A Journal of the plague Year: Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London, by Daniel Defoe.
Published in 1722, A Journal of the Plague Year purports to be an eyewitness account of The Great Plague of London which happened in 1665. Trillions of neurons have been sacrificed on the question of genre. Is this a work of non-fiction? Reportage? Creative non-fiction? A novel? Although it purports to be eyewitness reportage, we can safely eliminate this as a plausible account of the book for the simple reason that Defoe was five years old when the plague struck London. Much has been made of the fact that he concludes the work with a stanza written in the first person singular:
A dreadful plague in London was
In the year of sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!H.F.
This has led to speculation that Defoe based his book on notes taken by his uncle, Henry Foe. Perhaps he used them as the factual ground for an imaginative leap into his uncle’s experiences of the London plague. Supporting this, we have the fact that Henry Foe had a saddlery business as does the narrator of this account. I’m more inclined to take a postmodern approach to the work, accepting the indeterminacy of genre as part of its charm. It does us no harm to set aside for the time being our compulsion to answer the question of genre and simply read it as a factually accurate account which happens to take certain stylistic liberties.
Reading it 300 years after its publication, its postmodern genre-bending quality seems less remarkable than the fact that it could pass for a description of our own experience with Covid-19. How little life changes and, more to the point, how little we learn from experience.
As with Covid-19, the London experience of bubonic plague begins with rumours from abroad. In 1664, the plague had returned to Holland. Its source is a matter of speculation, maybe Italy, Turkey, Candia (Crete), or Cyprus. Whatever the source, given the degree of trade between London and Dutch ports, its approach is treated with a measure of fatalism. In December, the inevitable happens: two Frenchmen die of the plague in Drury Lane. The town is on tenterhooks. For a while, no new cases appear, but six weeks later, there are reports of more deaths.
This reminds me of our experience in Toronto. We heard rumours of something off in Wuhan, but felt it was sufficiently removed from our own experience that it could never affect us directly. There was a serious outbreak in Italy but, again, it seemed contained and wouldn’t affect us directly. On January 15th, a man arrived in Washington after visiting family in Wuhan. By January 19th he was symptomatic and visited an urgent care clinic for treatment. The virus made its first appearance in Toronto on January 25th again from a man who had traveled from Wuhan. By then, most of us had adopted an odd cognitive dissonance characterized by both fatalism (it is only a matter of time before the virus spreads to the general population) and denialism (surely the people at Sunnybrook Hospital will contain it). Now we learn that two workers have tested positive for Covid-19 at the long-term care residence where my wife’s 105-year-old grandmother lives. What began as a back page story on the other side of the world has now crept to our doorstep.
As soon as it had become apparent that the plague had a foothold in London, people of means fled the city. This had the not-so-incidental effect of spreading the illness. It also underscored an issue of class division to which Defoe was sensitive: the disproportionate impact of disease on the poor. The rich were more likely to survive because they could either remove or isolate themselves, relying on servants to assume the risk of exposure when fetching supplies for their employers. In 300 years, what has changed? The Premiers of both Ontario and Québec have pleaded with city dwellers to stay in place rather than flee to their cottages. Rural municipalities cannot support the additional burden on our grocery and other essential suppliers, municipal services like water and sewage, and medical services. Meanwhile those whose jobs fall within so-called essential services—i.e. those exempt from the requirements of provincial declarations of emergency—fulfill low-paying roles like grocery store clerks and hospital janitors. They ride the streetcar to work, they have no choice, while those they serve opt for cars when they go out because they can afford to drive cars—the streetcar was, for them, not a necessity but a matter of social conscience. It turns out that, among well-off liberals, solidarity is a transient commodity.
Defoe notes that it’s problematic to be sick during a plague:
It was a very ill time to be sick in, for if any one complained, it was immediately said he had the plague; and though I had indeed no symptom of that distemper, yet being very ill, both in my head and in my stomach, I was not without apprehension that I really was infected; but in about three days I grew better; the third night I rested well, sweated a little, and was much refreshed.
When I first began my self-isolation regimen, I had—or thought I had—a sore throat and began to catastrophize. What if I have it? What if I collapse in the street like people did in Wuhan? Later, when it was obvious I hadn’t succumbed to Covid-19, I nevertheless struggled to suppress little coughs and throat-clearings in case those around me suspected I was infected and accused me of breaking with accepted protocols.
This isn’t the only behaviour Defoe notes which has its correlate in our own time. When checking up on his brother’s home and business, the narrator observed women making off with hats and did not immediately twig to the fact that they were stealing his brother’s inventory. Instead, “I did not offer to say anything to them, but went across the way to shun meeting them, as was usual to do at that time, for fear of the plague.” He is alluding to what we now call social distancing and which we perform as a kind of dance whenever we go out in public, hugging buildings, stepping off the curb, crossing the street, doing our utmost to avoid close contact.
While fear engenders physical distancing, it also encourages psychological distancing. That’s a charitable way of saying that fear drives self-interested behaviour: “But, alas! this was a time when every one’s private safety lay so near them that they had no room to pity the distress of others … [t]his, I say, took away all compassion.” In the present situation, while it is easy to criticize someone like Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro for being devoid of empathy, I acknowledge that a “me-first” attitude has taken hold of my own thinking. I’ll make damn sure my own are taken care of before I consider the needs of others. This response flies in the face of everything I was (at least officially) raised to believe and leaves me feeling deeply conflicted.
Defoe demonstrates a remarkable degree of epidemiological savvy given that he is writing more than a century and a half before a germ theory of disease began to displace the prevailing miasma theory. In particular, he observes that it is possible to transmit the disease even though carriers are asymptomatic. He writes:
Here also I ought to leave a further remark for the use of posterity, concerning the manner of people’s infecting one another; namely, that it was not the sick people only from whom the plague was immediately received by others that were sound, but the well.
…
By the well I mean such as had received the contagion, and had it really upon them, and in their blood, yet did not show the consequences of it in their countenances: nay, even were not sensible of it themselves, as many were not for several days.
This has been one of the bugbears of the Covid-19 pandemic. Most infected people are infectious for at least a couple of days before becoming symptomatic and this fact alone has ensured that Covid-19 is far more successful than either Sars or Mers.
Finally, Defoe offers one last bit of wisdom for the benefit of posterity. In fact, it will save your life. Defoe acknowledges the pressure we feel to resume our economic activities, but sees a conflict between that impulse and the risk of a relapse if we try too quickly to normalize our lives.
The physicians opposed this thoughtless humour of the people with all their might, and gave out printed directions, spreading them all over the city and suburbs, advising the people to continue reserved, and to use still the utmost caution in their ordinary conduct, notwithstanding the decrease of the distemper, terrifying them with the danger of bringing a relapse upon the whole city, and telling them how such a relapse might be more fatal and dangerous than the whole visitation that had been already…
But for many these efforts were useless. They resumed their normal lives, living magically with the supposition that the plague was no longer in their midst.
This imprudent, rash conduct cost a great many their lives who had with great care and caution shut themselves up and kept retired, as it were, from all mankind, and had by that means, under God’s providence, been preserved through all the heat of that infection.
Already, we engage in public conversations about returning to normal life. More than 350 years ago, the people of London learned a hard lesson which screams to us down the centuries: do not do this! By amplifying this message, Defoe has given us a gift: the opportunity to save ourselves untold misery. I hope we have the wisdom to accept it.