A Journal of the Plague Year

by Daniel Defoe

  Nor will I deny, but there were Abundance of People who to all Appearance were very thankful at that time; for their Mouths were stop’d, even the Mouths of those whose Hearts were not extraordinary long affected with it: But the Impression was so strong at that time, that it could not be resisted, no not by the worst of the People.

  It was a common thing to meet People in the Street, that were Strangers, and that we knew nothing at all of, expressing their Surprize. Going one Day thro’ Aldgate, and a pretty many People being passing and repassing, there comes a Man out of the End of the Minories, and looking a little up the Street and down, he throws his Hands abroad, Lord, what an Alteration is here! Why, last Week I came along here, and hardly any Body was to be seen; another Man, I heard him, adds to his Words, ’tis all wonderful, ’tis all a Dream: Blessed be God, says a third Man, and let us give Thanks to him, for ’tis all his own doing: Human Help and human Skill was at an End. These were all Strangers to one another: But such Salutations as these were frequent in the Street every Day; and in Spight of a loose Behaviour, the very common People went along the Streets, giving God Thanks for their Deliverance.

  It was now, as I said before, the People had cast off all Apprehensions, and that too fast; indeed we were no more afraid now to pass by a Man with a white Cap upon his Head, or with a Cloth wrapt round his Neck, or with his Leg limping, occasion’d by the Sores in his Groyn, all which were frightful to the last Degree, but the Week before; but now the Street was full of them, and these poor recovering Creatures, give them their Due, appear’d very sensible of their unexpected Deliverance; and I should wrong them very much, if I should not acknowledge, that I believe many of them were really thankful; but I must own, that for the Generality of the People it might too justly be said of them, as was said of the Children of Israel, after their being delivered from the Host of Pharaoh, when they passed the Red-Sea, and look’d back, and saw the Egyptians overwhelmed in the Water, viz. That they sang his Praise, but they soon forgot his Works.*

  I can go no farther here, I should be counted censorious, and perhaps unjust, if I should enter into the unpleasant Work of reflecting, whatever Cause there was for it, upon the Unthankfulness and Return of all manner of Wickedness among us, which I was so much an Eye-Witness of my self; I shall conclude the Account of this calamitous Year therefore with a coarse but sincere Stanza of my own, which I plac’d at the End of my ordinary Memorandums, the same Year they were written:

  A dreadful Plague in London was,

  In the Year Sixty Five,

  Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls

  Away; yet I alive!

  H. F.

  FINIS.

  APPENDIX

  A MEDICAL NOTE

  Defining Plague

  Accurate knowledge of plague dates from the Hong Kong epidemic of 1894. Yersinia pestis, named after the first person to identify it correctly, Alexandre Yersin, is a clone of the bacillus Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. In 1898 Paul-Louis Simond was the first to explain the process of transmission via rats and fleas, and the genetic code of Yersinia pestis was published by Julian Parkhill and colleagues in 2001.

  Plague is not primarily a human disease. Yersinia pestis lives in the digestive tract of the fleas Xenopsylla cheopsis and Cortophylus or Nosopsylla fasciatus. Both live off the black rat Rattus rattus, and are prone to bite humans; other rodents carry infected fleas but of kinds that tend not to bite people. Yersinia pestis can survive in excrement, old nests, or even textile bales for up to a year in warm and humid conditions.

  Normally plague is contained within flea and rodent populations; this is referred to as its enzootic state. Periodically, however, Yersinia pestis multiplies and blocks the passage of blood to the flea’s stomach. In order to feed, the flea has to regurgitate blood saturated with plague bacilli into its host’s bloodstream, killing it. When the hosts—rodents—die in large numbers, the disease is epizootic, and at that stage the fleas and their bacillus must find an alternative host. Because Rattus rattus is a climbing species that lives close to people and often inhabits roofing, human beings are the natural choice.

  There are three types of plague, all of which may occur simultaneously in human populations, and all of which appear to be mentioned by Defoe. Bubonic plague makes up three-quarters of all cases and historically has been fatal in comparable proportions. The first symptoms appear between thirty-six hours and ten days after infection: a black pustule at the location of the bite; then, depending on that location, enlargement of the lymph glands in the armpits, neck or groin. Headaches, vomiting, and acute pain follow in the vicinity of the swelling, or bubo. In mild cases or with prompt treatment the infection will subside and the bubo shrink. Otherwise, haemorrhaging makes it turn purple, red lumps called petechiae appear, and the bacillus enters the bloodstream, poisoning the nervous system.

