Home > Media > Books > Daniel Defoe - A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations of Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, As Well Public As Private, Which Happened in Lond
Daniel Defoe - A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations of Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, As Well Public As Private, Which Happened in Lond
swoeste's Full Review: Daniel Defoe - A Journal of the Plague Year: Being...
A Journal Of The Plague Year is written by the same author who wrote Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe. Unlike Robinson Crusoe, which I had had rammed down my throat since the sixth grade, I read A Journal Of The Plague Year on my own, when I was in my mid-20s. I enjoyed that book; I did not like Robinson Crusoe, which may be a valid argument for letting people discover literary classics on their own. A Journal Of The Plague Year is worth discovering, for it chronicles one of the greatest disasters to ever befall the human race in recorded history, the relentless march of the Black Death across England in the 1600s.
It is noted in the forward to the book that Defoe was five years old at the time of the plague in 1665. It is further asserted that he used his childhood memories of the plague as the basis for writing this book. I, however, disagree; not for reasons of scholarship or research, but because it simply does not ring true, especially when Defoe's personal history is taken into account.
Defoe had a history of putting things over on people, plain and simple. He was a wildly speculative, and usually unsuccessful, businessman, once declaring bankruptcy for the unimaginable sum (back then) of 17,000 pounds. Lawsuits filed against him claimed deception and sharp business practice. Not exactly the kind of guy you should trust. Despite the threat of debtor's prison, Defoe again managed to put one over on his creditors, both avoiding prison, and going back into business again. To make a long story short, despite finally making something of a success in business, and making money from the books he wrote, and being on the government payroll (working as a spy, no less), he never did pay back his business loans.
What's the point? I don't believe for a minute that he did anything different when he wrote A Journal Of The Plague Year; again, he put one over on people, whether it was the readership of his time, the readers of all the later years, or even his editors. A five-year-old is not going to have such a rich collection of memories about any event, even the plague, as to fill a whole book, especially when the memories weren't used until Defoe was about sixty to write the book.
What do I think he did? He may very well have had some fleeting, fragmentary memories of the event, which he used in a few instances in his book. However, the bulk of his book I'm certain is composed of his rewriting of other accounts of the plague; it's known that he had good sources of such material available to him when he wrote A Journal Of The Plague Year. That being said, there is other evidence of this being true; simply, when you read the book, it reads very much like an account of the plague through someone else's eyes. Despite the detail of the account, the masterly writing, and even the desperation of the people afflicted with the plague, the account is too far removed to be from memory. It may well be a journal of the plague year, but it is not Defoe's journal.
That being said, what of the book? It's good, and the "stiff" aspect at times of the writing does not detract from it; it only serves to mark the account as historical, and not complete fiction. The working class aspect of the writing is immediately apparent to the reader, too. This is not an account of how the rich and powerful dealt with the plague, this is what the working-class, and the poor, did to deal with it. Other than just a few token mentions of the wealthy, the account is what happened to the working people and the poor, what they did to secure food and lodging as London started to crumble, how they lived from day to day, and just how much of their humanity they managed to keep as their world slowly ground to a halt.
Who still went to work every day when the plague raged in and outside the city? Who cared for the ordinary people left in the city when the wealthy fled? Who tried to keep the peace and enforce the law while both threatened to collapse? Who tended the dying in their last moments, or kept the lonely company when they were shut in their homes? Who buried the dead that littered the streets, where people lay when they fell? The "little people". They were also the ones who showed compassion and humanity; getting food and medicine for those too weak to do so for themselves, and in times when neither doctors nor nurses would attend the sick.
It is Defoe's telling of the ordinary people of the world, and how they dealt with the extraordinary that is the basis of this book, and not whether he actually experienced all that he wrote about or not. Like me, you may not have cared for the "classics" you were forced to read in school, but you may have a different opinion of them if you "discover" some of them on your own. A Journal Of The Plague Year is certainly one of the worthy ones.
Classic 1722 account of the epidemic that ravaged England nearly 60 years earlier. Defoe used his considerable talents as a journalist and novelist to...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
In 1665, the Great Plague swept through London, claiming nearly 100,000 lives. In A Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe vividly chronicles the progress ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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