these were gather’d from the letters of Merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now. (p. 1)
Once the plague arrived at London, the bills of mortality for the various parishes throughout the city showed an immediate increase in the number of deaths. In response, those Londoners who could leave the city did so; and H.F. recalls how this mass evacuation “was a very terrible and melancholy Thing to see, and as it was a Sight which I cou’d not but look on from Morning to Night; for indeed there was nothing else of Moment to be seen, it filled me with very serious Thoughts of the Misery that was coming upon the City, and the unhappy Condition of those that would be left in it” (p. 6).
H.F.’s older brother advises him to follow the exodus, get out of London, and seek shelter from the plague in the country. In response, H.F. expresses a fear of losing his trade and his goods if he leaves – the sort of anxieties that might afflict many people who are trying to decide how best to respond to the onset of a new pandemic – and says, in the spirit of Defoe’s belief in a benevolent personal God, that he wants to trust that God will protect his health. H.F.’s brother replies with impeccable logic: “[I]s it not as reasonable that you should trust God with the Chance or Risque of losing your Trade, as that you should stay in so imminent a Point of Danger, and trust him with your Life?” (p. 8)
Yet H.F. stays – inevitably, perhaps, for the sake of the main plotline of the book – and therefore he has the chance to bear witness, for the reader’s benefit, of how quickly and how completely the plague changes the life of London:
Sorrow and Sadness sat upon every Face....Tears and Lamentations were seen almost in every House, especially in the first Part of the Visitation; for towards the latter End, Mens Hearts were hardned, and Death was always so before their Eyes, that they did not so much concern themselves for the Loss of their Friends, expecting, that themselves should be summoned the next Hour. (p. 14)
When one takes into account the wide range of strange and downright irrational ways in which some people responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, I suppose we cannot be surprised when Defoe, through his “H.F.” narrator, describes comparably unreasoning responses to London’s bubonic plague epidemic of 1665: “The Apprehensions of the People, were likewise strangely encreas’d by the Error of the Times; in which, I think, the People, from what Principle I cannot imagine, were more addicted to Prophesies, and Astrological Conjurations, Dreams, and old Wives Tales, than ever they were before or since”. (p. 18) Defoe’s narrator sums up by saying that “These things serve to shew, how far the People were really overcome with Delusions” (p. 21)
Indeed, it is disheartening to note how assiduously the quacks of London offered plague “cures” to the less-educated members of the city’s terrified public:
“INFALLIBLE preventive pills against the Plague. NEVER-FAILING Preservatives against the Infection. SOVEREIGN Cordials against the Corruption of the Air. EXACT Regulations for the Conduct of the Body, in Case of an Infection: Antipestilential Pills. INCOMPARABLE Drink against the Plague, never found out before. An UNIVERSAL Remedy for the Plague. The ONLY-TRUE Plague-Water. The ROYAL-ANTIDOTE against all Kinds of Infection”; and such a Number more that I cannot reckon up, and if I could, would fill a Book of themselves to set them down. (p. 27)
All those who remember the pandemic lockdown – empty streets; empty office buildings and factories and shopping malls; entire populations sheltering at home, with at most an occasional trip to the grocery store – will note with interest the anti-plague precautions undertaken by the London city government in 1665 – for instance, “THAT all Plays, Bear-Baitings, Games, singing of Ballads, Buckler-play, or such like Causes of Assemblies of People, be utterly prohibited, and the Parties offending severely punished by every Alderman in his Ward” (p. 40).
Trying to keep people from gathering together for public entertainments while a contagious epidemic disease is ravaging an entire city is certainly a rational response. Unfortunately, not all public-health measures undertaken by the London authorities were quite as well-considered – for instance, the Lord Mayor’s order that all cats were to be killed on sight. We know now that Yersinia pestis, the plague bacterium, spreads mainly through bites from fleas that are carried on rats; therefore, it is clear today that killing cats was the worst anti-plague measure imaginable.
Defoe, through narrator H.F., takes particular issue with the practice, by city authorities called “Examiners,” of shutting up the homes of the infected, confining entire families of non-infected people with an infected family member. As H.F. points out, this practice encouraged family members to seek any escape possible from homes that had become prisons – and when these people escaped, they often carried the plague with them and spread the disease further.
H.F. says that he was compelled to work for a time as one of the Examiners, but dispensed with the work as soon as he possibly could. As Defoe always spoke his mind without fear, it should be no surprise that H.F. publicly takes issue with the city's policy of shutting up whole families in the homes of a single plague-infected family member:
In the execution of this Office, I cou’d not refrain speaking my Opinion among my Neighbours, as to this shutting up the People in their Houses; in which we saw most evidently the Severities that were used, tho’ grievous in themselves, had also this particular Objection against them, namely, that they did not answer the End, as I have said, but that the distemper’d People went Day by Day about the Streets; and it was our united Opinion, that a Method to have removed the Sound from the Sick in Case of a particular House being visited, wou’d ha’ been much more reasonable on many Accounts, leaving no Body with the sick Persons, but such as shou’d on such Occasion request to stay and declare themselves content to be shut up with them. (p. 151)
Defoe works like Moll Flanders - the story of an impoverished woman who must survive by her wits in a society that does not care whether she lives or dies - show the author’s compassion for the poor. A Journal of the Plague Year similarly shows the author expressing sympathy and understanding for the poor, while at the same time acknowledging that poverty can drive people to the most difficult of choices:
It must be confest, that tho’ the Plague was chiefly among the Poor; yet, were the Poor the most Venturous and Fearless of it, and went about their Employment, with a sort of brutal Courage; I must call it so, for it was founded neither on Religion or Prudence; scarse did they use any Caution, but run into any Business, which they could get Employment in, tho’ it was the most hazardous; such was that of tending the Sick, watching Houses shut up, carrying infected Persons to the Pest-House, and which was still worse, carrying the Dead away to their Graves. (p. 79)
A striking moment in A Journal of the Plague Year comes when two people, John the biscuit baker and his brother Thomas the sailmaker, engage in a bit of dramatized dialogue about whether to stay in London or try to leave the city, at a time when Londoners are being ordered to stay home, and residents of neighbouring towns are telling Londoners to stay away:
Tho. You talk your old Soldier’s Language…but this is a serious thing. The People have good Reason to keep any Body off, that they are not satisfied are found, at such a Time as this; and we must not plunder them.
John. No, Brother, you mistake the Case, and mistake me, too. I would plunder no Body; but for any Town upon the Road to deny me Leave to pass thro’ the Town in the open High-Way, and deny me Provisions for my Money, is to say the Town has a Right to Starve me to Death, which cannot be true.
Tho. But they do not deny you Liberty to go back again from whence you came, and therefore they do not starve you.
John. But the next Town behind me will by the same Rule deny me leave to go back, and they do starve me between them; besides there is no Law to prohibit my travelling wherever I will on the Road….
Tho. You will go away. Whither will you go? and what can you do? I would as willingly go away as you, if I knew whither: But we have no Acquaintance, no Friends. Here we were born, and here we must die.
John. Look you, Tom, the whole Kingdom is my Native Country as well as this Town. You may as well say, I must not go out of my House if it is on Fire, as that I must not go out of the Town I was born in, when it is infected with the Plague. I was born in England, and have a Right to live in it if I can. (p. 109)
Nowadays, there are COVID vaccines and boosters; and even as new variants of COVID-19 have emerged, the numbers of new cases and new deaths from the novel coronavirus have declined greatly from where they once were. But Defoe would no doubt prescribe caution for the people of any community that is coming out of a pandemic, judging from what H.F. describes of the behaviour of Londoners who learned that the bills of mortality from the various parishes were lessening. The physicians advised people “to continue reserv’d, and to use still the utmost Caution in their ordinary Conduct, notwithstanding the Decrease of the Distemper”; but their sound advice was in vain, as ordinary Londoners
…were so possess’d with the first Joy, and so surpriz’d with the Satisfaction of seeing a vast Decrease in the weekly Bills, that they were impenetrable by any new Terrors, and would not be persuaded, but that the Bitterness of Death was pass;’d; and it was to no more purpose to talk to them, than to an East-wind; but they open’d Shops, went about Streets, did Business, and conversed with any Body that came in their Way…neither inquiring of their Health, or so much as being Apprehensive of any Danger from them, tho’ they knew them not to be sound. (p. 200)
It should be no surprise that, as H.F. notes, “This imprudent rash Conduct cost a great many their Lives” (p. 200) – people who had survived the worst of the plague epidemic, and might have lived to see many more years yet.
A Journal of the Plague Year takes the reader back to an epidemic of the past, and encourages the reader to think about the pandemic that we are still living with now. History is supposed to serve, for the people of the present day, as a sort of rear-view mirror; we are supposed to emulate the good things, and avoid the bad things, that people and societies of the past have done. Defoe would want us to benefit from the advice that he set down 300 years ago – advice that remains valuable today.
July 4, 2020
The Danse Macabre from The Seventh Seal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L4-N...
It is no mystery to me today why it is that the name of an eighteenth-century novelist (Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe) is still known (okay, not to everyone, but to readers of literature). He’s just flat out a great writer! This book, which has been staring me in the face on my “books to be read during the pandemic” list for a few months, is just exactly the kind of literary mountain I have historically liked to climb, for reasons probably closer to masochism than anything else. But as I said, I liked Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe, and have a bunch of pandemic books (unread) on my “to read” list. And then I thought I might see how the Black Death was like or unlike Covid-19. We know so much more now, we are so advanced! We respect science! We know what to do to save ourselves!
I just now learned that DeFoe took a few years to write this book, in the form of a journal, publishing it in 1722. It was based on the occasion of The Black Death (or, the Great Plague) killed anywhere from 70-100,000 out of a total population of around 460,000. This was 1665, and the plague largely ended in London a year later (when the Great London Fire would also decimate the city). The world population was estimated at about 550 million at the time, and that plague they think may have killed as many as 25 million of the roughly 75 million living in Europe at the time.
