A Journal of the Plague Year (in .pdf)
A Play
Adapted from Daniel Defoe's Book
by Steven Key Meyers
In 1665, when Daniel Defoe was a little boy, an epidemic of bubonic plague killed a quarter of the people of his city, London. When in 1721 another epidemic was headed for Britain, Defoe called on his vivid commercial instincts to write two plague books. Both draw on boyhood memories of the earlier catastrophe and on a lifetime's worth of the wisdom and cunning that had kept him alive (and productive) through endless travails.
One, rare and little known, is called Due Preparations for the Plague. In dialogue form it follows the divergent strategies of two families in 1665 (the play's Tydings and Selkirk families). Its windy injunctions to pray, pray, pray remind us that Defoe is English's most prolific writer. But Due Preparations at least gave him a place to stash the pieties that remain the stock in trade of plague writers and that might otherwise have marred his second plague book, which is largely free of them.
That second book is A Journal of the Plague Year. It purports to be the journal of "H.F.," a Whitechapel saddler who, seeing the plague sweep into his city, feels compelled to view its horrors. He patrols London, then returns home to write up his "ordinary memorandums." H.F. depends less on prayer to survive than on the practical sanitary precepts of his physician friend Dr. Heath.
But it seems that writing that journal also helps to preserve H.F., as if Defoe is offering H.F.'s experience as a paradigm for the writer's life: the writer always lives in plague time, able to rely on himself only (shades of Robinson Crusoe!), but is compelled to make an ultimately honest accounting. Accordingly, the plague fails to stop H.F. from bearing witness—Defoe's more honest than that. At book's end, the old con artist slips H.F. "a coarse but sincere stanza" that neglects any pieties regarding victims in speaking the truth about surviving:
A dreadful plague in London was
In the year sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!
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