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. Never Made Public Before

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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. Never Made Public Before
Author: Daniel Defoe
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1722/1966
256 pages

Defoe was a young child in 1665. What's best about A Journal of the Plague Year is the lengths to which Defoe goes to cause the reader to believe that this is in fact a journal and not a novel. His narrator repeatedly reports sets of death statistics, analyzing them for evidence that cases of the plague are being hidden. He scrupulously avows that parts of the narrative are true and supports them with references and citations; other parts are equally scrupulously identified as unsubstantiated  or hearsay. The narrator admits that he is not publishing his religious reflections on the plague as these would be of no interest to the reader. The style is discursive and matter of fact. The overall effect is of reportage, not fiction.

The reader may indeed breathe a sigh of relief that the narrator keeps his theological musings from these pages, heavily interlarded as they already are with Defoe's usual moral philosophizing. Though not out of place for the time or the content of the novel, it is still wearing. This edition has an introduction by Anthony Burgess that puts these sermons into context and renders them tolerable.

As a bubonic plague aficionado, I appreciated Defoe's detailed descriptions of the signs of the plague and the practices associated with the government's efforts to contain it. Defoe makes a number of excellent observations about the futility and damaging effects of quarantine, and though the plague and HIV spread differently, the attribution of divine and social meanings to a disease resonate even today.