A Journal of the Plague Year Oxford World's Classics

European History : A Journal of the Plague Year Oxford World's Classics

The Plague

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A convincing fictional diary of the Plague of 1665
Thanks to 20th century medical and public health advances, we now know how to prevent, stem, and treat most infectious diseases. Though a few folks may still recall the flu epidemic of 1918, which cost 20 millions lives worldwide and a half million in the United States alone, for most of us living outside the Third World, fear of epidemic has become largely a thing of the past.

But if you wish to glimpse daily life under the threat of impending death by disease (without actually being threatened by it), along with the accompanying grief, despair, depravity, kindness, and courage, Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year" can take you there.

However, Defoe`s classic work is neither a journal nor of the plague year. Rather, it consists of an odd and hardly chronological collection of anecdotes, statistics, and ruminations written by the author of Moll Flanders some fifty years after the Plague of 1665 (when he was but a child of four). While pretending to be a first person eyewitness account of the epidemic, the Journal is in fact convincingly realistic fiction. The author has wisely created a narrator and a literary vehicle that powerfully portrays 17th century London and the agonies of an epidemic that killed more than 100,000 in the city.

Early on, Defoe establishes credibility for his fictional construct by quoting detailed figures (seemingly culled from official documents) on the growing death tolls as the Black Death spread across London. Further, throughout the book he documents the legal measures, such as quarantining households, and describes the medical endeavors to fight the disease and its spread. But more important, having once persuaded the reader of the authenticity of his tale, Defoe gets under the skin of the plague by showing the human suffering and drama it created.

He accomplishes this through his fictional narrator, a bachelor merchant who saunters about London hearing cries of pain, listening to tales of death, observing grief-deranged survivors roaming the streets, and even visiting the mass graves where, under the cover of night, death carts dump their grisly loads.

Also, we are privy to the deliberations of our moralistic but pragmatic narrator--on whether or not to flee London with his brother's family, on predestination and free will, on the quackery and skullduggery that fed on fear and ignorance. This imaginative character's active, intelligent, and detailed surveillance of the epidemic places us in the streets of London and creates a work of lasting vitality.

Through him we see the people's susceptibility to omens, religious superstition, prophets of doom, and astrologers; to quacks, charlatans, and fortune-tellers. We glimpse the duplicity and cowardice of the government and ruling class, who frequently fled London to save their own skins while abandoning their servants to penury and possible infection. We view mountebanks fleecing desperate families, nurses murdering and robbing their lingering patients, and the sick taking their own lives to save themselves a last few hours of pain. But we also are shown acts of great kindness, courage, charity, and love, as well as human ingenuity in service of a will to survive in the face of seeming doom.

Ultimately, the book is perhaps not so much about the plague as about human nature, of which Defoe is a keen observer, showing us that 17th century Londoners are not much different from ourselves. .

But as gloomy as this subject matter may seem, he can present it with a light and often-humorous touch, as in his story of the drunken piper. The beggar had passed out on the street after given an uncustomarily large amount to drink. A second man, thinking the piper a corpse, laid a plague victim beside him for the death cart to retrieve. The piper did not revive until about to pushed into a mass grave. He called out, "Where am I?" The sexton replied, "Why you are in the dead-cart, and we are going to bury you." The piper then asked, "But I ain't dead though, am I?"

Defoe presents the enigmatic narrator as both deeply affected by the suffering and aloof. He roams about London and its environs with seemingly little concern for his own well-being, at times viewing the horrific scenes with passion and compassion, and at other moments from a distant, Archimedean point of intellectual detachment. Along the way we get the narrator's (and, we suspect, the author's) views on religion, criminal justice, public health measures, medicine, government, and economics.

The pragmatism of Defoe's narrator shows through in his discussion of the last. Virtually all commerce came to a halt in the months when the plague ruled. Ships did not dock, shops closed, construction stopped, and economic life was put on hold while death profited. Defoe shows us the repercussions of this economic death--not only the hardship, the admirable efforts of certain government officials to help the needy, and the charity of many--but also how it helped stem the spread of the disease by reducing contact among people.