  Pneumonic or pulmonary plague accounts for about one-fifth of cases and combines pneumonia (making it more frequent in cold weather) with the passage of infected blood into the lungs. Coughing discharges sputum containing Yersinia pestis, which may then enter the lungs of other people; this is the only form of plague that can be directly transmitted by human agency. Incubation lasts two or three days before the body temperature falls and the lungs stiffen. Sufferers have had, at best, a 5 per-cent chance of survival.

  The third form, septicaemic plague, is rare but lethal, transmitted by human as well as rat fleas—Pulex irritans as well as Xenopsylla cheopsis and Cortophylus/Nosopsylla fasciatus. Fleas must have access to people badly infected by plague. Blood with a high concentration of plague bacilli is carried in the flea’s mouth and introduced directly to the bloodstream of the next person it bites. A rash develops within hours and death follows, almost invariably, within a period of one to three days, before buboes have had time to form.

  Modern Epidemiology

  The plague of 1665 was probably caused by a combination of population movement and seasonal changes in flea and rat ecology. London had suffered epidemics on a regular cycle: in 1563, 1593, 1603, and 1625. In the intervening years a steady number of people had died of the disease. A decline after 1649 indicates the development of collective immunity that might have led to plague’s demise but for the large-scale migration to London that accompanied the Restoration of 1660 and created a virgin population for the disease to attack.

  Why the plague abated in 1665 so far as virtually to disappear from the British Isles is harder to explain. Plague was always most virulent in London, and the South East has always shown the highest concentration of people with blood group ‘A’, whom some studies show are more susceptible to flea bites. Where the most vulnerable part of a population experiences prolonged exposure to a disease, the strong develop immunities while the weak simply die. It is possible that Yersinia pestis mutated back towards its milder parent form, Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, initiating a stable, non-lethal relationship with the human host and causing a disease similar to typhoid that in turn gave partial immunity to plague. Human beings need not be the answer: it may have been rats that acquired immunity.

  There is no substance to the theory that the Great Fire of 1666 caused plague to abate because brick and tiles replaced timber and thatch as building materials; the Great Fire caused little damage in the west of the city, where the plague had been most virulent. Nor is it true that the brown rat saved the day. Although it did have the advantage over the black rat of living underground and carrying fleas less partial to human blood, it did not arrive in large numbers until the 1730s. It is also very doubtful whether public and private hygiene improved sufficiently to eliminate the risk of infection.

  Defoe’s Epidemiology

  Defoe’s debt to contemporary epidemiology is charted in the Explanatory Notes to this edition but some general observations will establish the validity of his opinions, all with the caveat that his aim was to make a drama out of treatises. The three types of plague all appear to be present in the right proportions and Defoe’s observations
about its treatment are largely accurate. The bubonic form predominates but Defoe also cites people who, ignorant of their infection, collapsed and died suddenly, suggesting the septicaemic variety. H.F.’s references to the ‘fatal Breath’ of victims is a legitimate construction of pneumonic plague which places him closer to modern science than many of his contemporaries, while his descriptions of sufferers’ mental disorder reflect plague’s tendency to attack the nervous system. Ilse Vickers has demonstrated Defoe’s interest in new scientific methodologies (Defoe and the New Sciences (Cambridge, 1996)) and it is fair to say that his enthusiasm is apparent in A Journal of the Plague Year.

  That does not make its attempt to resolve old debates about the spread of plague accurate. Proponents of contagion argued that human contact was the key, while those who believed in miasma thought a poisonous cloud settled periodically, encouraged by hot weather, poor hygiene and—for some—gaseous effusions from the Earth’s core. Breathe in the cloud and you caught the disease. The miasma theory was popular because it appeared to explain how someone might catch the disease without coming into contact with anyone else, and because it sat more easily with descriptions of God’s judgement in the Old Testament. It depended on an idea H.F. emphatically rejects and modern science has proved true: that there are ‘invisible Creatures, who enter into the Body with the Breath’ (p. 65). But if H.F. is a contagionist he stretches his case to allow for a local or personal miasma: ‘no one in this whole Nation ever receiv’d the Sickness or Infection, but who receiv’d it in the ordinary Way of Infection from some Body, or the Cloaths, or touch, or stench of some Body that was infected before’ (p. 167). The idea may have arisen from medical observation but it also owes something to biblical descriptions of leprosy, referred to in the Journal (p. 211).

