1665 — A Journal of the Plague Year — An annotated text
The text of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 work with added maps and links.
A lockdown project during 2020/2021 — the Years of the Pandemic by Brian Clear — Tower Hill.
1665 — A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe 1722
A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe 1722
being Observations or Memorials of the most remarkable occurrences, as well public as private, which happened in London during the last great visitation in 1665.
Written by a CITIZEN who continued all the while in London.
Never made publick before
LONDON 1722
Introduction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Journal_of_the_Plague_Year
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. 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.
Table of Contents
A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe 1722
1.0 — the plague was returned
2.0 — a comet..a flaming sword..an angel clothed in white..
3.0 — quacks
4.0 — June
5.0 — Orders of my Lord Mayor — I
6.0 — Orders of my Lord Mayor — II
7.0 — Orders of my Lord Mayor — III
8.0 — Orders of my Lord Mayor — IV
9.0 — July
10.0 — escapes were made out of infected houses
11.0 — Others wandered into the country
12.0 — she died in less than two hours
13.0 — the 3 men — I / a terrible pit
14.0 — soldiers..none to be found.
15.0 — the lodger
16.0–200,000 people were fled and gone
17.0 — August
18.0 — Found dead in the streets
19.0 — some.. sit down, grow faint, and die
20.0 — rumours of murders
21.0 — the dead-carts came about
22.0 — the hat thieves
23.0 — John Hayward, the death cart and the bell…
24.0 — the Lord Mayor, the Chamber of London and the King
25.0 — the bills of mortality..what a desolate place the city was at that time..
26.0 — the waterman
27.0 — the half born
28.0 — the infants / the 3 men — II
29.0 — the 3 men — III
30.0 — The 3 men IV
31.0 …an account what became of the great numbers of people which immediately appeared in the city…
31.1 — shutting houses up..no liberty to stir, neither for air or exercise, forty days.
33.0 — September
34.0 — in one week 12,000
35.0 — this visitation
36.0 — insufferable agonies…death without pain
37.0 — they died by heaps, and were buried by heaps
38.0 … close the account of this melancholy year
Daniel Defoe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Defoe
Daniel Defoe (c. 1660–24 April 1731), born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer and spy. He is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, which is claimed to be second only to the Bible in its number of translations.[2] He has been seen as one of the earliest proponents of the English novel.
Great Plague of London
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plague_of_London
The Great Plague of London, lasting from 1665 to 1666, was the last major epidemic of the bubonic plague to occur in England. It happened within the centuries-long Second Pandemic, a period of intermittent bubonic plague epidemics which originated from Central Asia in 1331, the first year of the Black Death, an outbreak which included other forms such as pneumonic plague, and lasted until 1750.
The Great Plague killed an estimated 100,000 people — almost a quarter of London’s population — in 18 months. The plague was caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium, which is usually transmitted through the bite of an infected rat flea.
The 1665–66 epidemic was on a far smaller scale than the earlier Black Death pandemic; it was remembered afterwards as the “great” plague mainly because it was the last widespread outbreak of bubonic plague in England during the 400-year Second Pandemic.
2020 — Year of the Pandemic — a lockdown project
During the summer of 2020, London went into Lockdown. All non-essential places closed. Bars, Venues everything except supermarkets and small stores.
We were allowed 30 minutes of exercise close to our homes. I was lucky enough to live within yards of the City of London so decided to walk every ancient alleyway, of which there are many and visit every ancient church in the City of London. Many of the churches have ancient footprints back to 1123 but most would burn down a year after Defoe’s plague in the following year 1666 in London’s next great disaster the Great Fire Of London but many would be reborn again through the endless skill of Sir Christopher Wren.
One of these churches was St Botolphs Aldgate or to give it its correct title St Botolph without Aldgate and Holy Trinity Minories.
I had known one of its more famous parishioners was Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe. I had heard he had been married there. In fact most Saturdays I would sit in the sandwich shop opposite and see it out the window. Like most churches in London, it’s a rebuild or a rebuild of a rebuild. The last was after the Blitz in 1950. Before that in 1741, the building you see now was designed by George Dance the Elder (also famous for the Mansion House. Home of the Lord Mayor of London). The church was rebuilt in the 16th century by the priors of the Holy Trinity and renovated in 1621. Unlike many churches in the City, it escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666.
