(Another one from the _Peeps_ list.)  Written in the early 1700s; a first-person narrative of the London plague of 1665.  The account is incredibly detailed, although its accuracy has been called into question lately.  There's no longer any way to verify Defoe's statistics because the church records (tracking burials etc) were lost in the Great Fire.  I LOVE PLAGUE STORIES.  Doom!  Death! Destruction!  I think it would be really cool to set up a "living history" tour of London & visit the locations mentioned in the book (assuming they've been reconstructed).  I'm actually really surprised nobody's done something like that already.  I know I'm not the only armchair immunologist on the planet!

Niezwykle monotonna i chaotyczna, a dzięki temu zaskakująco wiarygodna, opowieść o klęsce zarazy w siedemnastowiecznym Londynie. Czyta się trochę jak powieść grozy (Defoe beznamiętnie opisuje zdarzenia, które z łatwością mogą wywołać ciarki na plecach, jeśli by je sobie plastycznie wyobrazić), a trochę jak moralitet i instrukcja przetrwania.

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?!

The plague comes to London in 1665. Daniel Defoe wrote a detailed account of life in London in the plague year before the Great Fire. Readers beware - Defoe was five years old at the time of the plague, so this book (published in 1722) is a bit of a reconstruction - but “based on a true story”. That’s ok. Defoe is a fabulous writer and we know surprisingly little of daily life in London during the restoration. This is one account. Pepys’s diary is another famous one. There is considerable detail in Defoe’s diary and it fits nicely with the Pepys diary and with other accounts.

London during the plague is horrifying. Bodies are in the street. The rich leave town and let their servants go. Work dries up, along with international trade. Nobody really understands the transmission mechanisms in any detail. Those who appear sick are locked up in their homes with their families. Whole households dies and are left to rot. The unemployed are put to work watching the houses of the sick (watchmen) and picking up and disposing of the bodies in carts that go to the mass graves. Social distinctions are reduced as all who remain are in the same situation. Religion still looms large in the population, sort of, although everyone seems to be out for their own good and there is not much community. People come to distrust and as a result avoid nearly everyone else.

Defoe is especially compelling on the social details of plague life, how neighhoods are organized, how charity aid is disbursed, and how the pestilence spreads across London. It is weird to read about this outbreak in an age without any medical knowledge. Indeed, the “treatments” available for the plague greatly added to the risks of death. Add to that the fact that London is an environment without inside plumbing or public health concerns. Typhus is a problem and the London skyline will not start to take on its modern appearance until after the fire. Many of the neighborhoods Defoe mentions are not recognizable as Underground stops but that parishes or neighborhoods. Even with all of this, Defoe’s journal has more social dynamics in common with the current shelter in place restrictions attendant to COVID-19. In particular, Defoe is insightful about how the plague was spread, providing a detailed discussion about how people were contagious before they were symptomatic, apparently over a period of one to two weeks in some cases. From this, he drew the conclusion that closing up affected houses and their residents was not productive and even counter productive. In a related discussion, he notes the long period between the initial recording of plague cases and its mass outbreak some months. This was possibly due to the ability of those who were infected and died being counted not as plague deaths but as other deaths (although with related symptoms). This suggests an intricate social process behind just identifying cases and resultant deaths. One does not need to strain much to see the similarities to identification and data problems around the spread of the COVID-19 virus. He also captures the strangeness of popular psychology regarding the plague, such as the willingness of people to rush back to normal life after declines were noted in plague death rates. Sound familiar?

I cannot read too much more plague literature, however, it starts getting depressing after a while.

Defoe’s account is worth the time.

(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!)

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.

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.

The truth is, I was so bored by this account that I ended up skimming in order to finish it faster than a careful reading.

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.

‘Oh! death, death, death!’ [p.59]

That’s it. That’s the review. No punch line.

Es muy interesante leer este "diario" luego de experimentar una pandemia, y ver qué aún después de 300 años, muchas de las acciones en distintas ciudades del mundo (y errores) cometidos son muy similares a pesar de los avances científicos. El miedo, la ignorancia, la soberbia ante una catástrofe de está naturaleza cuesta vidas.

The more things change, the more they stay the same...unfortunately. I haven't read this in awhile because I thought it was too archaic. Shows how wrong you can be, but anyway it's a remarkable read in that more than a few passages in this book parallel the current pandemic we're going through.

Just a quick note, though; although this is classified as a novel it's more a fictionalized report on The Black Plague in England. You don't really get fleshed out characters or a romantic plot, none of that. Some parts even resemble an almanac in its itemization of areas most impacted by the plague (or distemper, a term Defoe is quite fond of) with numbers and other statistics. If you don't mind a cold, journalistic account of The Black Plague then you're guaranteed to find this work fascinating and relevant.