  In a number of particulars Defoe was correct. Plague could be carried in clothes since fleas lodge in them. Bemused by prophylactics, H.F. still has his own ‘Preparation of strong Scent’ and fumigates his house, both of which might keep fleas and rats at bay. Escaping to moored ships did not guarantee safety, not only because they might already contain infected people, but because rats either lived there too or could scale the mooring ropes. That made the official quarantine measures inadequate. For the same reason, shutting oneself up at home could only work in the unlikely event of the house being secured against rats and fleas, a cause which the official policy of killing cats did little to advance. Defoe’s best schemes for controlling the disease were his most ambitious ones: the building of more pest houses and the isolation of infected areas would have checked the plague better than anything the miasmatists proposed.

  Until the very end, H.F. dismisses the idea that plague was the direct instrument of God’s wrath, preferring to believe that it had arisen from ‘natural Causes’ and been spread by ‘natural Means’. This was divine power operating within ‘the Scheme of Nature’ (p. 166). Yet the final abatement calls for no other explanation than direct intervention, even if it is proposed as hesitantly as we would expect from a burgeoning natural scientist: ‘just then it pleased God, as it were, by his immediate Hand to disarm this Enemy’ (p. 210). That, perhaps, is merely to be wise after the event and because H.F. is concerned not to indulge in ‘an officious canting of religious things’ once the ‘Sense of the thing was over’, he refrains from ‘going on’.

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

  Louis Landa’s 1969 Explanatory Notes have been lightly edited for consistency and economy. For place citations, readers should consult the new Topographical Index and map, which better serve readers wishing to track Defoe’s frequent and necessarily repetitious references to London’s streets and buildings.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  A Brief Treatise … of the Pestilence

  William Kemp, A Brief Treatise of the Nature, Causes, Signs, Preservations from and Cure of the Pestilence (1665)

  A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce Pieces

  A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce Pieces relating to the Last Plague in the year 1665

  Discourse

  Sir Richard Blackmore, A Discourse upon the Plague (1721)

  Lee

  William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings, extending from 1716 to 1729, 3 vols. (1869)

  Loimographia

  William Boghurst, Loimographia, Or an Experimentall Relation of the Plague, of what hath happened Remarkable in the Last Plague in the City of London … with a Collection of Choice and Tried Medicines for Preservation and Cure etc. 1666. Printed for the Epidemiological Society of London, ed. Joseph Frank Payne (1894)

  Loimologia

  Nathaniel Hodges, Loimologia, Or an Historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665 … to which is added An Essay on the Different Causes of Pestilential Diseases, and how they become Contagious, by J. Quincy, MD (1720; 3rd edn., 1721)

  Medela Pestilentiae

  Richard Kephale, Medela Pestilentiae: Wherein is contained Several Theological Queries concerning the Plague, with Approved Antidotes, Signs, and Symptoms: also an Exact Method for curing that Epidemical Distemper (1665)

  Necessary Directions … by the College of Physicians

  Necessary Directions for the Prevention and Cure of the Plague, with Divers Remedies of small Charge, by the College of Physicians (1721). Contained in A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce Pieces

  Short Discourse

  Richard Mead, A Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion, and the Methods to be used to prevent it (1720; 6th edn., 1720)

  again in Holland: on 4 May 1664 Pepys made the first of several entries in his Diary concerning the reappearance of the plague in Holland. A busy port trading with plague-infected countries in Asia, Amsterdam was watched with apprehension. According to John Graunt’s Natural and Political Observations … upon the Bills of Mortality, 5th edn. (1676), in 1663 it suffered 9,752 plague deaths; in 1664, 24,148.