I know a few things about The Plague, or I thought I did, but DeFoe’s novel, that fictionalizes an H.F. as the narrator of his own journal, set me straight on a lot of things. It was supposedly written based in part on the journal his uncle Henry Foe kept at the time, fortified by his own deep research of actual events and statistics. I’ll call the book historical fiction but it reads at times like science, counting infections and deaths in various wards, and so on. But I really did expect to find when I read it that we know WAY more today about plagues and pandemics than we did 250 years ago, and have changed as a human race enough to truly counteract the disease. Decide for yourself:
*Early on there was great denial that it was anything to really anything to worry about. “Oh, it’s just like the flu, maybe a little worse, but it’s so variable, why worry about it at all?”
*As it got worse, people of science as well as every day observers began to study it, of course. Early on they deduced that the disease seemed to be transferred through “effluvium,” or bodily fluids, especially through respiration (getting breathed on by those infected) and possibly perspiration. There were lots of theories that included transmission by insects such as flies that stand today, too. At one point many thought animals were responsible, which led to the needless killing of thousands of pets and farmyard animals. But imagine this: People of science began to advocate for the wearing of masks and other head coverings! Nah, can’t work, you say! A waste of time! And many people did ignore this, in part bolstered by their courage that THEY would never get this disease!
*People tried as much as they could to live life as they did before, ignoring doctors and health care professionals. Especially after weeks in health-care recommended lock-down (imagine this, people in the late seventeenth-century were told to stay home and avoid large crowds at all costs! Ignorance! Don’t they value their freedom?! Who are these supposedly scientific tools of totalitarianism??!) people just got sick of the lockdown and went back to living as they did, pretending the Plague was over, thus spiking infections and deaths considerably, imagine. But I mean, how many times can you see reruns of Andy of Mayberry or the X-Files?! Get back to the bar, right?
*Many defended their not paying attention to the Plague because of their religious beliefs, primarily re: predestination, as in: If God wants to take me, he will do that. To fight against what God wants to do with my body is blasphemy! Eat, drink and be merry!
*Many religious people used the occasion of the Plague to blame any number of types of sinners for what was happening as a judgement from God for their sins (like the Old Testament God that brought The Flood down on sinners to wipe out almost the entire human population).
*As the disease progressed, it brought on any number of fake cures (Plague Water for Sale! Guaranteed to cure the Plague or your money back!) and charlatans and scams and price gouging (This thermometer by my desk I got for $79, but could have been bought for around $12 six months ago). Hoarding was typical among those wise enough to stay inside for great lengths of time, but in general people were largely unprepared for the tragedy, including the completely overwhelmed healthcare industry.
*Lots of rumors and guesses proliferated. Get a boat! You’ll be safe (Hey, let’s go on a cruise!). People are dying in London? Get out of town and get out in the country or go abroad where there’s no disease (thus spreading it everywhere). And this one early on was common: Hoax! But how to get around that, as one strain of The Black Death featured boils and other sores. You could see many who had the infection, and then you could see the piles of bodies. But the strain that killed you most quickly had almost no warning signs, was largely asymptomatic! It spread like wildfire because people thought, I’m not sick, let me give Grandma a big hug! Imagine that!
*The widespread death (and lockdown) led to paranoia, depression, madness, increases in crime, including theft of supplies and food and murder. And There was widespread and massive grief for all the death, of course, so despair was rampant. Suicides were up.
*The poor were disproportionately affected, as they had to work or ignored the advice of professionals for various reasons.
*As soon as the numbers of infections and deaths started to go down, things started to open up, people started to party, creating more infections and deaths. Nah! Wouldn’t happen today! We’re too smart for that!
*There was no universal health system; in fact there was almost no safety net at all, though The Church and some government agencies helped a little with Charity. But the health care system didn’t have a cure, a vaccine, of course. They were not prepared for it. Imagine DeFoe writing this as a guide to future generations to warn them to be ready if it ever happened again! Of course it will never happen again, it’s completely random! We’re completely safe!
*The economy was of course shot, as businesses had to close, everyone lost their jobs, there was no money to buy anything.
*Many heroic acts of charity were performed by health care and other leaders, helping to avert greater losses.
Aren’t you glad that we (especially in America, We are #1!!) know so much more than we did 250 years ago?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L4-N...
It is no mystery to me today why it is that the name of an eighteenth-century novelist (Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe) is still known (okay, not to everyone, but to readers of literature). He’s just flat out a great writer! This book, which has been staring me in the face on my “books to be read during the pandemic” list for a few months, is just exactly the kind of literary mountain I have historically liked to climb, for reasons probably closer to masochism than anything else. But as I said, I liked Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe, and have a bunch of pandemic books (unread) on my “to read” list. And then I thought I might see how the Black Death was like or unlike Covid-19. We know so much more now, we are so advanced! We respect science! We know what to do to save ourselves!
I just now learned that DeFoe took a few years to write this book, in the form of a journal, publishing it in 1722. It was based on the occasion of The Black Death (or, the Great Plague) killed anywhere from 70-100,000 out of a total population of around 460,000. This was 1665, and the plague largely ended in London a year later (when the Great London Fire would also decimate the city). The world population was estimated at about 550 million at the time, and that plague they think may have killed as many as 25 million of the roughly 75 million living in Europe at the time.
I know a few things about The Plague, or I thought I did, but DeFoe’s novel, that fictionalizes an H.F. as the narrator of his own journal, set me straight on a lot of things. It was supposedly written based in part on the journal his uncle Henry Foe kept at the time, fortified by his own deep research of actual events and statistics. I’ll call the book historical fiction but it reads at times like science, counting infections and deaths in various wards, and so on. But I really did expect to find when I read it that we know WAY more today about plagues and pandemics than we did 250 years ago, and have changed as a human race enough to truly counteract the disease. Decide for yourself:
*Early on there was great denial that it was anything to really anything to worry about. “Oh, it’s just like the flu, maybe a little worse, but it’s so variable, why worry about it at all?”
*As it got worse, people of science as well as every day observers began to study it, of course. Early on they deduced that the disease seemed to be transferred through “effluvium,” or bodily fluids, especially through respiration (getting breathed on by those infected) and possibly perspiration. There were lots of theories that included transmission by insects such as flies that stand today, too. At one point many thought animals were responsible, which led to the needless killing of thousands of pets and farmyard animals. But imagine this: People of science began to advocate for the wearing of masks and other head coverings! Nah, can’t work, you say! A waste of time! And many people did ignore this, in part bolstered by their courage that THEY would never get this disease!
*People tried as much as they could to live life as they did before, ignoring doctors and health care professionals. Especially after weeks in health-care recommended lock-down (imagine this, people in the late seventeenth-century were told to stay home and avoid large crowds at all costs! Ignorance! Don’t they value their freedom?! Who are these supposedly scientific tools of totalitarianism??!) people just got sick of the lockdown and went back to living as they did, pretending the Plague was over, thus spiking infections and deaths considerably, imagine. But I mean, how many times can you see reruns of Andy of Mayberry or the X-Files?! Get back to the bar, right?
*Many defended their not paying attention to the Plague because of their religious beliefs, primarily re: predestination, as in: If God wants to take me, he will do that. To fight against what God wants to do with my body is blasphemy! Eat, drink and be merry!
*Many religious people used the occasion of the Plague to blame any number of types of sinners for what was happening as a judgement from God for their sins (like the Old Testament God that brought The Flood down on sinners to wipe out almost the entire human population).
*As the disease progressed, it brought on any number of fake cures (Plague Water for Sale! Guaranteed to cure the Plague or your money back!) and charlatans and scams and price gouging (This thermometer by my desk I got for $79, but could have been bought for around $12 six months ago). Hoarding was typical among those wise enough to stay inside for great lengths of time, but in general people were largely unprepared for the tragedy, including the completely overwhelmed healthcare industry.
*Lots of rumors and guesses proliferated. Get a boat! You’ll be safe (Hey, let’s go on a cruise!). People are dying in London? Get out of town and get out in the country or go abroad where there’s no disease (thus spreading it everywhere). And this one early on was common: Hoax! But how to get around that, as one strain of The Black Death featured boils and other sores. You could see many who had the infection, and then you could see the piles of bodies. But the strain that killed you most quickly had almost no warning signs, was largely asymptomatic! It spread like wildfire because people thought, I’m not sick, let me give Grandma a big hug! Imagine that!
*The widespread death (and lockdown) led to paranoia, depression, madness, increases in crime, including theft of supplies and food and murder. And There was widespread and massive grief for all the death, of course, so despair was rampant. Suicides were up.
*The poor were disproportionately affected, as they had to work or ignored the advice of professionals for various reasons.
*As soon as the numbers of infections and deaths started to go down, things started to open up, people started to party, creating more infections and deaths. Nah! Wouldn’t happen today! We’re too smart for that!
*There was no universal health system; in fact there was almost no safety net at all, though The Church and some government agencies helped a little with Charity. But the health care system didn’t have a cure, a vaccine, of course. They were not prepared for it. Imagine DeFoe writing this as a guide to future generations to warn them to be ready if it ever happened again! Of course it will never happen again, it’s completely random! We’re completely safe!
*The economy was of course shot, as businesses had to close, everyone lost their jobs, there was no money to buy anything.
*Many heroic acts of charity were performed by health care and other leaders, helping to avert greater losses.
Aren’t you glad that we (especially in America, We are #1!!) know so much more than we did 250 years ago?!
April 2, 2020
Daniel Defoe wrote this fictionalised account (by an author known only as H.F.) of the 1664 bubonic plague outbreak in London, otherwise known as the Black Death. He wrote it some 50 years after the events. Defoe was fascinated by plagues and did a huge amount of research, producing a work that was believed to be a true account for some decades after it was published. I bought it several months ago and it seemed to be timely to read it now. The parallels are chilling.
..the Face of Things, I say, was much altered; Sorrow and Sadness sat upon every face; and tho’ some Part were not yet overwhelmed, yet all looked deeply concerned; and as we saw it apparently coming on, so everyone looked on himself, and his Family, as in the utmost Danger.
...it was a most surprising thing, to see those Streets, which were so usually thronged, now grown desolate, and so few People to be seen in them, that if I had been a Stranger, and at a Loss for my Way, I might sometimes have gone the Length of a whole Street....and see no Body to direct me...
....the Power of shutting up people in their own Houses, was granted by Act of Parliament, entitled, An Act for the charitable Relief and Ordering of Persons affected with the Plague (confirmed an order of 1583 that those stricken by the plague be confined to their houses). ..to every infected House there be appointed two Watchmen, one for every Day, the other for the Night (with) a special care that no Person go in or out of such infected Houses, whereof they have the Charge, upon pain of severe punishment.
