London had been transformed in the decade before the Plague hit. He is the ever-present narrator, right in the middle of things, gathering stories in the pubs and on the street, and we see everything through his eyes, if occasionally, somewhat voyeuristically.
The author, signed only as ‘H.F.’, is the main character with few other names given. His genius is to construct a gripping novel filled with detail, statistics, gossip, hearsay and half-remembered stories that is totally convincing.Ī good journalist, he resists the temptation to sensationalise events realising that the story is itself sensational enough. After the mortality bills, his primary sources were the many contemporaneous accounts produced in the fifty years, or so, afterwards. But the book reads best as an historical novel that mingles fact and fiction, as Defoe was barely five years old at the time of the events. Defoe collected these bills, and other plague ephemera, which must account for the great amount of detail he brings to the text. The recurring use of weekly mortality bills to chart the spread and speed of the disease in each parish, adds to the administrative feel and gives the book an underlying authority. The journal style is simple and immediate and reads like an audit for the Lord Mayor’s office at times. The spirit of the book calls to mind the Blitz era, with its dark East End setting and themes of human distress and fortitude. No definitive figure exists for the total number of deaths from the Plague but it is estimated that twenty percent of the populace died as a result. Rich in detail, naming streets, alleys, churchyards and pubs, it chronicles the chaos of daily life during a dreadful onslaught.
It is also a haunting, atmospheric portrait of London in the seventeenth century. It is a kind of practical handbook of what to do, and more importantly, what to avoid during a deadly outbreak. At the time of publication there was alarm that plague in Marseilles could cross into England. A Journal of the Plague Year is Daniel Defoe’s novel of the Great Plague of London in 1665, published fifty-seven years after the event in 1722.
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