Daniel Defoe Plague Year

Although frequently lambasted for its being a “thorny shrub” of miscreant journalism, Daniel Defoe’s semi-fictional account of the great plague of 1665 also offers telling insight into English social and political customs. A Journal of the Plague Year is now framed more as novel than as historiography, but is equal parts both, making it akin to ancient narratives like the epic of Gilgamesh. Defoe does do a deft job at pastiche, weaving facts with fluffy embellishments that add life to what would otherwise be a dull and dry accounting for the inventory of dead and the litany of loss that occurred as a result of the plague. The reader of A Journal of the Plague runs the risk of losing sight of the forest for focusing too much on the trees, for those minute details contained in the text, whether true or false, offer far less of the real story than the gestalt: the fact that the public’s reaction to the plague is what really matters. Not just the public’s reaction, but the reaction and methods used by the authorities in London are what makes Daniel Defoe’s narrative so important to understand. These methods, which include the rule of law, the use of quarantine as a means of promoting public safety and preventing the spread of the plague, and the function of watchmen too, lend insight into English governance during the 17th century. Moreover, the despair, desolation, and dread that permeate the account shows how the plague evoked an existential crisis of apocalyptic proportions. The use of strong top-down organizational tactics like quarantine, watchmen, and rule of law parallel the technological, social, and political changes taking place in pre-modern English society.
Defoe’s book shows that the plague inspired one of the first organized, rational, and collaborative public responses to a health epidemic, even though some of the methods used failed. The public response also reveals the impetus for populist reforms and a more self-empowering form of democratic government. Many magistrates and other city officials who could have come up with a cohesive response to the epidemic fled the city at first signs of outbreak. Defoe is particularly critical of the magistrates and watchmen who reacted selfishly, while celebrating those who elected to stay in the interests of promoting the public welfare. While some of them do their jobs, others “were absent, sometimes drunk, sometimes asleep when the people wanted them, and such never failed to be punished severely, as indeed they deserve.” The fact that the public did mete out punishments on the neglectful city officials shows how the mentality was changing; the people realized that they needed to take matters into their own hands.
The narrator (H.F.) continually reminds the reader the law was present to ensure public safety and to unfortunately confine those who were infected to their homes so that they could not spread the disease. “But after all that was or could be done in these cases, the shutting up of houses, so as to confine those that were well with those that were sick, had very great inconveniences in it.” As tragic is it was to confine people, “it was authorised by a law, it had the public good in view as the end chiefly aimed at, and all the private injuries that were done by the putting it in execution must be put to the account of the public benefit.” This statement by the narrator shows how rule of law was being increasingly conceptualized as a matter of public good. Public good triumphed over all other considerations when creating laws for society. In fact, Defoe lauds the magistrates for their work in enforcing the sensible laws: “the magistrates wisely caused the people to be encouraged, made very good bye-laws for the regulating the citizens, keeping good order in the streets, and making everything as eligible as possible to all sorts of people.” While some magistrates and watchmen did flee, most did not: “they would not quit the city themselves, but that they would be always at hand for the preserving good order in every place and for the doing justice on all occasions.”
Defoe shows how the law, meted out by magistrates and watchmen, helped protect not just the interests of the wealthy and powerful but of the poor too. The magistrates were responsible “also for the distributing the public charity to the poor; and, in a word, for the doing the duty and discharging the trust reposed in them by the citizens to the utmost of their power.” Defoe shows how London’s demographics were changing given the rise in middle class power. As Richetti points out, London during the late seventeenth century as Defoe describes it in the Journal is “where a substantial urban bourgeoisie and professional/bureaucratic class” intermingled (71). The way the government and the people responded collectively to an epidemic that affected rich and poor alike inspired Defoe to activate his already astute “political consciousness,” (Richetti 71). The Church is a primary target for Defoe’s political consciousness. In A Journal of the Plague, Church officials are the ones least equipped morally to offer solace or succor, let alone the type of institutional or financial support that might have been needed. The fact that clergy were harassed and penalized, as H.F. describes it, demonstrates how Londoners were changing their attitudes towards presumed Church authority. Church responses to the plague were dissatisfactory at best, which aligned with the budding Enlightenment values of democratization of knowledge, truth, and reason. “Defoe’s generation had been battered by events that seemed to prove over and over again that religious, legal, and political beliefs and practices were inadequate,” (Backscheider 135). Defoe’s Journal is hardly unique but it is part of a zeitgeist.
