The Visitation: Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year

Resuming his comments from the last episode, the author here mounts a spirited criticism of fortune-tellers, cunning men, astrologers, conjurers, witches, and deceivers, but he doesn’t spare their audiences and followers, either, whose ignorance leads them into “a thousand weak, foolish, and wicked things.”  He’s particularly keen in observing how, despite the restoration of the Church of England, a multitude of sects continued to attract devotees and how, in their terror, the people flocked to religious leaders of all types, ignoring sectarian divisions in their overwhelming need for consolation. But when the plague abated and the terror had passed, the usual sectarian barriers were re-erected.   A significant portion of this episode is devoted to quacks, faith-healers, and purveyors of useless and sometimes poisonous remedies against the plague, a practice that continues even today. In these matters, Defoe displays a dry sense of humor.  In one of his accounts, a woman who had been lured by false promises of free treatment by one of these quacks creates her own version of a Twitterstorm by standing outside his office for an entire day, enlarging upon his dishonesty to every passer-by until the so-called physician relents and gives her his remedy for nothing, which, the author says, “was perhaps good for nothing when she had it.”  [For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.] Credits:  Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting.  Used by permission.  Visit our website: www.londonplague.com © 2020 Mark Cummings 

In this episode the author graphically describes the tenor of the moment, saying that death no longer seemed to be hovering overhead but was now entering into homes and staring directly into people’s faces, and he notes the spirit of repentance and confession its presence provoked.  He also continues his diatribe against quacks, pretenders, and deceivers, here mentioning what he considers an even greater madness than those previously described, the resort to magic, in the form of things like charms, amulets, and exorcisms.  “As if,” he says, “the plague was not the hand of God but a kind of possession of an evil spirit.” He concludes this portion of his narrative by describing how the Lord Mayor, seeing the way the poor, especially, were being victimized, appointed physicians and surgeons for their relief.  Of course, there was little medically that could be done for them, given the level of understanding of the disease at that time.  But there was another, deeper reason so little could be done, Defoe says again, for the plague is God’s judgment, “eminently armed from heaven from executing the errand it was sent about.”  [For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.] Credits:  Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting.  Used by permission.  Visit our website: www.londonplague.com © 2020 Mark Cummings

In this episode Defoe includes the text of orders issued by the Lord Mayor concerning the shutting up of houses, notification of the authorities, the appointment of watchers and guards, disposition of the bodies of the dead, public sanitation, and what we now refer to as “social distancing,” with bans on "loose persons and idle assemblies."  It’s a grim catalogue.  What is perhaps most noticeable about this account, apart from the evident terror the shutting up of houses provoked, was the careful insistence of the authorities on the gathering of accurate information about the number and location of all those infected, mirroring our own contemporary concern for testing and accurate reporting, or the lack thereof. I have to say, the recitation of these orders makes for some tedious listening, but the comparison of the steps taken then with our own is really quite instructive. For an index of contemporary issues surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and their historical precursors in the Journal, visit https://londonplague.com/concordance/ Credits:  Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting.  Used by permission.  Visit our website: www.londonplague.com © 2020 Mark Cummings

Episode 8: Prisons without Bars and Bolts With this episode the emphasis shifts a bit.  Having previously set out a brief history of the onset of the plague and the steps taken to contain it by the authorities, the author now relates a series of incidents that, in the particulars of their telling, lend great emotional depth to his novel. This episode is the first of several that will focus on the plight of families shut up and the stratagems they devised, some of them quite violent, to escape a house arrest that was in many cases tantamount to a death sentence.  Of particular note here is the distinction the author draws between the poor and those wealthy enough to have second homes to which they might escape, and means to lay in provisions for a long quarantine.  It is distinction he refers to time and again throughout the novel, and as the author has chosen to remain in the city, it is to the fate of those not wealthy enough to flee that he is most often eyewitness.  And it is in this episode that, for the first time, we’re introduced to the dead carts and to the now famous cry “Bring out your dead!”  [For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.] Credits:  Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard. Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting.  Used by permission.  Visit our website: www.londonplague.com © 2020 Mark Cummings

For me, at least, this is one of the grimmest chapters in the entire account.  I first read it over thirty years ago, and in revisiting the work now it is the one series of passages I remembered best and sought out first.  The author begins by resuming his account of the plight of families whose houses were shut up, illustrated by the graphic story of a young woman who died within hours of falling ill and how her mother went mad with grief before dying herself.  He then goes on to describe the pit, “this dreadful gulf,” he calls it, dug in Aldgate for the burial of the parishioners, and in one of the most shocking scenes in the novel, describes his visit to the pit and the burial of the dead.  Take your time with this episode; there’s a lot to absorb.  ["Great gulfs" for the burial of the poor continue to this day. See, for instance,  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/nyregion/coronavirus-deaths-hart-island-burial.html] Credits:  Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard. Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting.  Used by permission.  Visit our website: www.londonplague.com © 2020 Mark Cummings

