A Journal of the Plague Year Read online

  Could such confidence and style derive, after all, from witness as well as frenzied reading and writing? The narrator’s initials are those of Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe, who in 1665 was, like his counterpart, a middle-aged Whitechapel saddler; in 1684 Defoe would marry Mary Tuffley in H.F.’s parish church, one of the many ways in which the narrator retraces the steps of his author’s life. Foe saw his 5-year-old nephew Daniel evacuated to the country but lived long enough to be in a position to tell him about the windows flapping for want of people to shut them, about the grass growing in the streets, about the women screaming from upper storeys; Defoe was 14 when his uncle died. When H.F. visits his brother’s home and warehouse ‘in Coleman’s-street Parish’ he treads the exact ground where his creator had grown up, at least from the age of 7; visiting his brother, H.F. shook hands with Defoe’s father.

  There is a slender but tantalizing connection to another eyewitness. The Journal and the Diary of Samuel Pepys share idiosyncratic details, a correspondence hard to explain when the decoded diary was not published until 1848. One answer lies in the man who tended to Defoe’s spiritual and scriptorial needs when he was sent to Newgate in 1703 for writing The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. Paul Lorrain was prison ordinary with a sideline in writing up scaffold speeches, some of which crop up in A General History of the Pirates, thought to be Defoe’s work. None of this would matter as far as the Journal is concerned but for a staggering coincidence: when Lorrain took up his Newgate job in 1698 he had for the previous twenty years been library clerk to Pepys. In York Buildings, just off the Strand, Pepys kept his catalogued collection under Lorrain’s eye, including the diary with its standard shorthand code. For a brief period, in other words, Defoe was in company with one of the very few men who could possibly have read the other great journal of the plague year.

  Reception

  Although the Journal was the most ingenious, dramatic, and eclectic work to have been prompted by the Marseilles plague, it was hardly the most popular. That distinction goes to Richard Bradley’s The Plague at Marseilles consider’d, which went into five editions in 1721, and to Hancocke’s Febrifugum Magnum, which enjoyed a long afterlife among those deluded by the idea that merely drinking water could ‘probably’ save them. The Journal, by contrast, was not reprinted until 1755. Frank H. Ellis blames its ‘crazy cobweb of repetition’ that created ‘serious attention-deficit problems for the reader’, but the success of other plague works from 1720–2 points to over-supply and a problem of genre.4 Plague books started to dry up in 1722 as the Marseilles scare abated, and Defoe’s was the last substantial title to make it to the marketplace, probably a few months too late. The very measure he had worked hard to see into the statute books, the Act of Quarantine, had helped to defuse the scare that saw the Journal into print. Perhaps he wondered whether he had been lurid enough. In an article published in Applebee’s Journal on 23 November 1723, he criticized newsmongers who had indulged ‘the Pleasure of Writing Dismal Stories’ in order to arouse ‘Surprize and Horror’, a claim that required some nerve on his part.

  Defoe was doubly hoist with his own petard in so far as the quality that distinguishes the book today, its elusive blend of the literary and the historical, made it a distraction from the business of planning for survival. One plague book recommending a simple cure was worth a million memoirs, true or not. Ellis speculates that if the plague ‘had reached London in 1722, A Journal of the Plague Year would have sold like hot cakes, for it is … a How-to-do-it book’ full of suggested and false remedies. Perhaps so, but there had been more thorough-going how-to-do-it books and in any case the title page describes it in other terms. Thinking to intervene decisively in a scientific debate, Defoe gave the world what is, for all its repetitions, a work of art.