But the footprint of the church is very ancient. The earliest known written record of the church dates from 1115. It’s is known as without Aldgate as it lay outside ‘without’ the Ald’gate, one of the ancient city gates that surrounded the City of London. It was a church for travellers. St Botolph was the patron saint of travellers before St. Christopher took that mantle. Churches to him were often by city gates and there is another called confusingly St Botolph’s, Aldersgate.
But on researching its history I hit upon Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. And the many sections describing the great pit of bodies buried underneath. He tells the tale of the cart of bodies coming up Minories to be dumped in the great pit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minories
Inspired by another website which annotates the Diary of Samuel Pepys I decide to find all the churches and areas mentioned in the journal and maybe stick them on a map.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pepys
The project grew over the summer when I realised that Defoe liked to meander through his tale. He would often start a long sub-story and every so often it spills off into describing other things he remembered. For instance, the tale of the 3 men who flee London is broken into a number of pieces.
It was often hard to keep track and being a nerd by trade I decided to number the sections. I took the liberty to add titles to sections so I could easily find them again as often one tale could be split over many sections. I tried to limit this to just highlighting the first line of the section if it made sense. But sometimes the point he was alluding to could be buried deep in a section so I just mention theses in …brief descriptions…in the title.
Editing this during the 2020/2021 pandemic was strange. You will read of the panic as people did not know the cause. The rich fled the city. The poor suffered the most. the quaks, the people who put their fate in god, the preachers who fled. Some of these would appear again 355 years later.
You’ll read the tale of the ‘great pit’ and the men hired to pick up the bodies. They came at night and in an almost Pythonesque scene, we hear the tale of a drunkard picked up accidentally then nearly tipped into the pit before waking up.
Edits
I edited these in Notion but then decided Medium might be a better place so began moving 30+ sections to Medium. Luckily they’re both just fancy Markdown editors.
The source for the text was the amazing Project Gutenberg.
As you can see from the HTML version Defoe’s text is one long pamphlet.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/376
It’s 2021 and London and the U.K. is in its second Lockdown so time to finish my edits and publish this.
So enjoy, stay home, wear a mask, save lives.
Links
Wikipedia Articles that reference the Great Plague of London
Main Article
Main article in different languages
Others pages that link back to “Great plague of London”
1665
- 12 April — the first recorded victim of the Great Plague of London dies. Over the summer it is thought to have spread as far as Derby and on 6 September the first plague death takes place in the Derbyshire village of Eyam.
- 12 June — the city of New Amsterdam in the Province of New York is reincorporated as New York, named after James, Duke of York, and the first Mayor appointed.
- 7 July — the King and court leave London to avoid the plague, moving first to Salisbury, then (from 25 September) Oxford.
- 9 October — the Cavalier Parliament assembles in Oxford to avoid the Plague in London
- BIRTHS
- 6 February — Anne, Queen of Great Britain (died 1714)
Natural disasters
1665
Great Plague of London killed an estimated 100,000 people, 20% of London’s population.
1665
The bubonic plague spread north, but was stalled by the famous quarantine of Eyam.
1665–66
Long drought followed by a hot summer Every month from November 1665 to September 1666 was dry.
The climatological summer (June, July and August) of 1666 was amongst the top 10 or so of warm summers in the Central English Temperatures (CET) series (began 1659). CET also suggests that July 1666 had a mean value of 18 °C (64 °F), and August was 17 °C (63 °F).
The heat and long drought added to a heightened risk of fire in populated areas. Lack of rain and hot temperatures helped spark the Great Fire of London.
As a result, this year saw an end to the Great Plague of London due to extreme heat and fire.
1665 — Royalty and Politicians
1665 — A Journal of the Plague Year — People
People — the Physicians/Apothecarys
People — Ministers — the one who stayed / the ones who fled
Places
Other Links
Abracada
Daniel Defoe also wrote dismissively about Londoners who posted the word on their doorways to ward off sickness during the Great Plague of London.
Brazen head
- Daniel Defoe’s 1722 Journal of the Plague Year, set in London’s 1665 plague, states that Friar Bacon’s brazen head was the usual sign over the establishments of fortune tellers.
Snuff
Snuff use in England increased in popularity after the Great Plague of London (1665–1666) as people believed snuff had valuable medicinal properties, which added a powerful impetus to its consumption.
Myths
Doctor Beak