That where several Inmates are in one and the same House, and any Person in that House happens to be infected; no other Person of Family of such House shall be suffered to remove him or themselves without a Certificate from the Examiners of Health of that Parish;...
That all Plays, Bear-Baitings, Games.....or such like Causes of Assemblies of People, be utterly prohibited.....Dinners at Taverns, Alehouses, and other Places of common Entertainment be forborn...That no Vintner, Innholder, Cook, Ordinary-Keeper, Seller of Strong-Waters, Ale-House-keeper, shall henceforward, during the Infection receive or entertain any person or persons...to eat or drink in their houses or shops.
...many Families foreseeing the Approach of the Distemper, laid up Stores of Provisions, sufficient for their whole Families, and shut themselves up, and that so entirely, that they were neither seen or heard of, till the Infection was quite ceased, and then came abroad Sound and Well.....
People...have forbid their own Family to come near them, in Hopes of their being preserved; and have even died without seeing their nearest Relations, lest they should be instrumental to...infect or endanger them:..
all Trades being stopt, Employment ceased; the Labour, and by that the Bread of the Poor, were cut off; ..tho’ by the Distribution of Charity, their Misery that way was greatly abated: Many indeed fled into the Countries; ...they serv’d for no better than the Messengers of Death...carrying the Infection along with them; spreading it very unhappily into the remotest Parts of the Kingdom.
others....were silently infected....It was very sad to reflect, how such a Person...had been a walking Destroyer, perhaps for a Week or a Fortnight before that; how he had ruin’d those, that he would have hazarded his Life to save, and had been breathing Death upon them, even perhaps in his tender Kissing and Embracings of his own Children....many people..were as well to look on as other People, and even knew it not themselves.
But from the whole I found, that the Nature of this Contagion was such, that it was impossible to discover it at all, or to prevent its spreading from one to another by any human Skill.
a vast Number of People lock’d themselves up, so as not to come abroad into any Company at all, nor suffer any, that had been abroad in promiscuous Company, to come into their Houses, or near them; at least not so near them, as to be within the Reach of their Breath, or of any Smell from them.....It must be acknowledg’d, that when People began to use these Cautions, they were less exposed to Danger, and the Infection did not break into such Houses so furiously as it did into others before, and thousands of Families were preserved....by that Means.
When the numbers dying started to decrease, people stopped being so cautious and traders flocked to London from the countryside.
This imprudent rash Conduct cost a great many their Lives, who had with great Care and Caution shut themselves up, and kept retir’d as it were from all Mankind, and had by that means.....been preserv’d. The Consequence of this was, that the Bills (lists of fatalities) encreas’d again..
A dreadful Plague in London was,
In the year Sixty Five,
Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls
Away; yet I alive!
H.F. (author)
4 stars because it became quite repetitive at times but it is a fascinating account. I skim read the last pages because of the worsening situation in our world. For now, I feel the need for pure fantasy rather than fictionalised reality.
Keep safe everyone.
..the Face of Things, I say, was much altered; Sorrow and Sadness sat upon every face; and tho’ some Part were not yet overwhelmed, yet all looked deeply concerned; and as we saw it apparently coming on, so everyone looked on himself, and his Family, as in the utmost Danger.
...it was a most surprising thing, to see those Streets, which were so usually thronged, now grown desolate, and so few People to be seen in them, that if I had been a Stranger, and at a Loss for my Way, I might sometimes have gone the Length of a whole Street....and see no Body to direct me...
....the Power of shutting up people in their own Houses, was granted by Act of Parliament, entitled, An Act for the charitable Relief and Ordering of Persons affected with the Plague (confirmed an order of 1583 that those stricken by the plague be confined to their houses). ..to every infected House there be appointed two Watchmen, one for every Day, the other for the Night (with) a special care that no Person go in or out of such infected Houses, whereof they have the Charge, upon pain of severe punishment.
That where several Inmates are in one and the same House, and any Person in that House happens to be infected; no other Person of Family of such House shall be suffered to remove him or themselves without a Certificate from the Examiners of Health of that Parish;...
That all Plays, Bear-Baitings, Games.....or such like Causes of Assemblies of People, be utterly prohibited.....Dinners at Taverns, Alehouses, and other Places of common Entertainment be forborn...That no Vintner, Innholder, Cook, Ordinary-Keeper, Seller of Strong-Waters, Ale-House-keeper, shall henceforward, during the Infection receive or entertain any person or persons...to eat or drink in their houses or shops.
...many Families foreseeing the Approach of the Distemper, laid up Stores of Provisions, sufficient for their whole Families, and shut themselves up, and that so entirely, that they were neither seen or heard of, till the Infection was quite ceased, and then came abroad Sound and Well.....
People...have forbid their own Family to come near them, in Hopes of their being preserved; and have even died without seeing their nearest Relations, lest they should be instrumental to...infect or endanger them:..
all Trades being stopt, Employment ceased; the Labour, and by that the Bread of the Poor, were cut off; ..tho’ by the Distribution of Charity, their Misery that way was greatly abated: Many indeed fled into the Countries; ...they serv’d for no better than the Messengers of Death...carrying the Infection along with them; spreading it very unhappily into the remotest Parts of the Kingdom.
others....were silently infected....It was very sad to reflect, how such a Person...had been a walking Destroyer, perhaps for a Week or a Fortnight before that; how he had ruin’d those, that he would have hazarded his Life to save, and had been breathing Death upon them, even perhaps in his tender Kissing and Embracings of his own Children....many people..were as well to look on as other People, and even knew it not themselves.
But from the whole I found, that the Nature of this Contagion was such, that it was impossible to discover it at all, or to prevent its spreading from one to another by any human Skill.
a vast Number of People lock’d themselves up, so as not to come abroad into any Company at all, nor suffer any, that had been abroad in promiscuous Company, to come into their Houses, or near them; at least not so near them, as to be within the Reach of their Breath, or of any Smell from them.....It must be acknowledg’d, that when People began to use these Cautions, they were less exposed to Danger, and the Infection did not break into such Houses so furiously as it did into others before, and thousands of Families were preserved....by that Means.
When the numbers dying started to decrease, people stopped being so cautious and traders flocked to London from the countryside.
This imprudent rash Conduct cost a great many their Lives, who had with great Care and Caution shut themselves up, and kept retir’d as it were from all Mankind, and had by that means.....been preserv’d. The Consequence of this was, that the Bills (lists of fatalities) encreas’d again..
A dreadful Plague in London was,
In the year Sixty Five,
Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls
Away; yet I alive!
H.F. (author)
4 stars because it became quite repetitive at times but it is a fascinating account. I skim read the last pages because of the worsening situation in our world. For now, I feel the need for pure fantasy rather than fictionalised reality.
Keep safe everyone.
July 1, 2021
A Journal of the Plague Year is a dense, repetitive, dismal collection of fictional observations based on factual evidence derived from the events of the Black Death epidemic of 1664-1665. This “journal” completely lacks a narrative, relying solely on a journalistic approach, although it reads nothing like a reliable news source and more like a completely random collection of thoughts and observations that all bleed together.
Suffering pervades and death is king.
To put it bluntly, this book is boring. But having thus far survived a modern pandemic, I found quite a bit of the book to be depressingly relatable. I would like to believe that humanity will learn from its mistakes and grow away from ignorance, but recent evidence leads me to believe that we have a long way to go.
Another plague year would reconcile all these differences; a close conversing with death, or with diseases that threaten death, would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before.
Suffering pervades and death is king.
To put it bluntly, this book is boring. But having thus far survived a modern pandemic, I found quite a bit of the book to be depressingly relatable. I would like to believe that humanity will learn from its mistakes and grow away from ignorance, but recent evidence leads me to believe that we have a long way to go.
Another plague year would reconcile all these differences; a close conversing with death, or with diseases that threaten death, would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before.
October 27, 2011
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label
Essay #62: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), by Daniel Defoe
The story in a nutshell:
Although not actually written until sixty years later (but more on that in a bit), Daniel Defoe's 1722 A Journal of the Plague Year is pretty much what it sounds like -- a purportedly true account of London's Great Plague of 1665, the last outbreak of the bubonic plague the city would ever see, supposedly written by an average middle-classer who decided to wait things out instead of fleeing to the countryside like so many others. As such, then, the book doesn't really have a three-act plot per se, but is more a rambling collection of observations, anecdotes, and actual hard data -- from an examination of the religious fervor that overtook the city during the worst months, to a detailed look at how home quarantines actually worked, to second-hand accounts of the equal amount of trouble awaiting poor peasants who tried living illegally in the rural wilds of England that year, to horror stories of people literally bursting into goo in the middle of public streets, or of cemetery workers who would literally die while on their way to mass graves with a cart full of corpses, leaving the city full of wandering teams of horses dragging dead bodies randomly to and fro. Although almost 300 years old by now, be warned that this is still not for the faint of heart!
The argument for it being a classic:
The case for this being a classic is a pretty simple one -- it is arguably the very first "historical novel" in human history, and in fact it was the centuries of passionate debate about whether this should be considered fact or fiction that even led to the term in the first place, and to this genre eventually becoming as popular as it now is. (For example, although not proven, it's widely believed that our narrator "H.F." is based on Defoe's relative Henry Foe, who actually was a young adult craftsman in London during the '65 plague, and who may or may not have left a detailed journal where Defoe culled many of these stories; and for another example, Defoe even went to the trouble of including slang terms and intentional misspellings from the 1660s that had fallen out of favor by the 1720s.) On top of this, though, say its fans, the book's simply one freaky nightmare of a read, a surprisingly plain-spoken and readable book (befitting the Enlightenment times when it was actually written) that has had an enormous impact on not only historical novels but the horror genre and post-apocalyptic fiction, and that has directly influenced everyone from Albert Camus to Cormac McCarthy to even Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (That movie's famous line "Bring out yer dead!" was lifted directly from this book.)
