24/9/20 “A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR” by DANIEL DEFOE

The proposer outlined a few bare facts about Daniel Defoe and the book.  Defoe lived from circa 1660 to 1731, so he was about five years old at the time of the plague of 1665 in London.  Although the book reads as a first-hand account, it is considered to be founded on his uncle’s journals, his father’s memories, and his research into documents of the time.  It was published in 1722.

The proposer talked about why he had chosen the book.  He had studied and enjoyed ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘The Adventures of Moll Flanders’ in the past, and considered Defoe to hold an interesting place in the development of the literary form that we now call the ‘novel’.  He preceded by some decades other seminal figures such as Richardson, Goldsmith and Sterne.  The Journal cannot be easily categorised, sitting somewhere between documentary and fiction.  Indeed, one reader in the course of our discussion pointed out that it could be considered less as a forerunner of the novel than of our current genre of ‘drama-documentary’ on television.

The proposer enjoyed Defoe’s straightforward style and had found the book an engaging and fairly ‘easy’ read.  Not everyone agreed.

The main reason for his choice of the book was in its interesting relevance to the situation the world is currently (2020) facing – a global pandemic caused by a highly infectious and sometimes deadly virus.  He enumerated some of these parallels – more emerged in the course of the group’s discussion.

• The initial feeling (in Europe) that it was someone else’s problem, affecting a city in China (Wuhan).  Similarly, in 1665 Londoners heard of a plague affecting the Netherlands, but thought it would not reach them.

• The obsession with statistical information (defended as being of great importance by one of our scientific readers).  In Defoe’s narrator’s case it is the repetitive citing of the ‘bills’ of deaths in various parts of London and its outlying districts.  In 2020 it is the nightly television news programmes’ tally of cases and deaths.

• The personal dilemmas that arise from the infection – the narrator’s dithering about whether or not to leave London for the country echoed, more trivially, by the proposer’s indecision about taking a holiday in France after the announcement of quarantine in the UK for those arriving from that country.

• The variations – and absences – of symptoms, making both the bubonic plague and the Covid 19 infection difficult to detect in many cases – sometimes with fatal consequences.

• The persistence of certain types of gatherings – notably of church-goers and religious groups of all kinds, persuaded that appeals to a god or gods would protect them.

• The prevalence of illogical beliefs and quack remedies – for example the suggestion that 5G communication masts were the cause of Covid19, or President Trump’s touting of household bleach and bright lights as palliatives.

There were more such similarities.

Some of the other points made by members of the group included:

• An appreciation of the insights into Restoration society offered by the book.

• A preference for the vivid and imaginative descriptions – for example of the night-time disposal of bodies – over the elements of repetition and somewhat haphazard structure of the book.

• A suggestion that Defoe’s intention with the book was at least in part to provide a ‘public health warning’, since the bubonic plague was still sometimes resurgent at the time of composition and publication.

• Disapproval of a seemingly ‘rushed out’ Amazon edition this year, with arbitrary illustrations and an introductory note about Defoe simply lifted word-for-word from Wikipedia!

• In spite of the seeming lack of structure, one reader felt that overall it was well-crafted to have the ‘feel’ of a journal, providing quite a raw reading experience.

• Another reader disagreed with ‘well-crafted’.  He found it unrelentingly bleak, and also wondered if Defoe was sensationalising the outbreak to make it more saleable.  He would have liked a clearer time-frame within the account.  The proposer later pointed out an exception to the bleakness – the book repeatedly draws attention to the charity and kindness shown by the better-off citizens to the poor, and praises the measures taken by the mayor and aldermen of the city – such as their scheme for guarding the houses of those infected, however mixed the results.

• The ‘novella’ within the book – the story of the three men who leave London to take their chances in the countryside – was particularly enjoyed by two readers.

• Our medical member found much of interest in the symptoms described and also in the reactions of people to the plague.  He pointed out that it was only in the late 19th century that the role of fleas in bubonic plague was discovered.

• Another reader agreed with the proposer that Defoe’s literary style compared favourably with more ‘florid’ works of the time.  He felt that Defoe wrote ‘functional, practical English’.  On the other hand, another member of the group remarked that he had found it ‘heavy going’.

• The narrator, while believable, was described as somewhat of an amalgam.  Sometimes it wasn’t clear to whom the narrative voice belonged.

• The frequency of references to God and religion in the book was pointed out, and one reader compared that to ‘Robinson Crusoe’, where the narrator has bouts of committing himself to God’s disposition.

• Another reader drew our attention to the difficulty of communication with the public in 1665.  Defoe, writing over fifty years later, comments that newspapers did not exist at that time.  In our present pandemic we have an avalanche of both information and misinformation to pick our way through.  On this subject it was remarked by an academic member of the group that he found that his students often relied on social media for information, and hence were not always in possession of verified facts that were well disseminated by the traditional media of news organisations such as television, radio and newspapers.  On the topic of openness of information, another member of the group related his experience of the flu epidemic of 1968, when the deadliness and extent of the virus was, in his view, hushed up in order to avoid public panic.

In conclusion, the discussion seemed to validate the view that, almost exactly three centuries after the publication of ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’, it still has much to say that is of enduring relevance.