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A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is a harrowing chronicle of the Great Plague of London in 1665. Based on Daniel Defoe's own childhood memories and prodigious research, it thrusts the reader into the heart of an epidemic estimated to have claimed nearly a quarter of the city's population.

The narrator, known only as "H.F.", decides (along with the many who cannot afford to flee) to trust in God and stay in the city. He not only endures the daily horror, but he reports on it in meticulous and unsentimental detail: death-carts, mass burials, forced quarantines, gruesome medical procedures, panicked chaos, and eerie silence.

Walking the line between history, fiction, and practical handbook, it remains perhaps the greatest account of a natural disaster ever written. It is a masterpiece of visceral storytelling, exploring the psychology of fear, hysteria, and isolation; the struggle between science and superstition; and a portrait of human nature at its best and worst.

Schedule:

  • Week 1 (Sept 27): Kindle pages 1-76 (Librivox Parts 1-8)
  • Week 2 (Oct 4): Kindle pages 76-134 (Librivox Parts 9-16) starting "I could not perceive that my discourse made much impression..."
  • Week 3 (Oct 11): Kindle pages 134-201 (Librivox Parts 17-25) starting "This running of distempered people about the streets was very dismal..."

A Journal of the Plague Year:

Supplemental:

Extracts:

  • "She was like the great fire of London, breaking out on the heel of the great Plague." (Israel Potter, 19)
  • "Still, relatively to the pale history of the voyage, and his own pale face, there seemed something so incongruous in the Spaniard’s apparel, as almost to suggest the image of an invalid courtier tottering about London streets in the time of the plague." ("Benito Cereno")
  • "I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb’s tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent." (Moby-Dick, 27)
  • "Some thinking they would catch the plague, dipped oakum in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their nostrils. Others having broken the stems of their pipes almost short off at the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it constantly filled their olfactories." (Moby-Dick, 91)
  • "This day we buried three; the next day one, and then the pestilence left us, with seven convalescent..." (Redburn, 58)
  • "It visited them like a plague, sweeping them off by hundreds." (Typee, 26)
  • "We die by land, and die by sea; we die by earthquakes, famines, plagues, and wars; by fevers, agues; woe, or mirth excessive. This mortal air is one wide pestilence, that kills us all at last." (Mardi, 2.74)
  • "He would tell of lying in Batavia during a fever, when his ship lost a man every few days, and how they went reeling ashore with the body, and got still more intoxicated by way of precaution against the plague." (Redburn, 7)
  • "There seems to be no calamity overtaking man, that can not be rendered merchantable. Undertakers, sextons, tomb-makers, and hearse-drivers, get their living from the dead; and in times of plague most thrive. And these miserable old men and women hunted after corpses to keep from going to the church-yard themselves; for they were the most wretched of starvelings." (Redburn, 36)
  • "... in some of these ships... the emigrant passengers are cut off from the most indispensable conveniences of a civilized dwelling. This forces them in storm time to such extremities, that no wonder fevers and plagues are the result. We had not been at sea one week, when to hold your head down the fore hatchway was like holding it down a suddenly opened cesspool." (Redburn, 47)
  • "You see no plague-ship driving through a stormy sea; you hear no groans of despair; you see no corpses thrown over the bulwarks; you mark not the wringing hands and torn hair of widows and orphans:—all is a blank. And one of these blanks I have but filled up, in recounting the details of the Highlander’s calamity." (Redburn, 58)
  • "... the archangel cared little or nothing for the captain and mates; and since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a higher hand than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole command" (Moby-Dick, 71)
  • "... a malignant fever followed the scurvy; with the excessive heat of the lengthened calm, making such short work of it as to sweep away, as by billows, whole families of the Africans, and a yet larger number, proportionably, of the Spaniards, including, by a luckless fatality, every remaining officer on board." ("Benito Cereno")
  • "... do you think that because you can strike a bit of green light from the Leyden jar, that you can thoroughly avert the supernal bolt? Your rod rusts, or breaks, and where are you? Who has empowered you, you Tetzel, to peddle round your indulgences from divine ordinations? The hairs of our heads are numbered, and the days of our lives. In thunder as in sunshine, I stand at ease in the hands of my God. False negotiator, away!" ("The Lightning-Rod Man")
  • "For spite the sky there, always blue, / And blue daubed seas so bland, the pest / Was breaking out—the people quailing / In houses hushed; from Egypt sailing, / In ship, I say, which shunned the pest.... I say there fell to her unblest / A hap more baleful than the pest." (Clarel, 3.12)
  • "... forever exempt from wearing on his hands those treacherous plague-spots of indigence—videlicet, blots from the inkstand" (Pierre, 18.2)

This meetup is part of the series Circuses and Snake Oil.

Related topics

Classic Books
Literature
Intellectual Discussions
History
Medicine

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