Seven hundred years on, there’s something deeply poignant about Boccaccio’s pre-scientific description of the spread of the Black Death in his native Florence. If human behaviour remains dismayingly constant, one thing that has changed for the better is science and our understanding of it. He gives a prescient warning about the danger of asymptomatic carriers: “The plague is not to be avoided by those that converse promiscuously in a town infected, and people have it when they know it not, and that they likewise give it to others when they know not that they have it themselves.” Defoe adds in a chilling parenthesis: “For indeed it came upon them like an armed man when it did come.”Įven before germ theory, Defoe’s common sense and perceptiveness led him to conclusions of which our chief medical officer would approve. The citizens of east London watch complacently as the plague tears through the West End, and assume they will be fine. So much of the behaviour of our 17th-century forebears is uncomfortably familiar. There’s something amazingly bracing about his vividness and curiosity – the bills of mortality, quoted in full minor characters such as the religious fanatic Solomon Eagle who walks around naked with a pan of burning charcoal on his head and the imprudent John Cock, a barber who is so relieved by the apparent retreat of the epidemic that he returns to normal life too soon and pays the penalty. Daniel Defoe’s religious fanatic Solomon Eagle from A Journal of the Plague Year.ĭefoe is sometimes dismissed as a hack, but his lack of vanity about his prose is one of the things that gives the book its power. “Passing through Token-House Yard in Lothbury, of a sudden a casement violently opened just over my head, and a woman gave three frightful screeches, and then cried, “O death, death, death!”īracingly vivid. Defoe, responding to demand, provided them with an instant book, fashioned out of statistics, reminiscences, gossip, anecdote and blood-curdling dramatic detail. Anticipating its spread, readers wanted to know what it had been like in 1665.

Defoe’s motive for writing A Journal of the Plague Year was an outbreak of bubonic plague in Marseille in 1720. We turn to historical witnesses who can explain what it’s like. The sudden, powerful need to know what’s coming is predictable, too. “Many families,” he writes, “foreseeing the approach of the distemper laid up stores of provisions sufficient for their whole families, and shut themselves up, and that so entirely, that they were neither seen or heard of till the infection was quite ceased.” Defoe would have recognised the impulses behind the strange tableaux of life interrupted in central London: piles of ice melting outside abruptly closed bars a truck unloading gym equipment at an oligarch’s house in Mayfair jittery shoppers with overloaded trolleys.

A journal of the plague