Watchmen play a unique role in the new social order described by Defoe and his peers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Whereas the role of a watchdog seems oppressive, in this case it is a willing surrender to public health and safety that represents public trust in the city. The watchmen play a curious role in that they confine people to their homes, grounding them, transforming their private dwellings into prison cells. “Upon pain of severe punishment,” H.F. describes, “these watchmen have a special care that no person go in or out of such infected houses whereof they have the charge.” The watchmen keep vigil both day and night, their jobs integral to protecting the public and preventing the spread of the plague. Historically accurate, as is most of Defoe’s text, the paradoxical figures of the watchmen parallel the “paradoxical nature of his narrative works,” (Harlan 55). Also fascinating is Defoe’s account of the city’s hiring of female searchers, likely one of the first recorded instances of female public officials. The city’s organized response to the plague requires coordination and mobilization of human resources regardless of gender, class, or status. As panoptic as the watchmen are, they do not serve in positions of power per se, but as public servants. When H.F. describes the many people who, frustrated with being trapped in their houses, try to evade the watchmen and escape, the reader sympathizes with both parties. As Peraldo points out, Defoe remains “as faithful as possible to reality,” (97). Defoe captures earnest human responses to a crisis of epic proportions, one that could easily be played out in the twenty-first century, which is why the Journal remains important to read.
The watchmen’s role also coincides with the function of the quarantine. Quarantine represents a thorough knowledge of the ways disease spread, signifying the advancements in scientific understanding. The Church had for so long dominated discourse over the natural world that when finally the secular segments of society took charge of crisis response, the result was a sensible solution to the epidemic. However, H.F. describes the chaos that ensued, the reactions of the people who were shocked to be told that they were considered unclean, part of the problem, unable to leave their own homes. The quarantine “oppressed them so with anger and grief,” as H.F. puts it. Defoe “dramatizes the emotional crisis” in A Journal to show how people from all walks of life react to the full-scale emergency of the plague. Whereas the superstitious mentality of the middle ages might have led the people to believe in supernatural forces causing the plague, the seventeenth century mentality was more liberal, more rational, and more enlightened. The authorities used quarantine not to punish the people, or to wield authority by the rich over the poor. On the contrary, the quarantine was meted out in the interests of the public good. The public good was triumphing over any former methods of political or social control. As a democratic disease, the plague helped to minimize cleavages of social class, status, and power in London society.
London demonstrates in its reaction to the plague strong top-down organizational tactics like quarantine, watchmen, and rule of law. Defoe describes each of these methods of managing the plague in London through the eyes of his narrator, H.F. In A Journal of the Plague Year, the reader is privy to the reactions of ordinary people to the plague, as well as reactions by public officials whose job it was to prevent the spread of the disease. The use of quarantine and the watchers reflects technological and scientific advancements in recognizing the ways disease spreads in tight quarters. Applying democratic rule of law to the management of the plague also reflects the social and political changes taking place in London. Through A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe reveals his predilection for political and social commentary, hallmarks of his writing throughout his career. As an embellished historical narrative, the Journal shows how seventeenth century London was awakening to its own sense of public consciousness, a world in which it was finally acceptable to call attention to the failings of church and monarchic rule and to call for reform.






Works Cited

Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation. University Press of Kentucky, 1986.
Baker, Nicholson. The greatest liar. Columbia Journalism Review. July/Aug 2009, http://archives.cjr.org/second_read/the_greatest_liar_1.php
Brown, Homer O. “The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe.” ELH. Vol. 34, No. 4, Dec. 1971, pp. 562-590.
Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. Norton Critical Edition. Digital edition used: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/376/376-h/376-h.htm
Harlan, Virginia. “Defoe’s Narrative Style.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 30, No. 1, Jan 1931, pp. 55-73.
Peraldo, Emmanuelle. “Narrative Cartography in the Eighteenth Century.” In Narratives of Travel and Tourism. Ashgate, 2012.
Richetti, John. The Life of Daniel Defoe. John Wiley & Sons, 2015.