  Subsequent generations free from the threat of its subject, and from the somewhat snobbish disparagement the Nonconformist Defoe met with in the highest Augustan literary circles (Swift found him ‘grave, sententious, dogmatical’, while Pope thought Robinson Crusoe his only ‘excellent’ work), had leisure to enjoy the Journal on its own mixed terms. Sir Walter Scott was an influential advocate of Defoe’s fiction, although scarcely blind to its defects: ‘the incidents are huddled together like paving-stones discharged from a cart’, he wrote. He thought the Journal Defoe’s finest work after Robinson Crusoe and categorized it as ‘one of those peculiar character of compositions that hover between romance and history’. The plague was ‘a fit subject for a pencil so veracious as that of De Foe’, whose instinct for recording the surface of ordinary life enabled him to draw ‘pictures almost too horrible to look on’. William Hazlitt saw Defoe’s characteristic focalization of extreme circumstance through banal perception as a matter of genre. The Journal had one foot in ancient literature and the other in the soap opera that was sentimental fiction, its ‘epic grandeur’ leavened by ‘heart-breaking familiarity’ (John Dunstall’s 1665 broadsheet prints of the Great Plague had similarly combined mass funerals against the London skyline with people dying painfully in their beds).

  Generic classification has preoccupied critics since. In accounts of the rise of the novel, the Journal charts the distinctions between emerging genres by blurring them—a classic ‘boundary text’ that not only defies classification but threatens to discredit it. Such concerns perhaps mask the book’s immersion in two material domains that cannot be reduced to questions of literary discourse: the disease that was plague and the city that was London. Rarely has any work by a major novelist evoked such specific, real-world knowledge as A Journal of the Plague Year, which demands of its editors the unusual apparatus of factual appendices on plague and London’s topography. Fittingly for a new generation of literary scholars and students versed in urban theory, its discordant poetry of London has become its chief fascination.

  Imagining London

  In his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6), Defoe would describe London in terms that recall storm and plague: ‘infinitely difficult in its particulars’ and a ‘great and monstrous Thing’, its ‘straggling, confused manner’ was aesthetically a ‘disaster’.5 If plague demanded a strict regime of public order so did London, and the restrictions ‘Conceived and Published by the Lord MAYOR and Aldermen’ that occupy seven pages of the Journal (pp. 34–41) are also a dark manifesto for Puritan government: clean streets, no beggars, no plays, no public feasting, no ‘Tipling-Houses’, and an apparatus of examiners, watchmen, searchers, surgeons, and nurses appointed to ‘give present Notice’ to the authorities and implement a system of mass house arrest. It is no wonder that one of the most influential among recent essays on the Journal is to be found in John Bender’s 1987 study, Imagining the Penitentiary. In 1992, Paula Backscheider prefaced her edition with remarks on the management of AIDS, but now readers might draw parallels with the CCTV cameras, identity cards, and DNA databases that embody twenty-first-century insecurity. H.F. maps the alleys where the dead carts cannot go; he mentally unpacks suspicious cargoes from the Continent; he scans the Bills of Mortality for evidence of the growing threat; he attempts to impose on the ‘straggling, confused’ city and its innumerable inhabitants the rational discourse of public order. He is not slow to admire the city authorities.

  Yet he is not their tool. Called to be a parish examiner, he protests that ‘it would be very hard to oblige me, to be an Instrument in that which was against my Judgment’ (p. 137). As he distances himself from superstitious ‘Predictions and Prognostications’, so he mistrusts the policy of ‘shutting up houses’. His very mobility, his compulsive desire to range the infected streets, helps construct an individualism as resilient as Crusoe’s, alone on his desert island; he will not be tied to a house or neighbourhood or deterred by the straggling and confused city, because there he is in his element, intuitively confident of his proverbial taxi-driver’s ‘knowledge’ and eager to share it: ‘I liv’d without Aldgate, about mid-way between Aldgate Church and White-Chappel-Bars’ (p. 7), he says, never do
ubting that he makes instant sense.

  The confidence is partly an illusion, since Defoe had to plan his portrait of London carefully. True to a writer so intrigued by the effects of natural disaster, he had in mind two versions of the city: the one partially swept away by the Great Fire of 1666 and the one that emerged in its wake. In 1700, Edward Chamberlayne had tried to calculate the damage and given up:

  The Buildings on 373 Acres were utterly consumed, by that late dreadful Conflagration; also 63 Acres without the Walls, in all 436 Acres, 89 Parish-Churches, and 13200 Houses, besides that vast Cathedral of St Paul’s, and divers Chappels, Halls, Colleges, Schools, and other public Edefices, whereof the whole Damage is hardly to be computed or credited.6

