daniel defoe's a journal of the plague year

T is incredible and scarce to be imagined, how the posts of houses and corners of streets were plastered over with doctors’ bills and papers of ignorant fellows, quacking and tampering in physic, and inviting the people to come to them for remedies, which was generally set off with such flourishes as these, viz.: ‘Infallible preventive pills against the plague.’ Etc. Every page has vivid eyewitness details and powerful evocations of the narrator’s reactions: It is filled with minute facts that are verifiable yet not obviously taken from any published source. (It is written in the first person, the author calls himself a saddler, and he identifies himself at the end as H.F.) Most likely Defoe came across his uncle’s journal somehow and edited it to make it even more life-like, or perhaps I should say novel-like. To this day, critics still argue over whether the plague journal is novel or an actual journal written by Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe, a saddler by trade, who really existed and unlike his nephew (born 1660) really witnessed the plague. In fact, Crusoe itself straddles generic boundaries that hardly existed then when it was published in 1719 it was received as a travel book written by a real person called Crusoe. We think of Defoe as a novelist, because of Robinson Crusoe, but he wrote in a wide range of genres.

Part of that memory is due to the fact that it was memorialized in 1722 by Daniel Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year. It killed a quarter of London’s population over an 18-month period, and it lived in memory as the last major epidemic of plague to strike England. So now let’s turn our attention to a much later outbreak of the bubonic plague, the Great Plague of London in 1665-1666. Just as the gilded youth of the Decameron told tales to alleviate the tedium of their self-imposed quarantine, I find writing these blogs really makes the time fly. Read the first post on Boccaccio’s Decameron. This is the second of a series of blog posts about books in the Library Company’s collections about contagion and confinement, epidemics and quarantines. Potentially Harmful Materials and Descriptions Statement.Program in Early American Economy & Society.

Daniel defoe's a journal of the plague year