In a direct continuation of the narrative from the preceding episode, the author relates how he went home after visiting the pit at Aldgate but, being unable to sleep, ventures back out in the middle of the night to the tavern where the man grieving for his family had been taken by the buriers.  There he confronts “a dreadful set of fellows” who were jeering and mocking the grieving man.  When the author admonishes them for their behavior, they turn their insults on him and enlarge upon them by blaspheming God and religion and making fun of all who take comfort in it.    Well, later the plague carries this entire gang off, to the barely concealed satisfaction of the author, who spends much time in prayer satisfying himself that his horror at their behavior was not motivated by anger at their insults.  Methinks he doth protest too much.   [For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.] Credits:  Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard. Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting.  Used by permission.  Visit our website: www.londonplague.com © 2020 Mark Cummings

Here the author continues his insistence that the forced shutting up of houses is not only bad policy but actually led to the death of many more than would have succumbed if they had been able to voluntarily sequester themselves and send away the remainder of their households, who more often than not died as a result of their continued presence there. As it was, those wishing to spare their families were often forced to flee into the streets before notice could be taken of their illness, thereby infecting countless others with whom they came in contact. Defoe ends this episode with his narrator’s personal observations on the causes of the sickness and best course of treatment for its victims, from the standpoint of public health.  While he scornfully discounts theories of what sound close to our modern understanding of bacterial infections transmitted through the lungs or skin, his recommendations are otherwise sensible and sound.  [For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.] Credits:  Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard. Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting.  Used by permission.  Visit our website: www.londonplague.com © 2020 Mark Cummings

The accounts in the first part of this episode will be especially familiar to those of you hearing it during the spring of 2020, particularly if you have been sequestering yourself against the COVID-19 pandemic.  Here the author describes how some families attempted to shut themselves in voluntarily, laying in stores of food so that they went to market as infrequently as possible.  Some of them spent their time shut in making bread or beer, or, like the author himself, passed the time reading or writing a diary. The all-too-familiar pastimes of the housebound.  He also describes the length people went to to avoid contact with each other—and with the bodies of people who literally fell down dead in front of them—during necessary trips to the market and other places.  As we learned from the last episode, at that time there was no true understanding of the causes of the disease—which is spread by flea bites and only rarely by simple contact with the infected—but the social distancing they practiced was effective nonetheless when strictly observed.  The right practice for the wrong reason. Toward the end of this episode the tone darkens considerably as the author describes his forays out into the city and the terrors he encounters there. [For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.] Credits:  Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard. Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting.  Used by permission.  Visit our website: www.londonplague.com © 2020 Mark Cummings

It was inevitable that in the breakdown of trade and civil authority, and in a time of widespread hunger, that crime would increase.  Serious crime, including murder, was widely reported, but the author is skeptical of these accounts.  He believes that murder was unlikely, and even unnecessary, in a time when imminent and sudden death was otherwise so prevalent.  In fact, the author proves himself a very discerning analyst of what we now call urban legends, noting the patterned similarity in so many of these tales and the fact that they were always said to take place at the other end of town.   Petty crime, and crimes of opportunity, on the other hand, were indeed widespread, and he concludes this episode with an account of a visit to his brother’s warehouse, where he found women from the neighborhood making off with stylish “high-crowned” hats, which, they claimed, no longer had an owner. [For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.] Credits:  Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard. Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting.  Used by permission.  Visit our website: www.londonplague.com © 2020 Mark Cummings

This episode contains one of the better-known anecdotes to emerge from the novel and offers a rare moment of gallows humor amidst the unrelenting horror. The story of the piper was evidently widely known at the time of the visitation itself, for the author remarks on its being a story, “with which the people made themselves so merry.”  He also mentions use of what must have been a popular preventative measure, the holding of garlic and rue in one’s mouth, and the liberal use of vinegar.  I’ll leave the details to you.  In the second part of this episode the author touches upon a theme all too familiar to us today, the general lack of preparedness of both the citizenry and the authorities for situations of this sort. Their slowness to respond to this calamity. Recall also his remarks in a previous episode about the so-called “supine negligence of the people themselves.” Outbreaks of the plague, you’ll remember, were not new to London.  The previous one had occurred only a decade before, and the failure to plan for another was as hard for the author to understand then as our own lack of planning and slowness to respond, despite plenty of advance warning, is now.  The episode ends with an account of instances of private charity and the distribution of money to the poor and unemployed, a kind of stimulus package we also know about. [For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.] Credits:  Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard. Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting.  Used by permission.  Visit our website: www.londonplague.com © 2020 Mark Cummings