The argument against:
There seems to be two main arguments against The Plague Year being a classic, although admittedly both of them weak ones: first, that as a mere prototype of a genre that didn't acquire its main tropes until a century later, the book's digressive nature and outdated language is hard to read and follow; and second, that although this book may be good enough on its own, it's Defoe's much more famous and important Robinson Crusoe that should actually be considered the indisputable classic, in that that's the book widely considered to be the very first three-act novel in the history of the English language.
My verdict:
As I've said in this essay series before, I think to truly enjoy books that are this old, it's important to understand the context in which they were written, and to know what kinds of things were influencing both the author himself and the original audience he was writing for; and so in the case of The Plague Year, understanding this context makes the book much more fascinating than simply its writing quality may make it seem, and is crucial for understanding why I found this such a surprisingly fantastic read. Because, you see, Defoe was not only one of the first novelists in British history (a format he came to know and love during his travels in southern Europe as a businessman in the late 1600s), but he chose to use this format specifically to comment on the hottest, trendiest issues of the day, making him essentially the Michael Crichton of the Enlightenment; and it just so happens that just a year before this was written, the French city of Marseilles went through a major new outbreak of the bubonic plague, which inspired the British public and its newfound "journalism" industry to obsessively look back at their own plague of 56 years previous, and to examine all the ways that their society had profoundly changed since then.
Now combine this with the Great London Fire just one year after this 1665 plague, a one-two knockout to the city that left it largely empty of people and burned to the ground, and was the very thing that transformed it in those years into the post-Medieval modern infrastructure we now know; when you take all these things into consideration, then, The Plague Year suddenly becomes not just a horror story and important precedent in the development of historical fiction, but indeed serves as no less than a grand epic look at the transformation of Britain in this 60-year period, from the last vestiges of the Middle Ages to the "Age of Science" of Defoe's own times. I mean, certainly a lot more of this book suddenly starts making a lot more sense when you assume that this was Defoe's actual goal; he goes on and on in it, for example, about the shamefully superstitious way that 1600s Londoners actually reacted to this plague (a common criticism among Enlightenment citizens about the generation before them), and also takes the trouble to point out all the faulty ways that people medically tried to deal with this plague, outdated hokum that had been disproven by the "modern" doctors of Defoe's own time, and one of the many sneakily brilliant things that Defoe gets away with by writing this in reality half a century after the events that it describes.
I mean, don't get me wrong, the book just by itself is pretty great on its own; it's unusually easy to read compared to books written in the same time period, and really does have a kind of slasher-flick mentality that makes it still so engaging even three centuries later. But I have to admit, what makes it truly delightful is to imagine yourself as an average Enlightenment intellectual in the early 1700s yourself, to picture the ways that science and reason and philosophy were utterly transforming society at the time, literally wresting power away from the mysticism, fear and superstition that had mostly driven British life up to that point (because let's never forget, it actually took several additional centuries for the principles of the Renaissance to truly catch on in Britain, after it first became popular in southern Europe in the late 1400s); and then to imagine reading The Plague Year within such a context, the point not really to talk about plagues at all but rather to examine all the ways that British society had changed in the 60 years since, and to thank God that modern biological science was rapidly bringing an end to such plagues in the first place. When read in this spirit, it makes The Plague Year one of the most surprisingly great books in the entirety of this essay series so far, and it comes strongly recommended to those who can maintain this attitude themselves.
Is it a classic? Yes
(And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!)
The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label
Essay #62: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), by Daniel Defoe
The story in a nutshell:
Although not actually written until sixty years later (but more on that in a bit), Daniel Defoe's 1722 A Journal of the Plague Year is pretty much what it sounds like -- a purportedly true account of London's Great Plague of 1665, the last outbreak of the bubonic plague the city would ever see, supposedly written by an average middle-classer who decided to wait things out instead of fleeing to the countryside like so many others. As such, then, the book doesn't really have a three-act plot per se, but is more a rambling collection of observations, anecdotes, and actual hard data -- from an examination of the religious fervor that overtook the city during the worst months, to a detailed look at how home quarantines actually worked, to second-hand accounts of the equal amount of trouble awaiting poor peasants who tried living illegally in the rural wilds of England that year, to horror stories of people literally bursting into goo in the middle of public streets, or of cemetery workers who would literally die while on their way to mass graves with a cart full of corpses, leaving the city full of wandering teams of horses dragging dead bodies randomly to and fro. Although almost 300 years old by now, be warned that this is still not for the faint of heart!
The argument for it being a classic:
The case for this being a classic is a pretty simple one -- it is arguably the very first "historical novel" in human history, and in fact it was the centuries of passionate debate about whether this should be considered fact or fiction that even led to the term in the first place, and to this genre eventually becoming as popular as it now is. (For example, although not proven, it's widely believed that our narrator "H.F." is based on Defoe's relative Henry Foe, who actually was a young adult craftsman in London during the '65 plague, and who may or may not have left a detailed journal where Defoe culled many of these stories; and for another example, Defoe even went to the trouble of including slang terms and intentional misspellings from the 1660s that had fallen out of favor by the 1720s.) On top of this, though, say its fans, the book's simply one freaky nightmare of a read, a surprisingly plain-spoken and readable book (befitting the Enlightenment times when it was actually written) that has had an enormous impact on not only historical novels but the horror genre and post-apocalyptic fiction, and that has directly influenced everyone from Albert Camus to Cormac McCarthy to even Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (That movie's famous line "Bring out yer dead!" was lifted directly from this book.)
The argument against:
There seems to be two main arguments against The Plague Year being a classic, although admittedly both of them weak ones: first, that as a mere prototype of a genre that didn't acquire its main tropes until a century later, the book's digressive nature and outdated language is hard to read and follow; and second, that although this book may be good enough on its own, it's Defoe's much more famous and important Robinson Crusoe that should actually be considered the indisputable classic, in that that's the book widely considered to be the very first three-act novel in the history of the English language.
My verdict:
As I've said in this essay series before, I think to truly enjoy books that are this old, it's important to understand the context in which they were written, and to know what kinds of things were influencing both the author himself and the original audience he was writing for; and so in the case of The Plague Year, understanding this context makes the book much more fascinating than simply its writing quality may make it seem, and is crucial for understanding why I found this such a surprisingly fantastic read. Because, you see, Defoe was not only one of the first novelists in British history (a format he came to know and love during his travels in southern Europe as a businessman in the late 1600s), but he chose to use this format specifically to comment on the hottest, trendiest issues of the day, making him essentially the Michael Crichton of the Enlightenment; and it just so happens that just a year before this was written, the French city of Marseilles went through a major new outbreak of the bubonic plague, which inspired the British public and its newfound "journalism" industry to obsessively look back at their own plague of 56 years previous, and to examine all the ways that their society had profoundly changed since then.
Now combine this with the Great London Fire just one year after this 1665 plague, a one-two knockout to the city that left it largely empty of people and burned to the ground, and was the very thing that transformed it in those years into the post-Medieval modern infrastructure we now know; when you take all these things into consideration, then, The Plague Year suddenly becomes not just a horror story and important precedent in the development of historical fiction, but indeed serves as no less than a grand epic look at the transformation of Britain in this 60-year period, from the last vestiges of the Middle Ages to the "Age of Science" of Defoe's own times. I mean, certainly a lot more of this book suddenly starts making a lot more sense when you assume that this was Defoe's actual goal; he goes on and on in it, for example, about the shamefully superstitious way that 1600s Londoners actually reacted to this plague (a common criticism among Enlightenment citizens about the generation before them), and also takes the trouble to point out all the faulty ways that people medically tried to deal with this plague, outdated hokum that had been disproven by the "modern" doctors of Defoe's own time, and one of the many sneakily brilliant things that Defoe gets away with by writing this in reality half a century after the events that it describes.
I mean, don't get me wrong, the book just by itself is pretty great on its own; it's unusually easy to read compared to books written in the same time period, and really does have a kind of slasher-flick mentality that makes it still so engaging even three centuries later. But I have to admit, what makes it truly delightful is to imagine yourself as an average Enlightenment intellectual in the early 1700s yourself, to picture the ways that science and reason and philosophy were utterly transforming society at the time, literally wresting power away from the mysticism, fear and superstition that had mostly driven British life up to that point (because let's never forget, it actually took several additional centuries for the principles of the Renaissance to truly catch on in Britain, after it first became popular in southern Europe in the late 1400s); and then to imagine reading The Plague Year within such a context, the point not really to talk about plagues at all but rather to examine all the ways that British society had changed in the 60 years since, and to thank God that modern biological science was rapidly bringing an end to such plagues in the first place. When read in this spirit, it makes The Plague Year one of the most surprisingly great books in the entirety of this essay series so far, and it comes strongly recommended to those who can maintain this attitude themselves.
Is it a classic? Yes
(And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!)
December 27, 2021
What a time to be reading this as we in England wait to see if January brings tighter controls on what we can and can’t do. Living through the plague is not something I’d want to do but I would say that at least they didn’t have scientists computer modelling doomsday scenarios and so despite the death toll being so much greater than our covid one they were living normally within a year because they had realised that viruses become more contagious but less harmful over time. We are still debating whether to see our families after 21 months as our latest variant becomes equivalent to a mild cold.
What struck me was that whether you think Boris et al did a good or bad job during this pandemic is somewhat irrelevant as they put in almost the exact same measures as were put in place in 1665 proving that there are limited responses available. They furloughed those who couldn’t work, ensured everyone was fed, implemented lockdown, imposed curfews, dealt with the homeless and closed down the hospitality and entertainment industries. As with today the wealthy could leave (with a certificate of health – a 1665 vaccine passport) or had the resources to hole up but the poor had to keep working and exposing themselves to risk. The servants who had to buy supplies are today’s Amazon and supermarket delivery drivers who ensure that those in better paid work-from-home jobs can remain safe indoors while they risk infection. Just as we moved to paying exclusively by card Defoe’s Londoners had to use the exact change put into a pot of vinegar to disinfect it and without the need for money to change hands.
Just as today it was impossible then to prevent the spread. Despite a network of watchmen whose job it was to monitor houses that had the plague ensuring that no one entered or exited, people were not willing to be treated as prisoners. Using techniques ranging from distracting the watchman by sending him in errands he could not refuse to creating a hole into the house next door people escaped. This may seem very uncivic but it’s worth remembering that if a single member of a household had symptoms all the inhabitants were locked up with them guaranteeing their death.
