Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year

Like Camus’ book, Daniel Defoe combines realism and journalistic reporting to create a tale of life during the Great Plague of London in 1665.  His work is more journalism than personal journal.  In fact, Defoe was just a child when the plague raged through the city.  His A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is based on the personal accounts of his uncle, Henry Foe (Defoe added the “De” later in his life).  What is most interesting in Defoe’s writing is the way he uses science and data; the book really reads as science journalism, with Defoe citing “bills of mortality,” statistical references to those taken ill and those who died, as well as documenting the spread of the disease in London.

As with Camus’ work, many of the situations and responses Defoe describes ring eerily like our own Covid-19 response.  The government attempts to hide the greater spread of the disease.  “But it seems that the Government had a true account of it, and several councils were held about ways to prevent its coming over,” he writes, “but all was kept very private.”

He offers anecdotes about strange occurrences both before and during the outbreak.  “A blazing star or comet appeared for several months before the plague,” he tells us, and these events continue up to the Great Fire of London which effectively ends the spread of the disease in 1666 by eradicating rats and curing the flea infestation that spread the infection.  People also seek out all manner of “quacks and mountebanks, wizards and fortune-tellers,” in an attempt to find some kind of logic in the spread of the disease and eventual death rate.  Poor people especially are victimized by this.  Many of these snake oil salesmen hawking quick remedies offer no mitigation for the disease, similar to Trump flogging chloroquine as a cure for Covid-19.

Families of those who are hospitalized or die from the plague cannot be with their loved ones.  Defoe tells us they could not enter the church or hold graveside services.  In addition, he describes how when someone is taken ill or has died in a particular house, a guard is posted to keep the remaining family members from leaving the premises and possibly infecting others.  However, people would not report the death until the entire family could sneak out and go to the country or another area and thereby avoid quarantine.  This only spreads the disease to outlying areas.

Plays, entertainments and other assemblies are banned and people who try to circumvent the law are “severely punished by every alderman in his ward.”  This includes “all public feasting…dinners at taverns, ale-houses, and other places of common entertainment.”

The most chilling part of his account is the bringing out the dead.  Because of the sheer numbers of bodies, many are buried in mass graves.  Special workers are designated to roam the village streets at night collecting the corpses to be transported to the cemetery.  Defoe tells us that some feverish people, near death, would escape the house and run to the pits in the graveyard and throw themselves in with the dead bodies, a kind of self-burial.  He also makes note of the fact that rich and poor were thrown into these mass graves, making the plague the great equalizer in society.  Many of these workers who handled hundreds of bodies did become sick themselves, but there is also a fair number who did not become ill at all, a case of inoculation by exposure to the disease.

Defoe makes the case that people and government officials were not prepared for the onslaught of the epidemic.  However, there were previous outbreaks of plague before the events of 1665 but the warning signs were ignored.  He also expresses doubt about the veracity of those bills of mortality:  “if the bills of mortality said five thousand, I always believed it was near twice as many in reality…”

The striking thing about Defoe’s account is the way he addresses things science was centuries away from discovering and understanding, namely the idea of someone who is asymptomatic of the disease yet capable of infecting a host of others while not exhibiting symptoms himself.  “These were the dangerous people,” he writes.  “These were the people of whom the well people ought to have been afraid; but then, on the other side, it was impossible to know them…one man who may have really received the infection and knows it not, but goes abroad and about as a sound person, may give the plague to a thousand people, and they to greater numbers in proportion and neither the person giving the infection or the persons receiving it know anything of it, and perhaps not feel the effects of it for several days after.”

Even the crowds at pools and the beaches that we saw over the Memorial Day weekend are reflected in Defoe’s writing.  He complains about people “running rashly into danger” by “giving up all their former cautions and care” in fear of the disease only to expose themselves to new threats as quarantine measures were relaxed.

The prescient nature of Daniel Defoe’s writing tells us that plagues and pandemics have trolled human history back through the ages.  It would be a fair response to be prepared in the future to face these threats to human life.  We must learn a lesson here; I am not sure we will.