While it purports to be a journal, Daniel Defoe’s novel, A Journal of the Plague Year, is an imaginatively drawn “history” of the Great Plague that seized England from 1664 to 1665. Defoe likely based his narrator, a Whitechapel saddler identified only as “H. F.,” on his uncle, Henry Foe, who survived the plague while working as a saddler in St. Botolph. The book details survival tactics assumed by various individuals as London, and then most of their country, comes under siege. H. F. chooses to remain in London, feeling that it is God’s will for him, chronicling the progression of the plague and its effects on the citizenry from disbelief to terror.

In engaging detail, H. F. describes the changes in the city so acutely that the city almost becomes a character. Infected inhabitants remained literally imprisoned in their houses with little access to any relief, while those unaffected fled the city for the country, in some cases unwittingly carrying the plague with them. Small towns began to place constables and guards at their borders, preventing weary travelers from settling in. Defoe’s rendition of the dialogue in dramatic fashion helps build a realistic tension. The city remains so long deserted that nature begins to take over, as grass sprouts in the unused streets.

Two men discovering a dead woman in the street during the Great Plague of London, 1665. Wellcome Collection.

Defoe continues to receive high critical praise for his approach. He skillfully interconnects factual reports, including city statistics and mortality reports, historical reports, and anecdotal information. He focuses on human fortitude, or lack thereof, in the face of disaster, supposedly spurred to write this book following an outbreak of the plague in France. His subjects include not only everyday London citizens but also its civic leaders, with round criticism for their hesitancy to act. In the opening paragraphs, the narrator relates that although the government “had a true account” of the spreading plague, that information was not released in time to help many citizens. They first suspected the truth when weekly bills, or announcements, showed an increase in burials beyond the normal in a local parish. Defoe inserts what appear to be columned journal entries as H. F. begins to keep a tally of the dead. When the flight from the city begins, H. F. describes it as “very terrible and melancholy.”

Reaction to the work in his own era proved strong, with Sir Walter Scott’s voice of praise joining that of others in the 1821 Memoir of Daniel Defoe, Miscellaneous Works. First noting the “hideous almost to disgust” subject, Scott adds, “Even had he not been the author of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe would have deserved immortality for the genius which he has displayed in this work.” The 1720s saw several novels in which all the elements of fiction were not required: some plots, like Defoe’s, supplied a strong setting but no specific strong characters.

Defoe exhibited his skill at confusing fact and fiction in Moll Flanders (1722), a popular novel in which he convinced many readers, through his inclusion of realistic detail, that his protagonist actually existed. About A Journal of the Plague Year, a reviewer named H. Southern wrote in an 1822 review, “Such is the verisimilitude of all the writings of Defoe, that unless we have had some other means of refuting their authenticity than internal evidence, it would be a very difficult task to dispute their claims.” The book remains popular and may be accessed as electronic text as well as found in published print form.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Moulton, Charles Wells, ed. “Daniel Defoe.” The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959, 42.
Novak, Maximillian. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, His Life and Ideas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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