Defoe’s style here might be the first example of faction. It retells the true facts and bulks it out with conversations and observations that are invented. Although he was alive at the time of the plague Defoe would have been barely five and the journal was not written until 1722 when he was in his sixties and yet he does a convincing job of being the middle-aged man who decides to stay in London and brave frequent trips out to check on his brother’s evacuated home and to observe the streets of the city. He claims to be an inexperienced and inadequate writer and uses repetition of events and facts and his slightly haphazard narration (he tells us about three brothers who have an interesting story but doesn’t tell us their tale until about a hundred pages later) to justify this claim. This artifice is cleverly done and makes one even more appreciative of Defoe’s skill as a writer.
I would like to say the book ends on a hopeful, positive, dare I say, happy note but it doesn’t unless you see the end of the plague being all that is required to fulfil those criteria. Our narrator says that one of the unforeseen benefits of the plague was the way it brought people together to help and support each other and that it brought a cessation to the animosity between the Christian denominations. He talks of how they put their differences aside and came together and our narrator hoped that it would continue, but one of the bleakest aspects of the whole book was his observation of how quickly people forgot the kindnesses, the sacrifices made and the help given and returned to their hating and arguing. Reading that I couldn’t help think of how we in the UK lauded our care-home workers, took to our doorsteps weekly to applaud our NHS workers and now see fit to make them redundant if they will not have the vaccine. Truly there is nothing new under the sun or in human nature and the realisation that we are no more advanced than our forebears of 350 years ago I find depressing and reassuring in equal measure.
What struck me was that whether you think Boris et al did a good or bad job during this pandemic is somewhat irrelevant as they put in almost the exact same measures as were put in place in 1665 proving that there are limited responses available. They furloughed those who couldn’t work, ensured everyone was fed, implemented lockdown, imposed curfews, dealt with the homeless and closed down the hospitality and entertainment industries. As with today the wealthy could leave (with a certificate of health – a 1665 vaccine passport) or had the resources to hole up but the poor had to keep working and exposing themselves to risk. The servants who had to buy supplies are today’s Amazon and supermarket delivery drivers who ensure that those in better paid work-from-home jobs can remain safe indoors while they risk infection. Just as we moved to paying exclusively by card Defoe’s Londoners had to use the exact change put into a pot of vinegar to disinfect it and without the need for money to change hands.
Just as today it was impossible then to prevent the spread. Despite a network of watchmen whose job it was to monitor houses that had the plague ensuring that no one entered or exited, people were not willing to be treated as prisoners. Using techniques ranging from distracting the watchman by sending him in errands he could not refuse to creating a hole into the house next door people escaped. This may seem very uncivic but it’s worth remembering that if a single member of a household had symptoms all the inhabitants were locked up with them guaranteeing their death.
Defoe’s style here might be the first example of faction. It retells the true facts and bulks it out with conversations and observations that are invented. Although he was alive at the time of the plague Defoe would have been barely five and the journal was not written until 1722 when he was in his sixties and yet he does a convincing job of being the middle-aged man who decides to stay in London and brave frequent trips out to check on his brother’s evacuated home and to observe the streets of the city. He claims to be an inexperienced and inadequate writer and uses repetition of events and facts and his slightly haphazard narration (he tells us about three brothers who have an interesting story but doesn’t tell us their tale until about a hundred pages later) to justify this claim. This artifice is cleverly done and makes one even more appreciative of Defoe’s skill as a writer.
I would like to say the book ends on a hopeful, positive, dare I say, happy note but it doesn’t unless you see the end of the plague being all that is required to fulfil those criteria. Our narrator says that one of the unforeseen benefits of the plague was the way it brought people together to help and support each other and that it brought a cessation to the animosity between the Christian denominations. He talks of how they put their differences aside and came together and our narrator hoped that it would continue, but one of the bleakest aspects of the whole book was his observation of how quickly people forgot the kindnesses, the sacrifices made and the help given and returned to their hating and arguing. Reading that I couldn’t help think of how we in the UK lauded our care-home workers, took to our doorsteps weekly to applaud our NHS workers and now see fit to make them redundant if they will not have the vaccine. Truly there is nothing new under the sun or in human nature and the realisation that we are no more advanced than our forebears of 350 years ago I find depressing and reassuring in equal measure.
April 9, 2020
You will notice right away Defoe's journalistic approach, rife with supporting statistics. His powers as a writer and boldness of presentation are clearly beyond the pale. As was the case with Robinson Crusoe, he was not forthright with sources or veracity in the tale. It is often impossible to tell where he obtained his facts, and how much was mere invention.
A Journal of the Plague year is a vast catalogue of deaths, in all manners of protracted agonies, distempers, including plenty of "murthering" crazed wives fraught with frantic squalor. He adds sensational moments of street nudity, boiling underwear, and displays everywhere the distress and agony, heartache and sorrow to be found. He is not loathe to describe the ungodly boils, blisters and sacs, running with pus of myriad colours. But what is most intriguing is often the instigation of further hazards, posed by human beings in the thrall of distress. They are hazards of economy, selfishness, & prurience, born from their inelegant, uncontrollable dying. The fury of the contagion is not only crystal clear from the onset, it is obnoxiously apparent.
As usual, Defoe employs 17th-century nonstandarized spellings. His articulate wordiness is beguiling. The London plague was of topical interest, his belletristic swagger was prominent, and as a commercial, professional author of more than 500 works, as vague as that accomplishment is - he knows what he's bloody doing. Defoe sought to dispel suspicious superstitions. Journalistic writing was his mode, but his style becomes almost legalistic. It's less readable than it is a defense of readability.
What is called the Great Plague went by many names, including the Visitation, and Defoe inserts all the monickers, with his characteristic remarkable verisimilitude. He is one of the authors responsible for bringing the English novel out of its infancy. Is this an essential "classic"? I personally don't believe so. You might summarize the book as: Various divers tales about the Distemper and how it carried away man, woman, and childe.
As was the case for Robinson Crusoe, many readers believed the Journal to be an eyewitness account in its time. Defoe omitted his name from the original publication and would have been 5 years old when the book takes place. He describes in his roundabout way a natural machine or mortality, coupled with the creaking of death carts, the reek of rotting piles of rats along the trenches, and an endless number of atmospheric set-pieces.
I found the work, on the whole, very tedious. The minutiae it describes was by turns fascinating, but the accumulation, while probably fairly true, strains believability in more than one way. Defoe had to have invented parts of it - which parts though, are well-hid. I’ve read 4 of his other novels, and greatly enjoyed them all. This was his driest, the most disturbing, and also his most journalistic work of the bunch. I will never revisit this incessantly brooding, grim, tragic, historical document. On the other hand, I greatly look forward to reading his other novels. He is a keen observer of the human animal. Many of his literary documentaries are creative masterpieces, but I found this one overlong and essentially the same experience as reading 300 pages of reportage.
It is worth perusing if you are curious about old fashioned regulations and customs. There is no plot or character development. The main character is a generic upstanding citizen, a moral, unpanicked, detached surveyor amid chaos.
By this point, if we are at all literate, we have seen these images elsewhere - Holocausts, genocides, pandemics. The fear-imagery associated with them should be familiar to us. This does not immunize us to their power, but we are not as shocked as most people were centuries ago by the thought of mountains of human corpses. What also renders the text difficult is the wandering method Defoe employs. He foregoes chapter breaks for a “realistic” scrawl of data, theses, and key details. It was as if he boiled down 3000 pages of notes to the most essential, most alarming facts and speculations, and then summarized them one after another after another until he reached the requisite length. I believe he wrote another piece on plagues, but searching his immense bibliography is likely to arouse confusion. He was a great, influential and interesting writer, but this resembles his nonfiction more than his fiction.
A Journal of the Plague year is a vast catalogue of deaths, in all manners of protracted agonies, distempers, including plenty of "murthering" crazed wives fraught with frantic squalor. He adds sensational moments of street nudity, boiling underwear, and displays everywhere the distress and agony, heartache and sorrow to be found. He is not loathe to describe the ungodly boils, blisters and sacs, running with pus of myriad colours. But what is most intriguing is often the instigation of further hazards, posed by human beings in the thrall of distress. They are hazards of economy, selfishness, & prurience, born from their inelegant, uncontrollable dying. The fury of the contagion is not only crystal clear from the onset, it is obnoxiously apparent.
As usual, Defoe employs 17th-century nonstandarized spellings. His articulate wordiness is beguiling. The London plague was of topical interest, his belletristic swagger was prominent, and as a commercial, professional author of more than 500 works, as vague as that accomplishment is - he knows what he's bloody doing. Defoe sought to dispel suspicious superstitions. Journalistic writing was his mode, but his style becomes almost legalistic. It's less readable than it is a defense of readability.
What is called the Great Plague went by many names, including the Visitation, and Defoe inserts all the monickers, with his characteristic remarkable verisimilitude. He is one of the authors responsible for bringing the English novel out of its infancy. Is this an essential "classic"? I personally don't believe so. You might summarize the book as: Various divers tales about the Distemper and how it carried away man, woman, and childe.
As was the case for Robinson Crusoe, many readers believed the Journal to be an eyewitness account in its time. Defoe omitted his name from the original publication and would have been 5 years old when the book takes place. He describes in his roundabout way a natural machine or mortality, coupled with the creaking of death carts, the reek of rotting piles of rats along the trenches, and an endless number of atmospheric set-pieces.
I found the work, on the whole, very tedious. The minutiae it describes was by turns fascinating, but the accumulation, while probably fairly true, strains believability in more than one way. Defoe had to have invented parts of it - which parts though, are well-hid. I’ve read 4 of his other novels, and greatly enjoyed them all. This was his driest, the most disturbing, and also his most journalistic work of the bunch. I will never revisit this incessantly brooding, grim, tragic, historical document. On the other hand, I greatly look forward to reading his other novels. He is a keen observer of the human animal. Many of his literary documentaries are creative masterpieces, but I found this one overlong and essentially the same experience as reading 300 pages of reportage.
It is worth perusing if you are curious about old fashioned regulations and customs. There is no plot or character development. The main character is a generic upstanding citizen, a moral, unpanicked, detached surveyor amid chaos.
