‘Oh! Death, Death, Death!’ screams a woman from the window of a house near Cornhill. No neighbours stir and the street is deserted save for the book’s narrator. What does he do? Noting a chill in his blood, the man then simply continues his journey through the City of London streets. This book is a fascinating record of trying to cope during the capital’s last plague epidemic of 1665.
Daniel Defoe was only around five years old during the Great Plague that claimed nearly 100,000 lives. This makes A Journal of the Plague Year, originally published in 1722, an imaginative reconstruction. Its shadowy narrator, known only as ‘H.F.’, seeks to record the terrifying progress of a disease that had no known cause and therefore no known cure. Defoe uses his skills as a journalist, novelist and Londoner to knit together evidence with storytelling. In doing so, he presents a vivid picture of a plague epidemic, but also the mean streets of seventeenth-century London. Some inhabitants are shown to be brave and caring, but many are understandably plain scared, confused and desperate. The most sensational and wicked acts tend to be reported as hearsay with the weekly bills of mortality acting as sobering anchors of evidence.
It ought to be noted that ‘H.F.’ is not the easiest of companions. ‘As I said before,’‘I mentioned above’ and ‘as I have observed’ are common phrases for a narrator who thinks nothing of digression and repetition. Obsessively noting down the exact route of his journeys is another characteristic. These most human of idiosyncrasies should not detract from the fact that A Journal is the most comprehensive account of plague we have. Defoe had done his homework, and the most likely printed sources he used for the novel are listed in the explanatory notes.
This edition has a new introduction by Professor David Roberts, Head of English at Birmingham City University. Roberts is particularly interesting when considering the publishing environment of Defoe’s time. As a new plague epidemic threatened Europe, books on the theme became increasingly popular. Roberts identifies Richard Bradley’s The Plague at Marseilles Consider’d as the subject’s bestseller for the period. During 1721, Bradley’s book went into five editions. A Journal did not do nearly as well, with a second reprint only appearing in 1755. In contrast, four editions of Robinson Crusoe were published in about as many months when it first appeared. Concentrating on Moll Flanders first may have cost Defoe and his publishers dearly. Roberts wonders whether they were a few months too late with A Journal to fully capitalise on the market. It is perhaps significant that Defoe’s book was the last substantial title to appear on plague during this period. Whether the swine flu epidemic of 2009–10 inspired this new edition from OUP is unclear.
A Journal is perhaps Defoe’s most under-valued novel and it is heartening to see Oxford World’s Classics repackage it. Whether the indistinct photograph of a sixteenth-century charnel house door from France used for the front cover will stand the test of time is a small detail. The compact font sizes are perhaps more troublesome. Aside from Roberts’s introduction, this edition’s value lies in largely retaining Louis Landa’s exhaustive notes from the 1969 edition. A four-page appendix includes a succinct ‘A Medical Note’ of the plague, with an analysis of Defoe’s understanding of the disease. The topographical index will be sufficient for many, but Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert’s The London Encyclopaedia (London: Macmillan, 2008) is recommended. A screen with Google Maps or a hardcopy street atlas may also be wise as Defoe’s London is still largely there for the walking.
