A Journal of the Plague Year

"Defoe is better known as the author of novels like Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders . Here, there is an even thinner line between fact and fiction. When Defoe was writing in the 1720s, the novel was a new and emerging genre. Novelists were hungry for good material, so Defoe looked back sixty years to the bubonic plague that struck London around 1665, the year before the Great Fire of London. So A Journal of the Plague Year is a historical novel , and its pretext is that this narrative is a live journal of the epidemic by somebody living through it. The title page suggests that it’s been discovered in manuscript. “The suspension of normal realities that happens in a tragic situation like a pandemic can, paradoxically, produce a special protected environment for storytelling and its appreciation.” One of the most striking aspects of the book is that its storytelling mechanism incorporates early versions of the same kind of epidemiological data that we are paying attention to during the coronavirus outbreak. Bills of Mortality were the 17th century reporting method by which individual neighborhoods in London tallied up each week’s deaths and assigned them causes. Defoe incorporates those data to convey the arc of a disease on the rise, a disease which only relented after near total societal breakdown. That’s not representative of the book as a whole. Both the narrator and Defoe are interested in the mob mentality which took hold during the disease and how often people behave badly once the ordinary conventions of human interaction are suspended. The novel presents a bleak scenario, with even drastic quarantine measures being ineffective, because people behave as though rules don’t apply to them. People persecute strangers who come to their community because they’re afraid that they’re disease carriers. It’s not a Pollyannaish picture."