The Plague Novel Defoe Wrote Fifty-Seven Years After the Plague

Daniel Defoe was born in or around 1660 in the City of London, the son of a tallow chandler named James Foe. He was approximately five years old during the Great Plague of London in the summer and autumn of 1665, the last major plague epidemic in the English capital. About 100,000 Londoners died — roughly a quarter of the city’s population. Defoe’s father moved the family north into Hertfordshire for the duration. Defoe later remembered nothing useful about the experience.

He nonetheless published, in March 1722, a 287-page first-person account of the plague titled 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. The book was attributed on the title page to H.F., “a Citizen who continued all the while in London.” It read as a documentary memoir by an unnamed Londoner who had survived the epidemic.

The book is the first sustained prose narrative in English literature of a city under pandemic conditions. It is the closest precursor of, and an explicit model for, Mary Shelley’s 1826 pandemic novel The Last Man, of Camus’s La Peste (1947), of every subsequent pandemic-set novel in the modern Western literary tradition. It was studied for a century and a half as primary-source history.

What he did and didn’t have

The plague itself was sufficiently well-documented in printed sources that Defoe had substantial real material to work from. The London Bills of Mortality for 1665 — the city’s weekly parish death registers, by cause of death — survived in printed editions and were widely available. Several first-person accounts had been published by survivors during the late 17th century: Nathaniel Hodges’s medical narrative Loimologia (Latin 1672, English 1720), William Boghurst’s Loimographia (manuscript 1666, unpublished in the period), and the various plague-pamphlets of the early 1720s. Several manuscript diaries that have survived to modern times — including Samuel Pepys’s diary, not published until the 19th century — were not available to Defoe.

Defoe did have access to:

• The full run of the 1665 London Gazette.
• The printed Bills of Mortality.
• Hodges’s Loimologia.
• The reminiscences of his elderly uncle Henry Foe, a London saddler who had survived the plague (and whose initials H.F. became the narrator’s initials).
• The contemporary printed plague-pamphlets.

What he invented was the narrative voice. The book’s specific scenes — the buboes on the bricklayer in Aldgate, the maid in Whitechapel who had hidden a swollen neck under her ruffled collar, the bellman calling out the dead at midnight in Drury Lane, the pit at Cripplegate filled with 1,116 bodies in ten nights — are constructed from fragments, with substantial novelistic compression and detail-invention.

The medical content

What is unusually accurate about the Journal is the medical and demographic content. Defoe’s account of the disease’s progression in individual victims (the painful swelling of the lymph nodes, the spotted body rash, the high fever, the eventual rapid death) is consistent with modern understanding of bubonic and septicemic plague (the dominant clinical forms of the 1665 London outbreak). His narrative of the city’s progressive medical-administrative breakdown — the closing of the parish pest-houses, the failure of the early quarantine system, the substitution of mass graves for individual burial, the eventual general flight of the wealthy population to the country — is corroborated by every independent surviving documentary source.

His parish-by-parish death statistics, drawn directly from the printed Bills of Mortality, are accurate. The total he gives — approximately 97,000 plague deaths in London in 1665 — is consistent with modern demographic reconstructions that place the actual figure between 75,000 and 110,000 (the Bills under-recorded substantially, particularly from non-Anglican parishes; the underestimate has been progressively corrected by parish-register cross-validation work since the 1960s).

Why he wrote it

The immediate occasion of the Journal’s publication in March 1722 was the Plague of Marseille of 1720-21, which had killed approximately 100,000 people on the French Mediterranean coast and produced widespread fear in London that plague might return to the British Isles. The British Parliament had passed a quarantine act in 1721; popular pamphlets advocating various plague-defensive measures appeared throughout 1720, 1721, and early 1722. Defoe’s Journal was published into this market — partly as historical-documentary record, partly as practical public-health intervention, partly as commercial fiction.

The Marseille plague did not reach England. The Journal sold well — about 1,500 copies in the first edition — and entered subsequent English literary tradition. By the early 19th century it was being read as primary historical source by serious medical historians. The recognition that the book was fiction emerged progressively through the 1850s and 1860s; the modern scholarly consensus that it is a hybrid documentary-fictional account took the form it now has only after the publication of the Pepys diary in the 1820s allowed direct comparison with a verifiable contemporary source.

The literary inheritance

The Journal’s influence on subsequent pandemic literature was. Mary Shelley owned a copy and used it as the prose-model for her 1826 pandemic novel The Last Man; the narrator H.F.’s voice — first-person, observational, restrained in emotion, attentive to administrative detail — is recognizably the model for The Last Man’s narrator Lionel Verney. Albert Camus owned a copy and cited it as a structural model for La Peste. The general fictional convention that a pandemic novel should be narrated in the voice of a survivor describing systematic societal breakdown was, more or less, Defoe’s invention.

Defoe himself died in April 1731, aged 70 or 71, in lodgings in Ropemaker’s Alley off Moorfields. He had been hiding from creditors for the previous year. The Journal was, by that time, one of the better-selling books on his backlist but had not yet entered the canonical English literary tradition. That would happen a century later. The book has not been out of print since 1722.