Cover of A Journal of the Plague Year
Being Observations or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as Well Public as Private, Which Happened in London During the Last Great Visitation in 1665. Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London

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A Journal of the Plague Year Being Observations or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as Well Public as Private, Which Happened in London During the Last Great Visitation in 1665. Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London

Name: A Journal of the Plague Year Being Observations or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as Well Public as Private, Which Happened in London During the Last Great Visitation in 1665. Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London
Author: Daniel Defoe

by Daniel Defoe

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Language: en3,063 downloads on Project Gutenberg

Subjects

Historical fiction Great Fire, London, England, 1666 -- Fiction Plague -- Fiction London (England) -- History -- 17th century -- Fiction

In: Historical Novels·Classics of Literature·British Literature

Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #376.

About this book

A Journal of the Plague Year is Daniel De Foe’s quasi‑historical account of the 1665 epidemic that swept through London. Framed as the observations of a citizen who remained in the city throughout the crisis, the work opens with a detailed description of how news of the disease spread, or failed to spread, in an age before printed newspapers. De Foe draws on letters, official reports, and the weekly bills of mortality to trace the first suspicious deaths in Long Acre, the rising burial figures in St Giles and neighboring parishes, and the escalating panic as the plague moved from isolated cases to a city‑wide emergency. The narrative is anchored in concrete statistics and contemporary government actions, giving readers a vivid sense of the unfolding disaster without venturing beyond the documented events.

The voice is that of a pragmatic, observant Londoner, written in a straightforward, report‑like style that mirrors the period’s pamphlet literature. De Foe’s language is plain yet precise, reflecting the 17th‑century concern for factual recording while allowing occasional personal reflection on the moral choices the plague forces. Readers who enjoy immersive historical reportage, particularly those interested in early modern urban life, epidemiology, or the social impact of disease, will find this account both informative and compelling.

The opening · free to read

Plague, 2. Parishes infected, 1.

The people showed a great concern at this, and began to be alarmed all over the town, and the more, because in the last week in December 1664 another man died in the same house, and of the same distemper. And then we were easy again for about six weeks, when none having died with any marks of infection, it was said the distemper was gone; but after that, I think it was about the 12th of February, another died in another house, but in the same parish and in the same manner.

This turned the people’s eyes pretty much towards that end of the town, and the weekly bills showing an increase of burials in St Giles’s parish more than usual, it began to be suspected that the plague was among the people at that end of the town, and that many had died of it, though they had taken care to keep it as much from the knowledge of the public as possible. This possessed the heads of the people very much, and few cared to go through Drury Lane, or the other streets suspected, unless they had extraordinary business that obliged them to it

This increase of the bills stood thus: the usual number of burials in a week, in the parishes of St Giles-in-the-Fields and St Andrew’s, Holborn, were from twelve to seventeen or nineteen each, few more or less; but from the time that the plague first began in St Giles’s parish, it was observed that the ordinary burials increased in number considerably. For example:—

From December 27 to January 3 { St Giles’s 16 ” { St Andrew’s 17

” January 3 ” ” 10 { St Giles’s 12 ” { St Andrew’s 25

” January 10 ” ” 17 { St Giles’s 18 ” { St Andrew’s 28