A Journal of the Plague Year

<br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.

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.

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.

<blockquote> <i>It was a very ill time to be sick in…</i> </blockquote><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.) <br /><br />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. <br /><br />So while not exactly pleasant to read, <i>A Journal of the Plague Year</i> 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.

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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><i>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.</i><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><i>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.</i><br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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 <i> life.</i><br />

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 <i>and</i> 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.<br /><br />‘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.<br /><br />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.

That's one of Gainsbourg's favourite books. A clinical, almost naturalistic story. No pathos, the style is cold as death—exciting reading in these times of epidemic.

The Danse Macabre from The Seventh Seal:<br /><br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L4-NHoaF3A">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L4-N...</a><br /><br />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!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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:<br /><br />*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?”<br /><br />*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!<br /><br />*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?<br /><br />*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!<br /><br />*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).<br /><br />*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.<br /><br />*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!<br /><br />*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.<br /><br />*The poor were disproportionately affected, as they had to work or ignored the advice of professionals for various reasons.<br /><br />*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!<br /><br />*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!<br /><br />*The economy was of course shot, as businesses had to close, everyone lost their jobs, there was no money to buy anything. <br /><br />*Many heroic acts of charity were performed by health care and other leaders, helping to avert greater losses. <br /><br />Aren’t you glad that we (especially in America, We are #1!!) know so much more than we did 250 years ago?!

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 <i>A Journal of the Plague Year</i>.<br /><br />Defoe is well-known to modern readers as the author of classic novels like <i>Robinson Crusoe</i> (1719) and <i>Moll Flanders</i> (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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><i>A Journal of the Plague Year</i>, published in the same year as <i>Moll Flanders</i>, 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, <i>A Journal of the Plague Year</i> 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.<br /><br />Inspired in part, perhaps, by a plague outbreak in Marseilles in 1720, <i>A Journal of the Plague Year</i> 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:<br /><br /><i>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</i>. (p. 1)<br /><br />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).<br /><br />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)<br /><br />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:<br /><br /><i>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.</i> (p. 14)<br /><br />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)<br /><br />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: <br /><br /><i>“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.</i> (p. 27)<br /><br />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).<br /><br />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 <i>Yersinia pestis</i>, 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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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:<br /><br /><i>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.</i> (p. 151)<br /><br />Defoe works like <i>Moll Flanders</i> - 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. <i>A Journal of the Plague Year</i> 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:<br /><br /><i>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.</i> (p. 79)<br /><br />A striking moment in <i>A Journal of the Plague Year</i> 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:<br /><br /><i>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Tho. But they do not deny you Liberty to go back again from whence you came, and therefore they do not starve you.<br /><br />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….<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.</i> (p. 109)<br /><br />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<br /><br /><i>…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.</i> (p. 200)<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><i>A Journal of the Plague Year</i> 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.

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.<br /><br /><i>..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.<br /><br />...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...<br /><br />....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.<br /><br />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;...<br /><br />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.<br /><br />...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.....<br /><br />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:..<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.</i><br /><br />When the numbers dying started to decrease, people stopped being so cautious and traders flocked to London from the countryside.<br /><i>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..<br /><br />A dreadful Plague in London was,<br />In the year Sixty Five,<br />Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls<br />Away; yet I alive!<br /><br />H.F. (author)</i><br /><br />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.<br /><br />Keep safe everyone.<br /><br /><br /><br />