A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials of the most remarkable occurrences, as well public as private, which happened in London

A Journal of the Plague Year, first published in March 1722, recounts one man’s experiences in 1665, when the bubonic plague struck in what became known as the Great Plague of London. Presented as an eyewitness account of events at the time, it was actually written just prior to the book’s publication. The author, Daniel Defoe, was only five years old when the Great Plague took place, but he goes to great pains to achieve an effect of verisimilitude, identifying specific neighborhoods, streets, and even houses in which the events of the plague took place. Additionally, he provides tables of casualty figures and discusses the credibility of various accounts and anecdotes received by the narrator. 

The book is often compared to the actual, contemporary accounts of the plague in the diary of Samuel Pepys. Defoe’s account, which appears to include much research, is far more systematic and detailed than Pepys’s first-person account. As George Rice Carpenter, professor of rhetoric and English composition at Columbia College, wrote, “The reason why this religious romance of Defoe’s, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, has held for nearly two centuries its place in English literature, the reason why knowledge of it is still worth making a requisite of a broad education, is that it is one of the most vivid pictures imaginable of the varied scenes and experiences of a great national calamity, such as still might conceivably overtake a large community. No one can read it without a healthy quickening of the sympathies, and without receiving into his memory a series of pictures stimulating the imagination and scarcely to be effaced from the memory. The nightly dead-carts and the links, the red crosses on the doors, the pit at midnight with the half-crazed mourner, the simple waterman, the lowly artisan wanderers; even the seemingly trivial details, the untouched purse in the deserted courtyard, the unfrightened women pillaging the warehouse, all these remain with us for years as vivid as the actual recollections of our childhoods.”

Includes an introduction by George Rice Carpenter, professor of rhetoric and English composition at Columbia College.

Newly designed and typeset by Waking Lion Press.