  ‘Then’ and ‘now’ are common terms in H.F.’s lexicon. He notes changes of name and explains how particular alleyways disappeared or came into being. He evokes a smaller London in which the streets of 1722 were once green fields, sometimes going right back in its archaeology to the ‘Remains of the old Lines or Fortifications’ (p. 198). His knowledge of the old city may have derived partly from Foe family history (and it should not be forgotten that much of the city’s ground plan was unaffected by the fire) but there is also evidence that his creator wrote with an older plan of London to hand, picking out places and journeys among old alleyways and yards with the pedantry of the route-fetishist: ‘They told us a Story of a House in a Place call’d Swan-Alley, passing from Goswell-street near the End of Oldstreet into St. John-street’ (p. 142). Defoe made occasional mistakes that to the most astute reader of 1722 would have undermined the Journal’s claim to authenticity, but by and large his bifocal topography was painstakingly accurate.

  Evocations of London past turn into warnings about the future when Defoe compels us to imagine the great streets where we walk—Leadenhall, Bishopsgate, and Cornhill—covered in grass for want of traffic, with people walking down the middle to avoid human contact; even the Exchange, nerve centre for London’s thriving business community, goes to seed. The very houses where his first readers lived conceal plague pits for the burial of the poor. London’s great historian John Stow had represented the city as a mighty palimpsest, layers of history settling and maturing through a process of constant reinvention beset by unending nostalgia. For Defoe such visions evoked the nightmare of entropy for commerce and for humanity: the dead are beneath our feet and we are in danger of joining them. In a work of modern urban theory, Eduardo E. Lozano has examined the ‘associations’ and ‘reinforcements’ that bind city communities to their environment, off setting the alienation of sheer scale.7 The Journal’s success today, and perhaps its failure in 1722, lies partly in reviving associations that most people preferred to forget. Few readers then could have welcomed the obsessiveness with which H.F. traces, ‘Parallel with the Passage which goes by the West Wall of the Church-Yard, out of Houndsditch, and turns East again into White-Chappel, coming out near the three Nuns Inn’, the outline of a former plague pit (p. 53). Today such precision, sign of the book’s disconcerting mixture of genres, seems the result of its tentatively embodying what in the 1720s was a wholly new genre with rules as yet unwritten: the historical novel.

  Defoe fashioned it through the representation of what remains the best way to appreciate London: walking. Recent criticism has been preoccupied with different expressions of the peripatetic, whether in city parades of the Renaissance, Restoration strolls in the park, Romantic rambles in the hills, flâneurs taking in the modern city with an amused, cynical eye, or postcolonial subjects arriving to pace the British motherland. Defoe’s urban walker is a prototype for the wandering speaker of Blake’s visionary ‘London’, marking in every face he meets ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe’ and so exposing the poor and pitiable to the bureaucratic gaze of the rich and comfortable, the better to awaken their charity. ‘In these Walks’, H.F. says, ‘I had many dismal Scenes before my Eyes’ (p. 70). A reluctant instrument of officialdom by virtue of the parish examinership he accepts and then discards, he inhabits the margins of ‘folk’ geography by referring to local names for alleys or rivers sometimes at the distance of ‘they call’, at others ‘we call’, irrespective of whether the feature in question is near his home. For readers he is also a time traveller, allowing us to penetrate a city partly lost and always hard to navigate. Richard Bradley’s best-selling The Plague at Marseilles consider’d had evoked an older London of narrow, unpaved streets with overhanging houses ‘so that the Air within the Streets was pent up, and had not a due Freedom of Passage’.8 The Journal similarly lingers in ‘a great Number of Alleys, and Thorough-fares very long, into which no Carts cou’d come’ (p. 77) where the living must retrieve the dead on foot—the epitome of H.F.’s work as a narrator-cum-reporter.