By this point, if we are at all literate, we have seen these images elsewhere - Holocausts, genocides, pandemics. The fear-imagery associated with them should be familiar to us. This does not immunize us to their power, but we are not as shocked as most people were centuries ago by the thought of mountains of human corpses. What also renders the text difficult is the wandering method Defoe employs. He foregoes chapter breaks for a “realistic” scrawl of data, theses, and key details. It was as if he boiled down 3000 pages of notes to the most essential, most alarming facts and speculations, and then summarized them one after another after another until he reached the requisite length. I believe he wrote another piece on plagues, but searching his immense bibliography is likely to arouse confusion. He was a great, influential and interesting writer, but this resembles his nonfiction more than his fiction.
September 9, 2022
It was about the Beginning of September 1664, that I, among the Rest of my Neighbours, heard in ordinary Discourse, that the Plague was return'd again in Holland...
A story of the Great Plague (in three varieties) of 1665 in London, this is done in eye-witness style, using Defoe's uncle, H.F., as the main writer/character. Defoe himself was about 5 at the time, and his family went to the countryside to wait it out, so this story here is based mainly on written sources and perhaps some family remembrances. What we get is a story of the Plague's progress, from west to east, and people's struggle against it (plus a bonus story of three guys going to the nearby countryside and spending their time waiting there, in better circumstances than many other leavers without a certain place to be). This book certainly had some influence on Camus' The Plague and Mary Shelley's The Last Man. Other books about the Plague were written already before this book came out in 1722, but this book does a very good job, even if it was first found underwhelming or just whelming by the critics.
In the appendix there is comment on the plague: how it arrived, on its varieties (all shown in the story), and what Defoe got right/wrong. Also a topographical index of places at the time of the Journal, showing the northern side of the river.
H.F. survives the Plague, and part of the story is about his endurance watching the world fall. There is some repetition, especially towards the end, but it's not irritating. H.F. walks the streets and the riverside a lot, so we get information from these journeys (even if the information originally was in other forms). The language of the story may take some getting used to: capital letters for certain words appears differently, and some words are written in way different from today's (but hardly challenging like Chaucer), fe. 'encrease' instead of 'increase'. There are some lists within the book of certain mortality numbers and such.
Like Covid, the first signs of the Plague start showing up at the end of the year before, but start seriously spreading when the spring of 1765 arrives, and is at its worst in August/September. Only in 1666's late winter does the certainty of the Plague's end arrive - and then later that year, the fire of London happens...
So I listed things as they happen: the leaving of the rich happening very quickly in spring; people being frightened or finding comfort in prophecies, signs, conmen's 'miracle preventers'; religious-level repentance, fears; how the orders and regulations appear soon (the author lists them); houses isolated yet people finding their way out of them; burial pits and body-collector carts; how it's the poor people who suffer the most, even when they get (some) charity given to them; how the trades suffer; people living on ships and boats in the middle of the river; childbirth tragedies; the carelessness of some people (some too eager to come back and thus die); some ill people going crazy and running in the streets and drowning in rivers.
It's towards the end of the plague that some other cities get it. The burial grounds are turned into other places often. The houses are cleaned, though some methods look odd now. People everywher show their gratefulness for the end of Plague quite openly. And even though H.F. here is merely a figure useful for the story, I have no doubt Defoe's real uncle was glad for things being over, too.
It does feel a bit strange to read about this Plague with what has been happening in our time, but intersting too. Some things are different, some details are still the same. The book was just the right length, and the story flowed well. The way the story ended made the book feel surprisingly uplifting, and it might give many reader some levels of hopefulness in the present. A good story.
A story of the Great Plague (in three varieties) of 1665 in London, this is done in eye-witness style, using Defoe's uncle, H.F., as the main writer/character. Defoe himself was about 5 at the time, and his family went to the countryside to wait it out, so this story here is based mainly on written sources and perhaps some family remembrances. What we get is a story of the Plague's progress, from west to east, and people's struggle against it (plus a bonus story of three guys going to the nearby countryside and spending their time waiting there, in better circumstances than many other leavers without a certain place to be). This book certainly had some influence on Camus' The Plague and Mary Shelley's The Last Man. Other books about the Plague were written already before this book came out in 1722, but this book does a very good job, even if it was first found underwhelming or just whelming by the critics.
In the appendix there is comment on the plague: how it arrived, on its varieties (all shown in the story), and what Defoe got right/wrong. Also a topographical index of places at the time of the Journal, showing the northern side of the river.
H.F. survives the Plague, and part of the story is about his endurance watching the world fall. There is some repetition, especially towards the end, but it's not irritating. H.F. walks the streets and the riverside a lot, so we get information from these journeys (even if the information originally was in other forms). The language of the story may take some getting used to: capital letters for certain words appears differently, and some words are written in way different from today's (but hardly challenging like Chaucer), fe. 'encrease' instead of 'increase'. There are some lists within the book of certain mortality numbers and such.
Like Covid, the first signs of the Plague start showing up at the end of the year before, but start seriously spreading when the spring of 1765 arrives, and is at its worst in August/September. Only in 1666's late winter does the certainty of the Plague's end arrive - and then later that year, the fire of London happens...
So I listed things as they happen: the leaving of the rich happening very quickly in spring; people being frightened or finding comfort in prophecies, signs, conmen's 'miracle preventers'; religious-level repentance, fears; how the orders and regulations appear soon (the author lists them); houses isolated yet people finding their way out of them; burial pits and body-collector carts; how it's the poor people who suffer the most, even when they get (some) charity given to them; how the trades suffer; people living on ships and boats in the middle of the river; childbirth tragedies; the carelessness of some people (some too eager to come back and thus die); some ill people going crazy and running in the streets and drowning in rivers.
It's towards the end of the plague that some other cities get it. The burial grounds are turned into other places often. The houses are cleaned, though some methods look odd now. People everywher show their gratefulness for the end of Plague quite openly. And even though H.F. here is merely a figure useful for the story, I have no doubt Defoe's real uncle was glad for things being over, too.
It does feel a bit strange to read about this Plague with what has been happening in our time, but intersting too. Some things are different, some details are still the same. The book was just the right length, and the story flowed well. The way the story ended made the book feel surprisingly uplifting, and it might give many reader some levels of hopefulness in the present. A good story.
July 13, 2018
"A journal of the plague year" is actually a fictional account covering this time in history, and although Defoe was alive, we are given a narrator instead, and this was written near enough sixty years afterwards. We are certainly not told much about this narrator, apart from the fact he has family and servants, and we get a brief description of where he lives, but that is about it. I think due to this lack of character description, I was unable to completely empathise with him, and I also noticed there was a terrible amount of ramblings, where the narration went entirely off course, which made at times, for a rather bothersome and irritating read. I also did not appreciate that there were no clear chapters, and it all kind of flowed awkwardly, into a giant sludge.
However, despite the negativity there, I do have some positives regarding this book. The plague and the history around it fascinates me. I cannot say exactly why, but it's just so interesting. I thought the detailed and grim descriptions of the mass graves were interesting, and, the madness and chaotic scenes that the plague caused humans to endure, were so frightening, and to be in the middle of that, I just cannot even begin to imagine what that was like.
Overall, this book was let down mainly by the narrator and the layout, but, it does have some interesting snippets, but you'll need to dig rather deep to discover them.
However, despite the negativity there, I do have some positives regarding this book. The plague and the history around it fascinates me. I cannot say exactly why, but it's just so interesting. I thought the detailed and grim descriptions of the mass graves were interesting, and, the madness and chaotic scenes that the plague caused humans to endure, were so frightening, and to be in the middle of that, I just cannot even begin to imagine what that was like.
Overall, this book was let down mainly by the narrator and the layout, but, it does have some interesting snippets, but you'll need to dig rather deep to discover them.
May 25, 2020
‘Oh! death, death, death!’ [p.59]That’s it. That’s the review. No punch line.
May 12, 2020
I bought this a couple of summers ago in a second-hand bookshop because I’ve always been intrigued and it was one of those pretty Modern Library Classics that I love. And then it hovered near the top of my TBR pile but never quite surfaced. Just as well as it turned out, because I got to read it now, in late April of 2020.
Anyone reading this during the coronavirus lockdown is bound to comment on the similarities to our times: blame the foreigners, government dithering, rising death rates in neighbouring countries/parishes, limitations on movement, the rich fare better than the poor, livelihoods lost overnight, pestilence in the air! My favourite parallel was the “people are assholes,” continuity between 1665 and 2020: nowadays you might be rebuked on the street but are probably more likely to be attacked on twitter, whereas Defoe’s narrator H.F., having gone to the pub to check on an acquaintance who had just lost his whole family, came upon a group who
fell upon me with ill Language and Oaths; ask’d me what I did out of my Grave at such a Time when so many honester Men were carried into the Church-Yard? and why I was not at Home saying my Prayers, against the Dead-Cart came for me? and the like.
Overall though, it’s a text to make a person glad they live in the 21st century. We may not have a vaccine, but at least we know what’s causing the virus and don’t go about accidentally making it worse. Nor are we tortured in the name of a cure.
The writing style here is energetic and direct, with some biblical references but generally sticking to the topic at hand (because, what a topic!) without too much editorializing. Defoe is at his best here when he tells stories of individual experience, some the narrator’s, some hearsay. There are wonderful exchanges with a waterman who takes H.F. upon the river to see all the ships full of Plague refugees. A story that starts in the first pages is interrupted for almost a hundred but proves well worth the read when we eventually get back to it. This roving style allows us to take in a wide range of experiences, from the urban poor to the doctors (quack and otherwise, though they are all a bit quack) to those who escaped on foot to the country and were rejected by the villages they passed through. Even the bills of the dead are interesting.
The whole thing did get a bit bogged down by repetition in places but actually not as much as I was expecting. It would be an engaging read at any time, a thrilling read right now.
Anyone reading this during the coronavirus lockdown is bound to comment on the similarities to our times: blame the foreigners, government dithering, rising death rates in neighbouring countries/parishes, limitations on movement, the rich fare better than the poor, livelihoods lost overnight, pestilence in the air! My favourite parallel was the “people are assholes,” continuity between 1665 and 2020: nowadays you might be rebuked on the street but are probably more likely to be attacked on twitter, whereas Defoe’s narrator H.F., having gone to the pub to check on an acquaintance who had just lost his whole family, came upon a group who
fell upon me with ill Language and Oaths; ask’d me what I did out of my Grave at such a Time when so many honester Men were carried into the Church-Yard? and why I was not at Home saying my Prayers, against the Dead-Cart came for me? and the like.
