Product Description

Long considered the most compelling account of natural disaster in all of literature, Defoe's classic reconstruction of the Great Plague of 1665 scans the streets and alleyways of stricken London in an effort to record the extreme suffering of plague victims. At once horrifying and movingly compassionate, A Journal of the Plague Year offers a nightmare vision of the modern city laid to waste.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #510666 in Books
• Published on: 1966-11-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
An account of the Great Plague of London in 1664-65, written by Daniel Defoe and published in 1722. Narrated by "H.F.," an inhabitant of London who purportedly was an eyewitness to the devastation that followed the outbreak of bubonic plague, the book was a historical and fictional reconstruction by Defoe. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

Review
`It is a great book, but almost too painful to read.` Birmingham Post

'wonderful piece of retrospective journalism, probably the most compelling account of natural disaster in all literature' Oxford Times

`Just enjoy, if that is the right word, one of the most horrific stories of all time, made more so by the fact that it actually happened.' Berks and Bucks Observer

From the Publisher
Founded in 1906 by J.M. Dent, the Everyman Library has always tried to make the best books ever written available to the greatest number of people at the lowest possible price. Unique editorial features that help Everyman Paperback Classics stand out from the crowd include: a leading scholar or literary critic's introduction to the text, a biography of the author, a chronology of her or his life and times, a historical selection of criticism, and a concise plot summary. All books published since 1993 have also been completely restyled: all type has been reset, to offer a clarity and ease of reading unique among editions of the classics; a vibrant, full-color cover design now complements these great texts with beautiful contemporary works of art. But the best feature must be Everyman's uniquely low price. Each Everyman title offers these extensive materials at a price that competes with the most inexpensive editions on the market-but Everyman Paperbacks have durable binding, quality paper, and the highest editorial and scholarly standards.

Customer Reviews

Public health primer
Probably one of the first examples of journalistic fiction, Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year" is a pseudo-eyewitness account of the London plague of 1665. Writing this in 1722, Defoe casts himself into the role of his uncle whom he calls H.F. and who recounts the events in grisly detail but with magnanimous compassion. Aside from the prose, the book has a surprisingly modern edge in the way it combines facts about a sensationally dire historical event with "human interest" stories for personal appeal. It seems so factual that at times it's easy to forget that it's just a fictitious account of a real event.

The plague (H.F. writes) arrives by way of carriers from the European mainland and spreads quickly through the unsanitary, crowded city despite official preventive measures; the symptoms being black bruises, or "tokens," on the victims' bodies, resulting in fever, delirium, and usually death in a matter of days. The public effects of the plague are readily imaginable: dead-carts, mass burial pits, the stench of corpses not yet collected, enforced quarantines, efforts to escape to the countryside, paranoia and superstitions, quacks selling fake cures, etc. Through all these observations, H.F. remains a calm voice of reason in a city overtaken by panic and bedlam. By the time the plague has passed, purged partly by its own self-limiting behavior and partly by the Great Fire of the following year, the (notoriously inaccurate) Bills of Mortality indicate the total death toll to be about 68,000, but the actual number is probably more like 100,000 -- about a fifth of London's population.

Like Defoe's famous survivalist sketch "Robinson Crusoe," the book's palpable moralism is adequately camouflaged by the conviction of its narrative and the humanity of its narrator, a man who, like Crusoe, trusts God's providence to lead him through the hardships, come what may. What I like about this "Journal" is that its theme is more relevant than its narrow, dated subject matter suggests: levelheadedness in the face of catastrophe and the emergence of a stronger and wiser society.

A stunning blend of fact and imagination.
Defoe has pulled off something brilliant here. Although he was only 5 years old in 1665 (the year of the title), in 1720 he set down a narrative full of rich details blending fact and imagination. The thoroughness of his descriptions and the constant realism come close to convincing you that these are first-hand observations: but these are *not* first hand observations; his narrator is a fiction, recalling events he saw as an adult.

The persuasiveness of Defoe's fiction comes from his specificity, and little comments suggesting the narrator has an additional life outside the Journal. He mentions not only the dead (and the increasing losses), but the quacks taking advantage of the gullible, the quarantining of infected houses, the marks on the doors, the efforts to escape from quarantined houses, the efforts of the mayor's offfice to limit the spread of infection, and the public pits where the bodies were thrown. And so on into the facets of everyday life. Through it all, his portrayal of the narrator also has a personal richness, a consistent first-person perspective; the conceit is reinforced by insertions such as "what I wrote of my private meditations I reserve for private use, and desire it may not be made public on any account whatever." The narrator is a product of Defoe's imagination, of course, and similarly, any private meditations such a narrator would have. But Defoe has cleverly made the narrator real.

So realistic you forget you're reading fiction
Daniel Defoe put a lot of research into his 'Journal of the Plague Year,' yet it doesn't read like a history report. Rather, this is a novel so realistic you can quite literally feel what it must have been like to have lived in London at the time of the plague. The facts as he knew them, both from reading and interviews with those who lived through it, are revealed to us throughout the narrative. You get every detail of the plague, from the symptoms to the hysteria to the steps the government took to help insure the safety of the people. 'Journal of the Plague Year' is a fascinating and imminently readable book.