  The other walker of the Journal is the plague itself, which, Defoe had written in The Review back in 1712, had ‘come a Step nearer and nearer to this Nation’.9 In The Wonderful Year, published in 1603, Thomas Dekker had imagined the disease ‘like a Spanish leager, or rather like a stalking Tamburlaine… in the sinfully-polluted Suburbs’ and Defoe, wary of metaphors, occasionally envisages plague as some creature out of M. R. James: ‘the thing began to shew itself’ (p. 7); ‘the Plague which had chiefly rag’d at the other End of the Town … began now to come Eastward towards the Part where I liv’d’ (p. 14); having hovered ‘over every ones Head only’, it started to ‘look into their Houses, and Chambers, and stare in their Faces’ (p. 31); it moved erratically from Westminster, negotiating the crooked alleys and slow to cross the water before unleashing ‘its utmost Rage and violence’ in the City. When fiercest in the east it declines in the west; as pervasive as it is, and though its unpredictable movements make it the double of the ‘straggling, confused’ city itself, it cannot rage in two places at once, this monster in the labyrinth.

  Time, History, Narration

  If the nature of the city makes both walkers, narrator and plague, hard to follow, so does Defoe’s attention to time. Even more than his other works, the Journal has little respect for chronological sequence, returning repeatedly to that autumn of 1664, when two men ominously ‘died of the Plague in Long Acre’ (p. 3), as if the chief concern were to explain the disease rather than chronicle it. Yet the Journal is rich with the documentation of time. When the weekly Bills of Mortality tell the tally of the dead, the calendar is dissolved among parishes, their losses the true index of time passing. H.F.’s eastern perspective lends the book its most reliable narrative clock as 1665 becomes a year of two parts: ‘till the beginning of August’ and the virulent spread through the east that came afterwards. Charting the epidemic’s progress, the narrator is drawn to the clock of individual suffering, the handful of days left to victims. A family living near H.F.’s house in Aldgate ‘were all seemingly well on the Monday, being Ten in Family’, but ‘by Saturday at Noon, the Master, Mistress, four Children and four Servants were all gone, and the House left entirely empty’ (p. 149). Such vanishings are part not only of the book’s poignancy but its disconcerting modernity, its futile struggle to impose a single, all-encompassing narrative scheme on ‘an infinite variety of Circumstances’.

  All Defoe’s best-known novels use the convention, widely practised in his day, of a fictitious editor claiming to print the protagonist’s manuscript autobiography. In the Journal, the editor is the protagonist. He marshals evidence from the Bills of Mortality, Lord Mayor’s orders, and from medical tracts. He has anecdotes to hand, waiting their turn to be recounted and assessed. The ‘editor’ of the novels conventionally claims that his manuscript speaks for itself, but the patchwork of texts assembled for the Journal demands constant interpretation and comparison: tallies on the Bills of Mortality may be misleading, oral history biased or merely conventional. Where Robinson Crusoe is presented as ‘a just history of fact’ and Moll Flanders a ‘genuine’ private history, the Journal claims authenticity through the process of its writing as well as in its content. The desire to exercise authority as a historian
is, with his stubborn pedestrianism, one of H.F.’s key characteristics.

  Characteristics in the plural do not mean that H.F. should be regarded as a complex fictional creation comparable to, for example, Moll Flanders. In a book whose concerns are public, this narrator shields himself in semi-anonymity, his brother, relatives, and neighbours named only as such, others left nameless under the pretence of protecting their surviving relatives; it is largely officials who have names. Defoe’s other fictional protagonists begin with a summary of their family background but here plague facts and suppositions submerge the narrator within his community from the start. For six pages, ‘we’ and ‘everyone’ perceive, think, and feel, and not until page 7 does the ‘I’ that is H.F. disclose himself. Alone among Defoe’s narrators his death is recorded; fittingly enough he is buried amid his own narrative, in a Nota Bene on p. 199. Like his fellow protagonists he keeps a memoir, but says he derived the book from it rather than transcribing it whole. Some of it, he declares, is not suitable for public consumption—the ‘meditations’ that occupy the days of his confinement at home are edited out, as if there were something indecent, given the preoccupation with public calamity, about the self-centred form of Defoe’s novels, their easy access to private consciousness. Even a diary must be carefully explained, its contribution to history assessed. The period of deepest introspection, where H.F. agonizes over whether to flee or stay (pp. 8–11), is a structural precondition for the rest of the narrative. In method as much as myth, therefore, the Journal reorients the world of Robinson Crusoe.