Overall though, it’s a text to make a person glad they live in the 21st century. We may not have a vaccine, but at least we know what’s causing the virus and don’t go about accidentally making it worse. Nor are we tortured in the name of a cure.
The writing style here is energetic and direct, with some biblical references but generally sticking to the topic at hand (because, what a topic!) without too much editorializing. Defoe is at his best here when he tells stories of individual experience, some the narrator’s, some hearsay. There are wonderful exchanges with a waterman who takes H.F. upon the river to see all the ships full of Plague refugees. A story that starts in the first pages is interrupted for almost a hundred but proves well worth the read when we eventually get back to it. This roving style allows us to take in a wide range of experiences, from the urban poor to the doctors (quack and otherwise, though they are all a bit quack) to those who escaped on foot to the country and were rejected by the villages they passed through. Even the bills of the dead are interesting.
The whole thing did get a bit bogged down by repetition in places but actually not as much as I was expecting. It would be an engaging read at any time, a thrilling read right now.
January 8, 2022
http://ancazaharia.ro/2022/01/jurnal-...
Am Jurnal din Anul Ciumei de la apariția lui din 2020 la editura ART, în colecția cărți cult, dar l-am ocolit până acum pentru că nu eram convinsă că poate să-mi fie cu adevărat utilă o carte care face referire la epidemia de ciumă din 1665, din Londra. M-am apucat de cartea lui Defoe abia după ce mi-a spus un prieten că e copie aproape perfectă a atitudinilor pe care am avut cu toții ocazia să le vedem, în noi sau în cei din jur, odată cu pandemia pe care încă o traversăm căutând soluții și respectând reguli sau, după caz, o negăm.
Am Jurnal din Anul Ciumei de la apariția lui din 2020 la editura ART, în colecția cărți cult, dar l-am ocolit până acum pentru că nu eram convinsă că poate să-mi fie cu adevărat utilă o carte care face referire la epidemia de ciumă din 1665, din Londra. M-am apucat de cartea lui Defoe abia după ce mi-a spus un prieten că e copie aproape perfectă a atitudinilor pe care am avut cu toții ocazia să le vedem, în noi sau în cei din jur, odată cu pandemia pe care încă o traversăm căutând soluții și respectând reguli sau, după caz, o negăm.
March 21, 2021
This fictional account of the great plague hitting London in 1665 is an interesting snapshot of life at that time. With no real characters within the text (except the city itself, I guess) we get to see how far we’ve come in 350+ years but also how much we are the same. See: Stubborn leaders hiding death tolls to “prevent a panic” as well as infected people going about their day because “they don’t feel sick!” I also laughed that Defoe uses the word “trumpery” to define trinkets and miracle cures sold to the gullible to prevent illness.
One big downside is the format of the text: 240 pages with no chapter breaks, 95 footnotes to flip back to read, no dialogue, and every noun capitalized for some reason. So getting a daily page quota in is a grind. The intro in the Penguin Classics edition is sharp and the several appendices add more helpful background.
All in all I think it’s worth your time given the size. If it were 500 pages I’d probably feel differently.
One big downside is the format of the text: 240 pages with no chapter breaks, 95 footnotes to flip back to read, no dialogue, and every noun capitalized for some reason. So getting a daily page quota in is a grind. The intro in the Penguin Classics edition is sharp and the several appendices add more helpful background.
All in all I think it’s worth your time given the size. If it were 500 pages I’d probably feel differently.
March 29, 2015
It was the most Serge Gainsbourg's preferred book.
Daniel defoe is not a only-one-book man (Robinson Crusoe).
It is an aesthete book which one exchanges the name between friends.
What is extraordinary, it is the realism of story. All descriptions are extraordinary. They agree elsewhere with what was described. As of the appearance of the signs, death occurred in a few hours.
The plague is well known since the Middle Ages as an apocalyps. René Girard in "the scapegoat" says that people did not even dare to pronounce the name of it. We have forgotten that yhe last plague epidemy in occident was in France Marseilles 1925 !!!!!
What is brilliant, it is that we live the epidemy in the middle of the population.
His style is perfect, descriptions are a seizing naturalism.
A masterpiece.
Daniel defoe is not a only-one-book man (Robinson Crusoe).
It is an aesthete book which one exchanges the name between friends.
What is extraordinary, it is the realism of story. All descriptions are extraordinary. They agree elsewhere with what was described. As of the appearance of the signs, death occurred in a few hours.
The plague is well known since the Middle Ages as an apocalyps. René Girard in "the scapegoat" says that people did not even dare to pronounce the name of it. We have forgotten that yhe last plague epidemy in occident was in France Marseilles 1925 !!!!!
What is brilliant, it is that we live the epidemy in the middle of the population.
His style is perfect, descriptions are a seizing naturalism.
A masterpiece.
June 13, 2017
I taught this a couple times (Soph Eng Lit survey), instead of Moll or Robinson (or, indeed, Pamela or pt of Tristram). Of course it's a historical reconstruction: Defoe was 5 in the Plague Year, a year before the Great Fire, and two before the Dutch sailed to Chatham, on the Bay of Thames, and captured the Royal Charles, its transom still featured in Rijksmuseum.
I think those semesters AIDS featured in news. (Also useful for teaching Freshman Oedipus R, which begins in citywide mortality--to be cured by executing the cause, a man hated by the Gods bec NOT aborted/"exposed until death"). Hmmm… Might be a good approach. ( Was Harry Whittington hated by the gods, or the drunk who shot him at cocktail hour in TX? )
I think those semesters AIDS featured in news. (Also useful for teaching Freshman Oedipus R, which begins in citywide mortality--to be cured by executing the cause, a man hated by the Gods bec NOT aborted/"exposed until death"). Hmmm… Might be a good approach. ( Was Harry Whittington hated by the gods, or the drunk who shot him at cocktail hour in TX? )
May 22, 2021
At least they didn't have to bear with plague-deniers "educating" themselves in online echo-chambers... ^^' otherwise it's almost absurd how similar this account is to the current pandemic. Humanity really seems to actively strive against learning from its own history. (Rtc)
February 22, 2020
This edition's transplendent "Afterword" (by none other than that anti-DeFoe and scion of Joyce, Anthony Burgess) deftly analyses why this two-star reader's one-star l'il brain cell only afforded him a three-star experience of this five-star novel, viz:
As with Dickens's elevation of Preston/Coketown into the leading role in his Hard Times, however, what is most remarkable about Defoe's Journal is indeed, as Burgess suggests, his ability to make London "appear as a breathing, suffering entity"(274):
n.b. The Oxford edition's own introduction complements this one well, as do its somewhat superior explanatory notes. It is well worth investing in both, but if you can buy just one, go with the Penguin, for the Burgess.
There are people who still find Defoe hard to take as a novelist, and this is because they have become accustomed to regarding the novel as a form almost aggressively 'literary', full of barely concealed machinery, self-conscious fine writing, the personality of the novelist himself peeping through as a show-off puppet-master, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent.(264)By contrast, for Mr. Foe (his aristocratic prefix was acquired by the author later in life, parthenogenetically, as it were) "the thing was more important than the word, and 'human interest' was more important than either"(269). And as far as words went, while from his plume admittedly came a whole hell of a lot of them, they were nonetheless
models of plain and dignified style. The audience he sought was not that which enthused over Addison and Steele [or for that matter, over Anthony Burgess]; it was still the plain dissenting tradesmen he spoke to, patriotic, shrewd, practical, philistine.And so he speaketh not to this reviewer, then, who ticks precisely none of those boxes, except most likely (given his evident distaste with this book, and as his GR-friends should surely attest) the very last one .
As with Dickens's elevation of Preston/Coketown into the leading role in his Hard Times, however, what is most remarkable about Defoe's Journal is indeed, as Burgess suggests, his ability to make London "appear as a breathing, suffering entity"(274):
London is an emanation of ourselves, a projection of our own personalities. The individual citizens go uncharacterized, atoms which make up the collective body [...] This is in conformity with DeFoe's qualified liberalism, which means a kind of optimism. It is neither God's grace nor innate goodness which saves man's soul alive; it is rather his need for community, his concept of the desirable life as one lived collectively."Evidently, then, this philistine pessimist needs to re-read the Journal already!
n.b. The Oxford edition's own introduction complements this one well, as do its somewhat superior explanatory notes. It is well worth investing in both, but if you can buy just one, go with the Penguin, for the Burgess.
April 12, 2020
I’m not going to read any books that are about plagues, or pandemics for the next few months. Listening to the news of Covid-19 is enough of that for me right now, but for those that are looking for a good classic plague book, I’d like to recommend this one. I think it’s a pretty good one.
Daniel Defoe, best know for Robinson Crusoe which I still haven’t read, does a good job at a level headed, unsentimental, perhaps a little detached view of a plague. The narrator is a science minded man so the reader gets a lot of statistics about the plague and the way it spreads, making this a bit like following news of the event.
Mind you, this isn’t a terribly exciting read, perhaps because of the way the whole book is set up. There isn’t a great hero fighting his or her way to a cure of the plague, or through the apocalyptic landscape, or something like that, but I found it a realistic, and interesting story.
Daniel Defoe, best know for Robinson Crusoe which I still haven’t read, does a good job at a level headed, unsentimental, perhaps a little detached view of a plague. The narrator is a science minded man so the reader gets a lot of statistics about the plague and the way it spreads, making this a bit like following news of the event.
Mind you, this isn’t a terribly exciting read, perhaps because of the way the whole book is set up. There isn’t a great hero fighting his or her way to a cure of the plague, or through the apocalyptic landscape, or something like that, but I found it a realistic, and interesting story.
September 14, 2011
And so it was that the plague came into London, by the mercy of God, and I thought I would remain in the city despite the plague, for since God made it, I could not escape it if he meant me to perish from it, viz. when that brick fell off the chimney and onto my foot, which I was loathe to move, for since God sent the brick, it would do me no good to move my foot and so avoid his will.
