Angie's Review of "A Journal of the Plague Year"

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	• A Journal of the Plague Year (Penguin Classics) Daniel Defoe Penguin Classics, 2003 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Journalism not fiction

This edition restores Defoe's original punctuation, with capitals for nouns and colons for stops, so that the writing has the vitality, weight and elasticity that Defoe meant when he wrote it.

To enjoy this book you need to read it as creative journalism rather than fiction otherwise it will seem dull, and Daniel Defoe is never dull. It can't satisfy as fiction because it isn't fiction. It doesn't have any of the benefits of fiction such as plot, author's whimsy, or character development. The Journal is based on the eyewitness experience of his uncle Henry Foe, which has been expanded by Defoe's own journalistic research after the event. He has simply taken the eyewitness experience of his uncle and created a masterpiece out of it for posterity.

This technique began with his first book, The Storm, except that in that book the eyewitness accounts - perhaps spruced up by Defoe himself - and his own work were separate. In the Journal of the Plague Year these are blended together so that his book has the vividness of the eyewitness view of the events as well as all the talent and research that history would wish of an account of these events.

By misclassifying the book as fiction (and by modernizing the punctuation) we have been degrading the book's value to history and to readers.

I wish the print was bigger and blacker and this applies to the Modern Library edition too, as does the above review.

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Angie's Review of "A Journal of the Plague Year"

Although fictional, "Journal" provides a somewhat historical bird's eye view into the tragedy of the plague that affected Londoners for a period of a year. The book is interesting and detailed, and qualifies itself as one of the earliest known Novels. DeFoe is most recognized for Robinson Crusoe, written in 1719.

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A credible account of a time of horror

The Great Plague took place when Defoe was five years old. Therefore his account written many years afterwards is as much fiction as eye-witness reporting. Yet his first- person narrator collects statistics and provides a credible account of the horrifying effect of the plague upon the citizens of London.
He relates the effects of the 'Plague' on various parts of the population and traces its develoment in time. One can sense in it how much Camus in writing his great work , " The Plague" is indebted to this work.
In the concluding days as the Plague wanes Defoe reflects upon the citizens of the city and their new reality.
This is the concluding section of the work, and gives an excellent feel of Defoe's language and narrative stance.

"It was now, as I said before, the people had cast off all apprehensions, and that too fast; indeed we were no more afraid now to pass by a man with a white cap upon his head, or with a doth wrapt round his neck, or with his leg limping, occasioned by the sores in his groin, all which were frightful to the last degree, but the week before. But now the street was full of them, and these poor recovering creatures, give them their due, appeared very sensible of their unexpected deliverance; and I should wrong them very much if I should not acknowledge that I believe many of them were really thankful. But I must own that, for the generality of the people, it might too justly be said of them as was said of the children of Israel after their being delivered from the host of Pharaoh, when they passed the Red Sea, and looked back and saw the Egyptians overwhelmed in the water: viz., that they sang His praise, but they soon forgot His works.

I can go no farther here. I should be counted censorious, and perhaps unjust, if I should enter into the unpleasing work of reflecting, whatever cause there was for it, upon the unthankfulness and return of all manner of wickedness among us, which I was so much an eye-witness of myself. I shall conclude the account of this calamitous year therefore with a coarse but sincere stanza of my own, which I placed at the end of my ordinary memorandums the same year they were written:-

A dreadful plague in London was
In the year sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!"

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Truth stranger than fiction

I agree with a previous reviewer that Defoe's "Journal of the Plague Year" is a journalistic history, not fiction. He describes an event that happened when he was only, I think, an infant. He has used family and other accounts of the last great epidemic of the Black Death to strike England. It is readable and instructive.

To me, the most interesting part of the tale, is the 'knowledge' people had of this disease before knowledge of microbes and their transmission. Animals, especially dogs, cats and rats, were identified as possible transmission agents and were shot on sight. Infected people are quarantined in their homes along with their relatives. Although these homes were guarded by armed people, breakouts from quarantine were common. The disease spread and uninfected villages on the outskirts of London, themselves set out guards, preventing panicked refugees from entering and infecting their towns. An interesting tale of desperation.

Ron Braithwaite, author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico.

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THE DAWN OF SCIENCE

Since Daniel Defoe was only four years old in 1664, A Journal of the Plague Year is a novel rather than a journal. It was written as a pamphlet to warn people of what to expect and how best to defend themselves should another plague strike. What makes any book written in the distant past interesting is the glimpse it affords into the mentality of the people of the time. This was the plague that caused Isaac Newton leave London for the country, where he purportedly started the work that led to the invention of calculus and the laws of gravity. We can see the struggle between clear thinking and self-destructive superstition in the thoughts of Defoe's character.

On the one hand he insists the plague is doubtless "stroke from Heaven, a messenger of His vengeance, and a loud call to repentance," but in the next paragraph he understands that the plague arises from natural causes, propagated by natural means." So he concludes that God is using natural causes to exact his vengeance, even though he also says he must be allowed to believe than all who got sick received it in the ordinary way of infection. So he speaks disparagingly of fatalistic Christians, and especially Moslems, who ignore simple safety precautions because they are convinced that only those whom God wishes to will get the plague. Though convinced that the plague is God's way of punishing the wicked, he acknowledges that it strikes the good and wicked alike, and the wicked were just as likely to survive as the good. When the plague finally ends, he is convinced that nothing but God could have ended it - not even the worst of people could have doubted this. He seems surprised by man's unthankfulness and the return of all manner of wickedness soon after the plague. Presumably, the average people of the time really felt that they deserved to die arbitrarily of an awful disease, and after living with the horror of seeing friends and family die agonizing deaths, that they should feel thankful that God had not done the same to them. Thankfully, science has put an end to this kind of superstition. True, some people still cling to this ugly notion of God, but while we can respect Defoe as an unusually intelligent man of his time, any writer with such ideas today would be happily dismissed as a crank.
(Peter Payne, author of CAPTAIN CALIFORNIA BATTLES THE BEELZEBUBIAN BEASTS OF THE BIBLE)

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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 of the epidemic. We follow his fictional narrator through a city transformed-the streets and alleyways deserted, the houses of death with crosses daubed on their doors, the dead-carts on their way to the pits-and encounter the horrified citizens of the city, as fear, isolation, and hysteria take hold. The shocking immediacy of Defoe's description of plague-racked London makes this one of the most convincing accounts of the Great Plague ever written.

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