A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

First published: 1722, as A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as Well Publick as Private, Which Happened in London, During the Last Great Visitation in 1655

Type of work: Novel

The Work:

Unlike Daniel Defoe’s other books and novels, A Journal of the Plague Year is rarely read as a whole, although a number of writers, such as Virginia Woolf, testify to its impact. It is more likely than Defoe’s novels, however, to be included in college anthologies of English literature, where its presence is justified as appropriate for reprinting in extracts by its episodic construction and by its historical significance. Both grounds indicate the nature and worth of the whole work. On every page, the book shows more clearly than Moll Flanders (1722), or any of the other episodic novels posing as true accounts, the intricate and slow development of the English novel. As the English novel developed, writers moved away from sermons, romances, and polemics and established a formal tradition that continued for some two centuries. Defoe’s reputation as the founder of the English novel rests as much on A Journal of the Plague Year as it does on Robinson Crusoe (1719) or Roxana (1724).

The first problem in the development of the novel was to establish a working relationship between fact and fiction. The traditional novel still uses realistic narration to assist readers in the willing suspension of disbelief. Defoe’s invention was to use statistics. Tabulated on the pages of A Journal of the Plague Year are the weekly death bills or returns from the ninety-seven parishes in the city of London and the sixteen or so in Southwark and outside the city limits. The tables are disposed artfully throughout the work, instead of appearing as appendices, and they are surrounded by further realistic particulars. In a very short time, the reader is in a region of rumor that Defoe first solemnly reports, then rationally dismisses or qualifies. Rumor is the middle ground between statistics and the imagination, and Defoe is careful to allow readers to believe it or not, as they wish. Readers accept such folklore at face value, perhaps, because gossip is more entertaining than truth. The first sentence of A Journal of the Plague Year, for example, specifies September, 1664, as the date the narrator first heard the rumor that the plague had come to Holland for the second year running. The first paragraph then expands with rumors about its place of origin: “they say . . . some said . . . others . . . all agreed.”

The full title of A Journal of the Plague Year contains a bland lie that indicates the second way Defoe encouraged the reader’s imagination to work. “Observations or Memorials” sufficiently confuses the distinction between what was recorded at the time and what was remembered later. Defoe’s sources, beyond the death bills, were not extensive, and his memories were secondhand. His imagination, however, was fertile. He carefully controlled and encouraged the imagination by the threefold organization of his work. Contrary to the word “journal” in the title, the book is not a daily record. Time references shift from September to August and over the whole summer of the plague. Instead of daily entries, Defoe uses time references, from September, 1664, to December, 1665, as ways of beginning and concluding his narrative, ending with the doggerel quatrain that celebrates the narrator’s deliverance. Within the work, he preserves a gradual movement of the plague from the western to the eastern parts of the city, ending with a central holocaust, and scattered throughout the work readers find his tables of statistics. The geographical, the chronological, and the numerical progress of the plague is not followed consistently. The jumps in geography and time make one want to restore logical order to the work and thereby turn it into a literal “journal,” at the same time risking loss of its imaginative qualities. Much about the plague’s effects and progress is left to the imagination, as the author intends.

Defoe’s imagination proceeds mechanically but energetically by considering a general topic and its related topics one at a time. Therefore, readers get several pages of increasingly horrific detail about the practices of nurses, then a catalog of various kinds of quacks, fortune-tellers, prophets, and necromancers who flourished during that awful summer. The section on women in childbirth, for example, coolly divides their tragedies into those who died in childbirth with and without the plague, and the former are further subdivided into those who died before giving birth, or in the middle of giving birth, or before the cord was cut. Defoe’s narrator could see little of these matters for himself, but “they say” and “I heard” fill up the paragraphs one after another until all possible contingencies have been covered.

Defoe’s imagination works with three classes of corroborative detail: the quick summary, the brief anecdote, and the extended story. The summary paragraph often introduces a series of brief anecdotes but sometimes stands alone, as in his brief recital of the killing of forty thousand dogs and two hundred thousand cats as a precaution against the spread of the plague. There are many brief anecdotes, such as the frequently anthologized account of purifying a purse, that exhibit at once the commonsense caution Defoe admires, the honesty of the Londoner, and the belief that the plague was spread by contaminated air. The longest of the stories, filling about one-tenth of A Journal of the Plague Year, is that of the three men and their company who spent the summer camping in Epping Forest. Defoe tells the story at length to show what happened to Londoners who left the city and retired to places where his narrator could not follow them.