Having already treated social distancing, quarantine, crime, fake news, lack of preparation, fake remedies, and the inadequate facilities for the treatment of the sick and the disposition of the dead, the author now takes up another all-too-familiar effect of pandemic: what happens to a great metropolis when the wheels of commerce come to a full stop.  Wanting to make his point with even more care than usual, he lists the rolls of the unemployed in several broad areas and describes the cascading effect the shutdown of one trade has on several others.  Only a vigorous program of social relief, he asserts, prevented rioting and mass starvation.  As part of this program, many of the unemployed were given jobs as watchmen at shut-up houses or as nurses tending victims of the plague.  The author notes that, in a grim irony, the high death rate in these occupations actually reduced the burden on the remaining citizenry and the likelihood of widespread starvation. He also takes up the inherent difficulty in accurately reporting cases of the disease and the number that died of it, only in this case the causes are largely from the high rate of mortality caused by the plague, which overwhelmed the capacity of the authorities to manage it, rather than from official misadministration. [The way in which job losses in one trade result in a cascade of job losses in industries dependent upon them is reflected in our own time in the April 2020 unemployment figures: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/upshot/virus-jobless-rate-demand-collapse.html.  See also https://londonplague.com/concordance/.] Credits:  Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard. Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting.  Used by permission.  Visit our website: www.londonplague.com © 2020 Mark Cummings

Although Defoe’s account is scarcely chronological, at this point in the novel we have come to the height of the epidemic, when, by official accounts, around 7,000 people were falling victim to the plague every week. Here he describes what are by now the familiar horrors of the epidemic and his growing restlessness at his self-imposed seclusion. By the way, the so-called Solomon Eagle mentioned in this account was a real person, a composer by the name of Solomon Eccles, who became a Quaker and renounced music as profane entertainment. [For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.] Credits:  Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard. Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting.  Used by permission.  Visit our website: www.londonplague.com © 2020 Mark Cummings

Here is a pious little tale about an act of loyalty and human kindness that the author witnessed on one of his forays along the waterfront.  It contains some information about how the more resourceful among those who lived near the river found provisions for their survival and how some people lived on boats, thinking themselves safer there than on land. Near the end of episode, the narrator is taken to Greenwich, where, from the top of a hill, he sees hundreds of ships moored in the river and estimates that as many as ten thousand people survived the plague sequestering themselves in them. [For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.] Credits:  Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard. Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting.  Used by permission.  Visit our website: www.londonplague.com © 2020 Mark Cummings

This episode is one of the most disturbing in the novel.  It concerns the death of newborn infants and their mothers at or shortly after childbirth as the result, direct or indirect, of the plague.  Some died along with their mothers at the moment of birth, others died for lack of skilled midwives, the better of whom had fled, and there were even cases of infants dying at the hands of their mothers driven mad from the disease. From the Bills of Mortality published weekly during the visitation, the author reports that maternal mortality, so-called deaths in Birth-Bed, and incidents of miscarriages, premature births, and stillborn infants were roughly twice as high in 1665 as in the preceding year, on a population base he estimates as one-third smaller. And of course, newborns were no less susceptible to the plague than any others, and many died in their mother’s arms in the first weeks of life as disease swept through the entire household.  In sum, this episode is a litany of horrors, told without literary embellishment of any kind, horrors that lead the author to conclude that in future visitations pregnant women and women nursing young children should use every means at their disposal to flee at the first rumor of plague. [For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.] Credits:  Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard. Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting.  Used by permission.  Visit our website: www.londonplague.com © 2020 Mark Cummings

Readers of the novel will note that at this point I have entirely passed over a long account about three men from Wapping, whose tale of taking to the highways and fields is instructive, but perhaps too long and detailed for modern listeners.  However, the final paragraphs of their story are so compelling, and so seamlessly connected with what follows, that I have inserted them, out of order, at the beginning of this episode.  The main theme of this episode centers around a phenomenon seen again in our own times: the resistance of rural areas to the arrival of strangers fleeing the epidemic.  More generally, it speaks to our habit of ascribing all manner of wickedness to outsiders.  The author mentions the several species of rumor and myth, some even sanctioned by official voices, that charged the victims of the plague with the desire to infect others.  On their part, fleeing Londoners spoke of the uniform cruelty and inhumanity of rural folk, who forced them to return to the city to face death. Here as before, Defoe is careful to separate fact from rumor.  He understands how isolated incidents can be accepted as innate characteristics and is having nothing of it. [For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.] Credits:  Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard. Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting.  Used by permission.  Visit our website: www.londonplague.com © 2020 Mark Cummings