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.

Leggere questo libro in tempo di Covid fa pensare che, nonostante siano passati secoli, le reazioni di fronte a un'epidemia sono sostanzialmente sempre quelle.
Dapprima c'è una sorta di rifiuto del problema, si sa che altri Paesi sono stati colpiti, ma si pensa che non toccherà mai a noi e anche quando si verificano i primi casi, si tende a negare il problema.
Poi si realizza che la questione non può più essere ignorata e così si corre ai ripari: l'isolamento delle persone malate e dei loro conviventi, i tentativi di fuga di chi si ritiene sano, ma probabilmente non lo è e diffonderá il contagio, la limitazione della vita sociale.
Ne consegue una restrizione del commercio, la perdita del lavoro per molte persone, l'aumento del numero degli indigenti e il conseguente svilupparsi di iniziative caritatevoli per aiutare chi non ha da mangiare.
E quando i numeri dei decessi iniziano a calare e l'emergenza sembra essere meno pressante che succede? Che la gente, sollevata dal miglioramento della situazione, si lascia andare abbandonando la cautela ed esponendosi nuovamente al rischio contagio.
Che si parli della Londra del 1665 o della pandemia mondiale del 2020 poco cambia, le dinamiche sono sempre le stesse.

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.

If I had read this proto-novel at any time before this covid-19 pandemic, the writing would have held my attention enough to rate it it 3 stars. Now I rate it a solid 4 Stars.

Simply because I begin--as millions and billions do--to have a glimpse at some similarities described in this book and to wonder what will happen as officials and their offices continue to lose their leadership abilities. I am scared and excited and scared--just like that. As a result, I am thrilled by this book. I may have to reread. Thrill me some more.

Let me get into this book. A Journal of the Plague Year is a proto-novel written in a format of a journal.. which makes great sense. In a journal written in a time before you could bookmark, download, add to Pinterest, etc., a reading, writing, and socially engaged person would record bits of data, situations watched and encountered, discuss decisions and re-decisions--and more.

The information is more or less accurate, attained from two journals contemporary to the plague. This is historical fiction with an emphasis on the history aspect. Scary-exciting-scary. . .

Acho pouco provável (praticamente impossível) que eu me interessasse em ler A Journal of the Plague Year (Diário do Ano da Peste, na tradução mais recente) se não fosse a pandemia. Mas, de longe, é o livro mais legível do Defoe. Já tinha lido (aos trancos e barrancos) Robinson Crusoe e Moll Flanders, e são praticamente impossíveis (pra não dizer insuportáveis) a não ser para alunos e alunas de Letras – dada a importância do autor na história do romance inglês.

A Journal..., embora não pareça, é um romance, mas é construído como um diário, e bastante crível, do período de 1664 a 1665 quando Londres enfrentou a Grande Peste. Defoe tinha apenas 4 anos quando isso aconteceu, por isso não tinha como ser um livro de não-ficção ou, pior ainda, de memórias. Ele fez uma pesquisa bastante aprofundada e cria uma narrativa que se acompanha com muito interesse – especialmente por causa do que vivemos agora.

É impressionante como algumas coisas existiram, embora sem o nome chic que têm agora: fake news, subnotificação, assintomático, transmissão comunitária etc. E também, naquela época, as classes mais pobres foram as mais afetadas. Numa introdução da edição da Penguin de 1966, Anthony Burgess escreve que “Dafoe foi nosso grande primeiro romancista porque foi nosso primeiro grande jornalista.” Aqui, o autor combina as duas prática, romance e jornalismo, e escreve um livro, que, quem diria!, é fundamental também para compreensão de nosso tempo – em especial de elementos que sobrevivem ao longo desses séculos, o que faz do livro bastante atual em alguns elementos – mesmo que não estivéssemos enfrentando uma pandemia.

How little the world really changes!

This is so incredible. Mankind hasn't changed. With the plague in the 1600s, you had multiple groups of people: 1) I'll do as the government tells me, 2) i will do everything against the government. You have the ones claiming it's "naught but a fever!", the ones ignoring quarantine because they're bored, the ones who go out to infect others on purpose, the ones who laugh at those who fled from the plague, the ones who abuse the fear of the economically vulnerable (quacks etc). We haven't changed one bit and this book shows it. The resolution was a bit outdated, but everything else could be said right now about this very pandemic. Read or listen to this book if you want to understand more about human nature in a pandemic.

A Journal of the Plague Year surprised me. I didn't expect to enjoy it and only picked it up thanks to a group's choice, and the fact that we are in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. But I found this book much easier to read and more interesting than I expected it to be. Defoe includes loads of facts, numbers and statistics, making it more journalism than anything. But the fact that he centers the story of that one year on one man's view of London and everything that happened, allowed it to read more easily and enjoyably.

Defoe himself was only 5 years old at the time the book took place so his memory was likely very limited. However, he describes the sights and sounds and smells of London so vividly that it feels as though this is actually his real journal. The atmosphere of place is tangible on every page. And for me this is what made the book enjoyable. It isn't a book with plot or even much character development. It is truly about one place in one specific time. And it is so rich in the description of that place that the reader can see it like a movie in their minds.

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.

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.

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.

DNF’d at chapter 11