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A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials, Of the most Remarkable Occurrences, As well Publick as Private, which happened in London During the last Great Visitation In 1665, commonly called A Journal of the Plague Year, is a book by Daniel Defoe, first published in March 1722. It is an account of one man's experiences of the year 1665, in which the bubonic plague struck the city of London in what became known as the Great Plague of London, the last epidemic of plague in that city, as part of the larger centuries long Second plague pandemic. The book is told somewhat chronologically, though without sections or chapter headings, and with frequent digressions and repetitions.

Presented as an eyewitness account of the events at the time, it was written in the years just prior to the book's first publication in March 1722. Defoe was only five years old in 1665 when the Great Plague took place, and the book itself was published under the initials H. F. and is probably based on the journals of Defoe's uncle, Henry Foe, who, like 'H. F.', was a saddler who lived in the Whitechapel district of East London.

In the book, Defoe goes to great pains to achieve an effect of verisimilitude, identifying specific neighbourhoods, streets, and even houses in which events took place. Additionally, it provides tables of casualty figures and discusses the credibility of various accounts and anecdotes received by the narrator.

The book is often compared to the actual, contemporary accounts of the plague in the diary of Samuel Pepys. Defoe's account, which appears to include much research, is far more systematic and detailed than Pepys's first-person account.

thumb|Portrait of the author, [[Daniel Defoe]]

Classification

How the Journal is to be classified has been disputed. It was initially presented and read as a work of nonfiction, but by the 1780s the work's fictional status was accepted. Debate continued as to whether Defoe could be regarded as the work's author rather than merely its editor. This view was also held by Watson Nicholson – writing in 1919 – who argued that "there is not one single statement in the Journal, pertinent to the history of the Great Plague in London, that has not been verified during the course of this investigation", and "we are compelled to class the Journal of the Plague Year with authentic histories." It is, according to Nicholson, "a faithful record of historical facts ... [and] was so intended by the author."

  • A 2016 BBC Radio 4 play adapted the novel into a 60-minute drama.

A Journal of the Plague Year also served as the initial inspiration for Anthony Clarvoe's play The Living.

A supernatural copy of the work appears in The Magnus Archives, wherein it is able to cause buildings to become infected; one character describes his childhood home being destroyed by the book "in a collapse of diseased brick and septic foundations."

References to the book's title have been made in Michael D. O'Brien's 1999 novel Plague Journal, where the narrator and main character chooses the title to describe the theme of the book (jokingly referring to himself as a modern-day Defoe) and Norman Spinrad's 1995 Journals of the Plague Years, a satirical novel about a sexually transmitted viral disease that cannot be defeated by vaccines, referencing how AIDS was in its earliest days known as "the gay plague".

A comparison of plague-driven behaviour described by Defoe and the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 is discussed in "Persistent Patterns of Behavior: Two Infectious Disease Outbreaks 350 Years Apart", an article in the journal Economic Inquiry, and also in a commentary in The Guardian.

The 1975 play A Journal of the Plague Year by Shūji Terayama in collaboration with Rio Kishida is inspired by the work, and deals with the effects of a plague in a town in Southeast Asia.

References

Further reading

  • Etext with facsimile page images: Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. Printed for E. Nutt at the Royal-Exchange; J. Roberts in Warwick-Lane; A. Dodd without Temple Bar; and J. Graves in St. James's-Street, 1722. Literature in Context: An Open Anthology.
  • Dermot Kavanagh's article on the London Fictions site about the London of 'A Journal of the Plague Year'