Journal Of The Plague Year

Perversely, I'm going to be reading some books written throughout history that deal with plagues, as we're actually going through one, to see what if anything has changed. Shockingly, not all that much, after reading Daniel Defoe's Journal Of The Plague Year, which documents life in London in the last bubonic plague to hit that city, in 1665-66.

But first I must point out something I learned after reading it--we're not sure if it's fiction on nonfiction. Defoe published the book in 1722. He was only five years old during this plague. On the other hand, scholars point out that everything in the book is true--he even includes the bills that listed all the dead. The book reads like he's an adult going through this, but he's not.

Having said that, the book is informative, if not exactly gripping, as it reads like a personal journal. Defoe chronicles the spread of the disease from neighborhood to neighborhood, and early in the book contemplates going to the country, as many did, though in many cases they took the contagion with them. At some points outlying towns banned strangers from entering, reasonably so, and the exiles simply camped in the woods.

It's stunning how many similarities there are between then and now. Of course we know what causes our plague, but back then they had no knowledge of germs. Some thought it was caused by astronomical events, such as a comet, some simply thought it was God's wrath. But somethings are exactly the same. 'That all plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads, buckler-play, or such-like causes of assemblies of people be utterly prohibited, and the parties offending severely punished by every alderman in his ward." On the other hand, "For this is to be said of the people of London, that during the whole time of the pestilence the churches or meetings were never wholly shut up, nor did the people decline coming out to the public worship of God, except only in some parishes when the violence of the distemper was more particularly in that parish at that time, and even then no longer than it continued to be so."

Stronger measures were taken then than now, such as the killing of all dogs and cats, the mandatory quarantining of people in their homes, with guards not letting them out, which has not happened in the U.S. The scene was also much grimmer then, with carts pulled around town to take up dead bodies, though many lay in the streets where they fell, or dumped in the river with no coffin, to float away with the tide, or babies suckling at their dead mother's breast.

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The Great London Plague wiped about fifteen to twenty percent of London's population, with some estimates as high as 100,000  The U.S. has just about doubled that number with deaths from COVID-19. Perhaps this is the primary reason, true then, true now: "I must here take further notice that nothing was more fatal to the inhabitants of this city than the supine negligence of the people themselves, who, during the long notice or warning they had of the visitation, made no provision for it by laying in store of provisions, or of other necessaries, by which they might have lived retired and within their own houses, as I have observed others did,"