Defoe’s subject was epic in scope: A great metropolis is slowly strangled by a hidden enemy. The size of his subject gives ample scope for the inclusion of all sorts of material, but his handling of it is typically original. Instead of a heroic poem, readers are presented with the sober account of an average Londoner. The Londoners who stayed in London are the heroes of Defoe’s book—those from the Lord Mayor to beggars who did not abandon their city. The narrator is simply identified by the subscription of “H. F.” throughout the novel (possibly an allusion to Defoe’s uncle, Henry Foe) and is described as a saddler engaged in the American trade. This, like all trade and manufacturing, ended with the onslaught of the plague in June, 1665, and left his narrator free to observe the reactions of his townsfolk.

Defoe’s choice of narrator serves to control his material. Presenting the terrible soberly, the narrator offers views on the prevention of the plague. For example, the narrator is critical of shutting up the living with the sick when one plague victim is found in the house. The opinions of the narrator, however, seem contradictory in two respects. The first is purely technical; the saddler recommends shutting up one’s house at the beginning of the plague but acknowledges that supplies have to be brought by servants and thus the plague spreads. He shuts up his house and servants but wanders through the streets even to the death pits (he observes that one in his parish of Aldgate holds 1,114 corpses when full); he must wander in order to write his journal. Except for a period of three weeks when he is conscripted as an examiner, he remains an observer and thus uncharacteristic of London’s energetic and resourceful citizens. The populace’s organization is practical, and the narrator lauds the Londoners’ community spirit during the plague and bewails its passage as the plague diminishes.

In a second respect, the ambivalence of the narrator is more striking. He lauds common sense and courage where he finds it but looks for the salvation of the city in divine providence during the despair most felt at the end of September, when deaths numbered more than ten thousand weekly. Then, suddenly, the weekly bills showed a dramatic decrease. To whom should go the praise? Defoe is equivocal, in much the same way that he solemnly introduces the scandalous history of Moll Flanders as a moral tract. This ambivalence may be called the true foundation of the English novel, a recital of fictions that rings true.

Bibliography

Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Scholarly and well-written, this biography is remarkably detailed in every aspect of Defoe’s life and career. This refreshing cache of information is a work of history with few forays into literary criticism.

Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. Edited by Paula Backscheider. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. The definitive modern edition of Defoe’s novel.

Flanders, W. Austin. “Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and the Modern Urban Experience.” In Daniel Defoe: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Max Byrd. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976. Investigates Defoe’s concern with the moral challenges that confront the urban dweller. Discusses Defoe’s imaginative exploration of those challenges.

Nicholson, Watson. The Historical Sources of Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague Year.” Boston: Stratford, 1919. Reprint. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1966. Illustrated by extracts from the original documents in the Burney collection and the manuscript room in the British Museum. Of particular importance are the excerpts from the original sources, which are included. The comparisons of the novel with actual events and the careful examination of the errors found in Defoe’s work offer an opportunity to scrutinize aspects of the novel that are often ignored by literary critics.

Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. A biographical study by a leading Defoe scholar that focuses on Defoe’s writings. Includes an analysis of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and other novels, as well as discussion of his works in other genres.

Richetti, John J. Daniel Defoe. Boston: Twayne, 1987. An excellent introduction to Defoe’s life and works. Includes bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005. A thorough look at Defoe’s writing within the context of his life and opinions, including an analysis of his fiction and political and religious journalism. Richetti focuses on Defoe’s distinctive literary style.

West, Richard. Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1998. West covers all aspects of Defoe: the journalist, novelist, satirist, newsman, and pamphleteer, as well as the tradesman, soldier, and spy. Written with considerable flair by a journalist and historian of wide-ranging experience.

Zimmerman, Everett. Defoe and the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Chapter 5, “A Journal of the Plague Year: Fact and Fiction,” is a study of the evolution of Defoe’s style and in particular his reaction to the demands entailed in fictionalizing a then-recent historical event.