Purports to be a firsthand account of the Great London Plague of 1665, though the author's name does not appear on the title page of the first edition. The book was published in 1722, half a century after the events described. Only near the end do we learn the initials of the narrator, H.F., and that he is dead and buried.
In other words the narrator is a fictive one, which makes the book a sort of novel. In the introduction to this edition, Anthony Burgess calls it “a cunning work of art, a confidence trick of the imagination.”
Defoe was only five years old at the time of the plague, and the account
may in fact be based on notes made by his uncle, Henry Foe. It is mostly reportorial in nature, and according to Anthony Burgess, “the most reliable and comprehensive account of the Great Plague that we possess.”
Burgess also calls Defoe "the first really modern writer" because of his "plain and dignified style," which avoids "literary artificiality." However, it must also be said that the book is disorganized and repetitious, making it something of an ordeal for modern readers. Burgess implies the "clumsiness" is intentional.
Timespan
London was visited numerous times by the plague. This one began in late 1664, but the number of deaths remained low until June of 1665, at which time “the richer sort of people” began fleeing the city. In July and August the number of deaths increased dramatically, with the highest weekly total of 7000 reached in September. The numbers then abated until the plague was “reckoned to be quite ceased” by the following February.
Symptoms
The disease was puzzling because it affected people in different ways.
“Some were immediately overwhelmed with it,” says H.F., “and it came to violent fevers, vomitings, insufferable headaches, pains in the back, and so up to ravings and ragings with those pains; others with swellings and tumours in the neck or groin or armpits, which till they could be broke put them into insufferable agonies and torment; while others...were silently infected, the fever preying upon their spirits insensibly, and they seeing little of it till they fell into swooning and faintings and death without pain.”
Some were “walking putrefied carcases whose breath was infectious and their sweat poison, and yet were as well to look on as other people, and even knew it not themselves.” Some did not realize they were infected until hours before they died.
Not everyone died who was infected, and in the later stages of the epidemic people recovered faster and the disease did not seem so virulent. “If it was catched it was not so mortal.”
Defoe, through his mouthpiece H.F., gave the total number of deaths in London as 68,590 based on the weekly “bills of mortality,” but believed this was not an accurate count and that the true figure was much higher. A figure of 100,000 is commonly quoted today, about a quarter of London's population at the time.
He is generous with praise for city officials, but in the end offers the opinion that one of the methods used, enforced confinement, was ill-advised.
Transmission
H.F. says the infection was “spread by certain steams or fumes, which physicians call effluvia, by the breath, or by the sweat, or by the stench of the sores of the sick persons.” Some thought the plague could be spread by a mother's milk, or that an infected baby could transmit the plague by suckling.
It was also believed to be spread by clothing, and brought into houses by servants returning from errands. Animals were suspected, and as a result “forty thousand dogs and five times as many cats” were destroyed, as well as a “prodigious multitude” of mice and rats killed by poison.
The poor were “more subject to be infected” because they lived in closer quarters and less sanitary conditions, and because they had not the means to flee the city. “They died by heaps and were buried by heaps.”
Lockdown
Since there was only one pest-house in London, the city ordered that any home with an infected person be locked up for four weeks. All members of the household, including servants and those showing no signs of the disease, were kept within. The city hired two watchmen to guard it night and day to prevent people from leaving. The house was identified by a red cross on the door.
“All plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads, buckler-play, or such-like causes of assemblies of people” were “utterly prohibited.” “Public feasting” was banned, but taverns stayed open with the imposition of a 9pm closing.
Churches remained open, and the Government “appointed public prayers and days of fasting and humiliation, to make public confession of sin and implore the mercy of God to avert the dreadful judgement which hung over their heads.”
Dead-carts were sent out daily to collect bodies. Some streets were too narrow to admit the carts, and the bodies had to be brought out by wheelbarrow.
Remedies
Many believed that the smell of pitch, tar, rosin, or brimstone, would keep them safe. Others “carried bottles of scents or perfumes,” and always had “preservatives in their mouths and about their clothes to repel the infection.”
Houses visited by the plague were purged by burning “perfumes, incense, benjamin, rozin, and sulphur in their rooms close shut up, and then let the air carry it all out with a blast of gunpowder.” Shopkeepers sought to disinfect coins by having them placed in a pail of vinegar.
The gullible were preyed upon by quacks and mountebanks, who peddled philtres, plague water, anti-pestilential pills, as well as “cordials against the corruption of air,” and “papers tied up with so many knots, and certain words or figures written on them, as particularly the word Abracadabra, formed in triangle or pyramid.”
Second Wave
When the plague waned in the fall, people began “running rashly into danger, giving up all their former cautions, and all the shyness they used to practise, depending that the sickness would not reach them, or if it did they would not die.” Physicians warned that this could bring about a relapse of the danger upon the whole city, which might be more serious than what had been experienced so far.
“But it was all to no purpose; the audacious creatures were so possessed with the first joy and so surprised with the satisfaction of seeing a vast decrease in the weekly bills, that they were impenetrable by any new terrors, and would not be persuaded but that the bitterness of death was past; and it was to no more purpose to talk to them than to an east wind; but they opened shops, went about streets, did business, and conversed with anybody that came in their way to converse with, whether with business or without, neither inquiring of their health or so much as being apprehensive of any danger from them, though they knew them not to be sound.”
The result was a upsurge in deaths.
Crazy Stuff
Physicians thought that the danger of death was great if buboes were not lanced, but some were so hard that they could not be cut and so were burnt with caustics.
Some proposed that the breath of infected persons would leave a scum on warm water, and cause a chicken to lay rotten eggs.
A man named Solomon Eagle ran naked through the streets with a pan of burning charcoal on his head.
In one incident, a man who had passed out from drink was picked up, and awoke just before he was about to tossed into a mass burial pit. Anticipating a Monty Python sketch by nearly 300 years, he says, “But I an’t dead though, am I?”
Oxford University Press Edition
This edition contains a very informative “Medical Note” as an appendix. It's not long and worth reading. It suggests that all three forms of the plague – bubonic, septicemic, and pneumonic – were present in London, which would explain the differing ways it was manifested.
The Plague Today
It's now generally believed that the plague was spread by the bite of fleas whose main host was rats. Other animals known to carry the plague are squirrels, prairie dogs, chipmunks, and marmots.
Every year a few hundred people die from it in scattered places, including the United States. Apparently there are no reliable vaccines, but antibiotics can be used successfully if the disease is diagnosed quickly enough. However, its flu-like symptoms can make this problematic.
Reading Defoe's work, one sees many similarities between the London plague and the pandemic now sweeping the world, Covid-19. Lockdowns, social distancing, financial assistance to those afflicted, cockeyed remedies, a second wave, even crime. (In London thieves broke into houses to steal the clothes off dead bodies, while today criminals are able to use safer methods thanks to the internet.)
Other Plague Novels
The Last Man by Mary Shelley 1826
The Scarlet Plague by Jack London 1915
The Plague by Albert Camus 1947
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart 1949
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson 1954
The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton 1969
The Stand by Stephen King 1978
Interestingly, both The Last Man and The Scarlet Plague are set in 2073.
Click here to see my remarks on
The Scarlet Plague and Cormac McCarthy's
The Road.