But I would say the best way to avoid the plague and to survive would be to leave the city, as many did, when the signs of the plague came, for in this way, many survived who would not have, by the grace of God, for though God created the plague, which cannot be hoped to be avoided, we are no Mahometans who believe our lives predetermined.
But, the Lord Mayor should not have locked people with the plague up in their houses, for this was a cruel thing, and I think many died who had no reason to from this expedient, viz. by being trapped with others who were diseased or suffering ill health from the close air.
I rejoice that God sent this plague to kill so many unpleasant people, viz. heathens and unbelievers and thieves and the greedy, for surely God sent the plague for this purpose, and would not have allowed to live any who so deserved death, viz heathens, unbelievers, thieves, and the greedy.
Though it was difficult to go to church, for so many of the priests had died, and so many of those who came in and prayed for their lives, and their families lives, which was the best thing they could do, even though the plague travels on the breath and to be in church is very dangerous for this reason, doubtless God spared the good people who deserved life, viz. kind and gentle people.
Now I must tell you a sad story about a man who I knew to be extremely generous and pious, and whose wife was chaste and always kind, and who had two infant children. The children both died of the plague, followed by the wife, who did not even know she had it, and then he was driven to madness by the plague and ran through the streets naked and babbling, before he also died. I feel it was necessary to relate this story, for there are many such like it, and though I cannot declare it's veracity myself, it seems so likely that I must needs include it here, viz. it is a worthy story.
And I should say that the Lord Mayor should not have locked people with the plague up in their houses, for this was a cruel thing, and I think many died who had no reason to from this expedient, viz. by being trapped with others who were diseased or suffering ill health from the close air.
There are some physicians who say that the disease can be detected by taking a microscope to the exhalation of a victim, whereupon will be seen many tiny monsters, viz. dragons, snakes, and devils, and that these enter the blood and lay many eggs which pass the disease along, but I think this most ridiculous and unlikely, and only include it because some have said it.
Some poor, ignorant folks went to fortune tellers or other such liars and payed monies to have certain rituals performed or symbols given which were meant to protect them, viz. pins or necklaces said to be good luck or proof against disease, which was most foolish and it is a shame that such folk took advantage of the poor in this way.
Luckily, most of the poor took faith in the church, wearing crosses or invoking saints and praying each day and night to be spared, which I am certain the greater part were.
But I should not end this account without first speaking of a certain crime: the Lord Mayor should not have locked people with the plague up in their houses, for this was a cruel thing, and I think many died who had no reason to from this expedient, viz. by being trapped with others who were diseased or suffering ill health from the close air.
But I would say the best way to avoid the plague and to survive would be to leave the city, as many did, when the signs of the plague came, for in this way, many survived who would not have, by the grace of God, for though God created the plague, which cannot be hoped to be avoided, we are no Mahometans who believe our lives predetermined.
But, the Lord Mayor should not have locked people with the plague up in their houses, for this was a cruel thing, and I think many died who had no reason to from this expedient, viz. by being trapped with others who were diseased or suffering ill health from the close air.
I rejoice that God sent this plague to kill so many unpleasant people, viz. heathens and unbelievers and thieves and the greedy, for surely God sent the plague for this purpose, and would not have allowed to live any who so deserved death, viz heathens, unbelievers, thieves, and the greedy.
Though it was difficult to go to church, for so many of the priests had died, and so many of those who came in and prayed for their lives, and their families lives, which was the best thing they could do, even though the plague travels on the breath and to be in church is very dangerous for this reason, doubtless God spared the good people who deserved life, viz. kind and gentle people.
Now I must tell you a sad story about a man who I knew to be extremely generous and pious, and whose wife was chaste and always kind, and who had two infant children. The children both died of the plague, followed by the wife, who did not even know she had it, and then he was driven to madness by the plague and ran through the streets naked and babbling, before he also died. I feel it was necessary to relate this story, for there are many such like it, and though I cannot declare it's veracity myself, it seems so likely that I must needs include it here, viz. it is a worthy story.
And I should say that the Lord Mayor should not have locked people with the plague up in their houses, for this was a cruel thing, and I think many died who had no reason to from this expedient, viz. by being trapped with others who were diseased or suffering ill health from the close air.
There are some physicians who say that the disease can be detected by taking a microscope to the exhalation of a victim, whereupon will be seen many tiny monsters, viz. dragons, snakes, and devils, and that these enter the blood and lay many eggs which pass the disease along, but I think this most ridiculous and unlikely, and only include it because some have said it.
Some poor, ignorant folks went to fortune tellers or other such liars and payed monies to have certain rituals performed or symbols given which were meant to protect them, viz. pins or necklaces said to be good luck or proof against disease, which was most foolish and it is a shame that such folk took advantage of the poor in this way.
Luckily, most of the poor took faith in the church, wearing crosses or invoking saints and praying each day and night to be spared, which I am certain the greater part were.
But I should not end this account without first speaking of a certain crime: the Lord Mayor should not have locked people with the plague up in their houses, for this was a cruel thing, and I think many died who had no reason to from this expedient, viz. by being trapped with others who were diseased or suffering ill health from the close air.
December 27, 2020
Daniel Defoe, the author of "Robinson Crusoe", was only five years old in 1665. Thus, this book which was published in 1722 falls under the genre of historical fiction. However, the events described are quite real and this "account" of the Bubonic Plague that struck the city of London in 1665 is fairly accurate.
While not the most exciting of books to read, bordering on tedious, those who are interested in an accurate description of life during the Bubonic Plague of 1665, will find a host of interesting statistics and stories. While the work itself is considered historical fiction, many historians do credit Defoe with being quite accurate with his descriptions and with the numbers of casualties that he presents.
Written as the journal of one H.F. it details the coming of the Plague to London, the ways in which people dealt with the situation, and accurate descriptions of the measures and laws in place, all backed up with detailed statistics. Even though this is considered to be a fiction novel, bear in mind his stats and descriptions are based on the real laws and numbers that were present at the time.
Still, this is a dry story that is filled with a great deal of religious mutterings that, while I completely understand is apropos for the time, I could have done without. It is not an exciting tale, but rather one that serves as a reference for historians or laymen who wish to understand the events surrounding the Plague of 1665. Replete with street names and accurate descriptions this "Journal" is a bird's eye view of this rather awful event.
Certainly not a book for everyone. I gave it 3 stars due to the high level of detail and accurate information, but overall? It is a tedious bore to read.
While not the most exciting of books to read, bordering on tedious, those who are interested in an accurate description of life during the Bubonic Plague of 1665, will find a host of interesting statistics and stories. While the work itself is considered historical fiction, many historians do credit Defoe with being quite accurate with his descriptions and with the numbers of casualties that he presents.
Written as the journal of one H.F. it details the coming of the Plague to London, the ways in which people dealt with the situation, and accurate descriptions of the measures and laws in place, all backed up with detailed statistics. Even though this is considered to be a fiction novel, bear in mind his stats and descriptions are based on the real laws and numbers that were present at the time.
Still, this is a dry story that is filled with a great deal of religious mutterings that, while I completely understand is apropos for the time, I could have done without. It is not an exciting tale, but rather one that serves as a reference for historians or laymen who wish to understand the events surrounding the Plague of 1665. Replete with street names and accurate descriptions this "Journal" is a bird's eye view of this rather awful event.
Certainly not a book for everyone. I gave it 3 stars due to the high level of detail and accurate information, but overall? It is a tedious bore to read.
January 26, 2022
Contada en forma de novela, de crónica y de reflexión religiosa. Este relato ficticio nos narra los años de la peste que acontecieron a finales del S.XVII en Londres. Contada a través de diferentes fuentes por el autor (el cual no vivió la dicha peste). A pesar de que tiene cierto valor para entender la perspectiva de la época, he tenido la sensación de que contada desde su perspectiva no deja de sonar altanera, carente de sentido crítico y centrándose casi de manera exclusiva en su visión de la religión. Mientras tilda a algunos ciudadanos de ignorantes y matasanos, él mismo decide quedarse en la ciudad por su fe religiosa, una fe que incluso para la época suena de lo más absurdo. Curioso como un hombre ilustrado, como se supone que era Defoe, cae en tópicos de lo más simplistas, sin profundizar siquiera en lo que podría llamarse en inicio de la ilustración, bueno, en Robinson Crusoe ya se le notan los tintes de señorito de teta, no obstante, la narrativa es buena, aun así, cayendo una y otra vez en la faceta religiosa, llegando a ser una crónica carente de sentido alguno, repito, incluso para la época en la que se estaba tratando el tema. Un autor al que sé desde hace tiempo que fue un error volver.
August 6, 2021
I am so happy to be done with this book.
It was a good supposed-secondhand account of the Plague that ravaged London in 1665. It was interesting to hear about the daily life of 17th century Londoners. But there were no chapters or sections or even breaks and and it was quite repetitive.
If I were a historian I’m sure this novel would be of great importance, the observations seem quite objective even though it’s riddled with spiritual faith which we know now doesn’t have much to do with pandemics (regardless if God is real or not, I doubt he cares much about what happens to the human germ lol).
As an armchair-philosopher I can appreciate the first person POV style of writing, and I give the narrator credit for being intelligent. The writing style is not at all like the third person which can be thought of as an omnipotent being and is allowed to be judged cruelly (in my view, lol). First person accounts allow for epistemological errors and biased (and sometimes blatantly wrong) viewpoints. If I were more interested in that time and place and subject I would most likely love the subject matter. But I’m not interested in all accounts.
It was a good supposed-secondhand account of the Plague that ravaged London in 1665. It was interesting to hear about the daily life of 17th century Londoners. But there were no chapters or sections or even breaks and and it was quite repetitive.
If I were a historian I’m sure this novel would be of great importance, the observations seem quite objective even though it’s riddled with spiritual faith which we know now doesn’t have much to do with pandemics (regardless if God is real or not, I doubt he cares much about what happens to the human germ lol).
As an armchair-philosopher I can appreciate the first person POV style of writing, and I give the narrator credit for being intelligent. The writing style is not at all like the third person which can be thought of as an omnipotent being and is allowed to be judged cruelly (in my view, lol). First person accounts allow for epistemological errors and biased (and sometimes blatantly wrong) viewpoints. If I were more interested in that time and place and subject I would most likely love the subject matter. But I’m not interested in all accounts.
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