  Candia: Crete.

  matter’d not … whence it come: Defoe reflects the prevalent view that plagues originated in Asia and Africa and were transmitted by commerce, as stated by Mead’s government-approved Short Discourse. Mead denied Britain had any ‘Pestilential Disease’ that had not been received ‘from other Infected Places’, i.e. ‘the Eastern and Southern parts of the World’ (pp. 4–5). It was a controversial subject: the author of Medicina Flagellata (1721) believed that troop movements, not trade, were to blame. In reality there was an outbreak in Turkey in 1661; the plague spread to Greece and then, by 1663, to Amsterdam.

  no … printed News Papers: there were at least anticipations of the newspaper. In 1665 the Oxford Gazette (later the London Gazette) made its appearance and carried news of the plague, as did Sir Roger L’Estrange’s The Intelligencer and The Newes.

  Tokens: in modern parlance, cutaneous lesions resulting from subcutaneous haemorrhaging, a common plague symptom. Defoe owned a copy of Kephale’s Medela Pestilentiae, which says they were otherwise known as ‘Gods Tokens’; Kephale unwittingly alluded to the key to transmission when he compared the lesions to ‘the bigness of a flea-bitten spot, sometimes much bigger’. He attributed their different colour to ‘the predominancy of humour in the body’ (red for choler, black for melancholy, etc.) and claimed that they appeared most commonly on the breast and back because ‘the vital spirits strive to breathe out the venom the nearest way’ (pp. 84–5).

  the Hall: the Hall of the Company of Parish Clerks in Broad Lane, Vintry Ward. It burned down in 1666. Parish Clerks were licensed as a guild in 1233 and called the Fraternity of St Nicholas.

  weekly Bill of Mortality: Defoe’s key statistical source for the Journal. The Bills began in ad hoc fashion in the sixteenth century and assumed the form in which Defoe consulted them around the plague outbreak of 1636. Compiled and published by the Company of Parish Clerks, they reported the cause and number of deaths in 97 city parishes, 16 outside the walls, 12 in Middlesex and Surrey, and 5 in the city and liberties of Westminster—a total of 130. H.F. doubts their accur
acy and in Applebee’s Journal, 18 November 1721, Defoe attacks ‘those ridiculous Legends, call’d Bills of Mortality’, promising to demonstrate their ‘scandalous Deficiency’ in 1665. He probably consulted the Bills in the 1665 compilations, John Graunt’s London’s Dreadful Visitation and John Bell’s London’s Remembrancer. The 1721 A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce Pieces included John Graunt’s 1665 Reflections on the Weekly Bills of Mortality, another possible source.

  Spotted-Feaver: ‘a politic word’ for the plague, as Defoe called it in The Review, no. 151, 29 Jan. 1706, echoing Thomas Dekker’s earlier remark in London Looke Backe (1630): ‘a fine Gentleman like name … as if it had beene a Beautifull faire skind sickenesse’ (Dekker, Plague Pamphlets, ed. F. P. Wilson (1925), 179). The phrase, apparently coined in Spain in the seventeenth century, was loosely applied in England to typhus or any fever involving petechial eruptions. Defoe’s contemporaries thought it ‘cousin-germane’ to and herald of the bubonic plague. The confused medical views of fever in the period are reflected in Blackmore’s ‘Account of Malignant Fevers’, included in his 1721 Discourse. Dr Nathaniel Hodges wrote: ‘Very many were puzzled to distinguish aright between these Marks [the tokens of bubonic plague] and the Petechiae Pestilentiales, or Pestilential Appearances in Spotted Fevers’ (An Account of the First Rise … of the Plague, reprinted in A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce Pieces, 27–8). Willis, Sydenham, and Richard Morton, contemporary authorities, ranged fevers in a scale of ascending severity: putrid, malignant, pestilential. Sydenham wrote of malignant fever: ‘Its true affinities are with plague … and from the true plague it is distinguished only by its difference in degree’ (Works, ed. R. G. Latham, for the Sydenham Society (1848), i. 98). John Hancocke, prebendary of Canterbury and chaplain to the Duke of Bedford, was a popular proponent of the view that the plague is a fever, curable by cold water. His book, Febrifugum Magnum: or, Common Water the best Cure for Fevers, and probably for the Plague (1722), went quickly into six editions. William Boghurst, an apothecary, denied that the plague is a putrid fever: ‘though wee may fancy it is putrefaction in the highest degree of exaltation … [feaver] is not the essence and constitution of it, but a consequent and effect’ (Loimographia, 10).