In the end, it's Defoe's details that win out, making this fictional account read as the intimate first-person portrayal it purports to be: the 200,000 pet dogs and cats rounded up and slaughtered to help prevent the epidemic's spread; the infection and quick death of infants who fed at the breasts of their diseased mothers; the public whippings of those who stole from the dead; the excruciating pain of the swellings brought on by the bubonic plague and the perhaps even more painful attempts by physicians to break the tumors with hot irons. Such details as these, perhaps too realistically rendered for the squeamish, give "A Journal of the Plague Year" an irresistible authority.

However, the whole conceit might have fallen flat had it not been crafted with such a deft, and I think, sly, touch. Defoe's language never flies toward hyperbole, but is grounded in seemingly careful observation--even when the narrator is deeply moved. Defoe's slyness is evident in his narrator often claiming faulty memory or lack of knowledge--"whether he lived or died I don't remember"--which augments the verisimilitude of his highly creative and still haunting work.

Entertaining Historical Work Marred by Lack of Proofreading
I have long wanted to read this classic account of the Black Death in London. Couldn't believe all the typos, which a notice at the beginning attributes to OCR--the pages are scanned rather than typed. The publisher's excuse is they need to keep costs down. Like they couldn't find a graduate student in English or History who wanted to pick up a bit of money proofreading? I would rather pay more for a properly edited book.

Why Teens Should Read This
1.Defoe is fascinating biography subject:
Ian Watt remarked that Defoe "was a hard man who led a hard life: raised as a Dissenter in the London of the Great Plague and Great Fire; enduring Newgate prison and the pillory in bankrupt middle age; working as a secret agent and a scandalous journalist until imprisoned again for debt and treason. Defoe died old, and so may be accounted as a survivor, but he had endured a good share of reality, and his novels reflect that endurance."

2. Observing and personalizing "real world" problems can inspire you to read and enjoy related literature. Thank G-d the H1N1 Flu causes mild to moderate symptoms despite its fierce contagiousness. However, I'm sure most of your mothers and others have made anxiety ridden phone calls to the pediatrician. We live in a Global Village. How long is it before one rural Chinese farmer falls ill and China Air cancels flights out of Beijing. Even the Plague, today having a mere 15% mortality rate down from the Medieval high of 75% can still wreak havoc. And it is a fact that the recent completion of the Kinshasa Highway enabled the transmission of AIDS epidemic throughout Africa. Is it so far-fetched?Someone collapses in Cape Town, schools close across Europe, ports are inspected along the Atlantic shore, riots break out surrounding Kaiser-Permanente, Japanese civilians receive face masks from their government... DeFoe's London is a microcosm of our world.

3. In order for you to like reading, you have to be exposed to a variety of genres to help discover your own interests. The Journal of the Plague Year is a great introduction to Historical Fiction, or even Literary Journalism-- even if it was written so early that the genre would not yet be coined for a few hundred years. After all, Defoe is credited with being one of the earliest innovators of the novel itself. I personally love the genre, it makes me fell like I'm time traveling, sans jet lag. Historical fiction by the way, is also popular genre for mini-series, HBO is particularly good for shows like Deadwood, Rome, John Adams, and The Tudors.

A Journal of the Plague Year - 1722

Plot Kernel - A survivor of the plague of 1665 in London recounts the event. He tells of the shutting up and guarding of houses where anyone infected resides, imprisoning the entire household because of the illness of one; of the anger and despair of those shut-in, and of the strategies used to trick the watchmen and sometimes escape. He tells of the dead-carts and the great pits where the dead were thrown and buried. He meets a man whose wife and children are shut-in but he is not, and how he provides for them. He relates a story he was told of a group of uninfected people who fled the city and the difficulties they had with the distrust of others. He discusses the numbers dead, the sweep of the pestilence and the effects of it on England's trade with other countries.

Note: There isn't any actual plot, in the sense of a character contending against difficulties and reaching some sort of resolution. The narrator is merely an observer, to whom nothing significant happens. The text has no chapter breaks or section breaks. The narrative rambles, is repetitive, and is only loosely structured. It is a fictional account of an actual event. Defoe was five years old in 1665.

The book from which I read this novel is not the one under which this review is placed. The book I have is a volume in the Library of Essential Writers (not listed on amazon) and contains five of Defoe's novels. There is only a short biographical introduction, and nothing concerning the content of the novels, so I don't know whether Defoe's account of the plague is accurate in the details of its spread, the degree of its contagion, the measure of law enforced, the behavior of those infected, the caution and fright, or of anything else that would be discussed in a scholarly introduction to the novel.