Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
(New York: Penguin Books, 2003)
In his third novel, A Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe does not follow a tight plotline, preferring the route of multiple digressions, prolepses, and repetitions, with the levelheaded shopkeeper narrator’s numerous “observations” grouped, without chapter headings, by associations: the suffering of households with children, the effect of the plague on trade, the role and conduct of professional doctors, quacks, parish officers, burial teams, the clergy, and others addressed in turn. The loose arc of the ever-increasing disease itself, conveyed through repeated citations from the parish “Bills of Mortality” for 1665 provides the basic ground for the narrative.
Along the way, in addition to documenting and describing the progression of the disease and the actions of individual people in response to it, H.F. (as he signs the “document”) has a good deal to say about his society, its classes (especially “the Poor”), the policies and conduct of the local and national government, religion, superstition, science, commerce and economics. He includes mini-dramas relating an experiment in communal living in the countryside, episodes of sympathetic exchange of money, tears, and blessings, accounts of economic structure of businesses and trade, and a great deal of morbid detail.
[“the Poor”]
The poor occupy a special place of fascination, sympathy, and horror for H.F., who seems ultimately to make little distinction between the laboring poor tradesmen, servants, and shiftless vagrants. “[A]s thoughtless for to Morrow as ever,” (202) and “madly careless of themselves, Fool-hardy and obstinate,” the poor jump at the chance to get even the most dangerous jobs in order to feed themselves and their families. (201) They are repeatedly described as “miserable,” but just as often as dangerous, contagious, and difficult to control. While he appears sympathetic, he repeatedly says that their deaths en masse were the only thing that prevented riots.
HF in part attributes the easy spread of the plague to the great numbers of the poor crowding London’s streets after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Indirectly, he indicts the extravagant court of Charles II, whose demand for finery has brought them there. HF cites an opinion of another writer that at the time of the plague, there were 100,000 ribbon workers living in London, as an explanation for overcrowding and mass unemployment which immediately followed the news of the plague: all the workers in luxury goods, as well as many domestic servants were dismissed early on, as the nobility fled the city, dramatically increasing the indigent population with no settlement rights, which relied on voluntary (as opposed to established parish) charity.
[science and religion]
This desperate (or, at any rate, precariously employed) population also provides the main source of income for various quacks and fodder for HF’s discussion of superstitiousness, to which he is sympathetic in spite of having a clear “scientific” bias. For HF, true religion is perfectly compatible with action in the world and with attempts to understand it scientifically; while he does assume that the plague is a form of divine punishment, he assumes that it proceeds by natural means.
[city government and disciplinary power]
A continued topic of discussion is the role and actions of the city government, based on the Jacobean plague law, which demands the locking-up of houses or businesses in which diseased people are found. HF criticizes this practice as ineffectual, both because it was not rigorously implemented, and because of the nature of the disease, which often makes it impossible to distinguish between the infected and the well.
This inability to make a distinction leads Defoe to one of his most interesting formulations: “...it was to very small Purpose, to call them infected Houses and shut them up; the Infection having ravaged, and taken its Leave of the House, before it was really known, that the Family was in any way touch’d” (160). The “body” of the house that is distinct from that of the Family (untouched), perhaps an arbitrary distinction that could nonetheless be pursued further and related to the body of the city as separate but related to the bodies of its inhabitants. The plague is here a conceptual mechanism for thinking through the “fuzzy” concepts of society, family, and relation, made unstable by the great and varied population of the city.
[early sentimental scenes] especially around the theme of child victims, Defoe creates several highly wrought sentimental tableaux, with the water-man keeping away from his infected family, which he sustains through his work, and a grieving father holding the bodies of his dead wife and child all night, then dying in the morning seemingly made for tear-jerking paintings.
[curio] A man “had a Wound in his Leg, and whenever he came among any People that were not sound, and the Infection began to affect him, he said he could know it by that Signal...”, detecting even those who had no visible signs of infection on them (184).
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