Journal of the Plague Year

Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is the most vivid first-person account of a pandemic in the English language. The narrative professes to be the daily musings of one “H.F.,” a saddler “who continued all the while in London” during the Great Plague of 1665, England’s deadliest bubonic plague outbreak in centuries. Defoe wrote and published it a generation later, in 1722, three years after Robinson Crusoe and the same year as Moll Flanders. But while A Journal of the Plague Year shares a devotion to verisimilitude with other works of fiction of the day―many contemporary fictions purported to be “histories” or “true stories”―its approach to character is distinctive, as H.F. often recedes into the background. The novel’s depiction of a diseased city and of the social and religious dimensions of a pandemic seem to anticipate our own age. This edition allows readers to appreciate the novel’s complexity and apparent contradictions.

The introduction and historical appendices (which include materials on plagues and the spiritual, civic, and scientific responses to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pandemics) make Defoe’s book and its world accessible to modern readers. Three new maps show England, London, and H.F.’s neighborhood in 1665.

Jack Lynch is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. Celia Barnes is Associate Professor of English at Lawrence University.