Those afflicted experienced painful swellings of the lymph glands (buboes), accompanied by high fever, severe chills and body aches, and frequently vomiting of blood and delirium. Secondly, the plague caused a particularly gruesome kind of suffering and death. The worst-case scenarios advanced so far anticipate that at the upper limit there might be 2.2 million deaths in this county before a vaccine or treatment is developed-a very high number, but a small percentage of what London and other cities of England suffered in the seventeenth century. From one-fifth to one quarter of the population of London died from the disease-upward of 100,000 people, proportionally the equivalent of more than 65,000,000 people in the US. First, the plague was much more deadly and dramatic. Some of what he wrote comes from his imagination, but his vividly imagined anecdotes, characters, and details could, he believed, bring out important truths about the experience of the plague.Īlthough I want to examine some echoes of the plague in the experience of the corona virus in the US, certain contrasts must be stressed. We know that he also performed historical research, reading numerous books and pamphlets about the plague as he wrote the Journal. Defoe probably did not base his account on a journal by his uncle, but he may well have drawn on the memories and experiences of that uncle and other family members. Henry would have been in his mid-thirties at the time of the plague the narrator says his family came from Northamptonshire, as the Foes did, and the book concludes with the initials “H.F.” as a signature. Nevertheless, Defoe’s Journal contains many elements that resonate with the circumstances surrounding the current Covid-19 epidemic-especially concerning the behavior of public officials, the persistent role of misinformation and rumor, and the psychological stress of living in a time of such anxiety.ĭefoe was only 5 years old in 1665, but he had an uncle, Henry Foe (Daniel added the prefix “De-” to the family name when he was an adult), who may have been a model for the narrator of the Journal.

As it happened, England fortunately did not suffer from a visitation of the plague in the 1720s or indeed in later times. Reports reached London in 17 that the plague had already killed tens of thousands in Marseilles, and the laws for quarantining ships from foreign ports had been tightened. Almost three hundred years ago, in 1722, shortly after he published Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe wrote a similarly fact-based fictional narrative- A Journal of the Plague Year-to warn of what to expect if the bubonic plague were to afflict England as it had with horrific effects in 1665.

Daniel defoe diary of a plague year