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A Journal of the Plague Year

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Overview

The most reliable and comprehensive account of the Great Plague that we possess Anthony Burgess.

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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Author Information

Bio of Daniel Defoe

Defoe was a prolific novelist, journalist and pamphleteer. His work is notable for its realism, precision and directness of style. Defoe is also recognized as the first author in modern English literature to write ghost stories.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Penguin Group, Inc.

Filesize

1002.80 KB

Number of Pages

256

eBook ISBN

9781429501026

Excerpt from: A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

LONDON'S PLAGUE ' A CLINICAL
SUMMARY

THE bubonic plague that hit London in Charles II's reign was the final assault on an English city of a disease that is part of the folklore of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Wherever the London Plague originated, it spread in the following manner: the disease struck rats (probably stowaway ones), the rats' fleas sucked blood containing bacilli, the same fleas attacked human beings and inoculated them. The infection from rat to man was conveyed almost solely by fleas, direct infection of man by man being extremely rare. Thus, the spread of the epidemic was due to its spread among rats, this being assisted by rat-cannibalism, infected food and even human faeces. Drinking water had apparently no part to play in transmitting the epidemic. The outbreak of the disease among animals in any given district preceded human cases by about two weeks.

The disease was characterized by enlargement of the lymphatic glands, commonly the axillary ones, this forming the 'primary bubo' ' hence the name. There were secondary buboes in other parts of the body, but these were less considerable. The primary bubo would appear after a maximum of ten days' incubation and a day or two after the true onset of the disease. Other symptoms would develop in a few hours ' headache, chill, back-pains, fast pulse and breathing, high fever, restlessness. The symptoms would progress rapidly, with vomiting and delirium added to the above. In seventy per cent of the cases, death followed in two to seven days ' usually three or four.
A. B.

Facsimile of the title page of the first edition

IT was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again.