Daniel Defoe's novel A Journal of the Plague Year was published in March 1722. Through the eyewitness testimony of H.F., a saddler from the Whitechapel district of London who decides to remain in the city during the Great Plague of 1665, the book imagines one man’s attempt to avoid infection while confronting the horrors of an epidemic: the forced shutting up of houses, the plague pits barely able to contain the dead, the dissolution of social order. At age five Defoe had lived through the epidemic he would later fictionalize.
The Great Plague of 1665 had killed over 20 percent of the roughly 460,000 people living in London. The outbreak began in the small parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, just outside the city. When several unusual deaths, mostly of poor working-class people, were reported in 1664 and 1665, they were not directly connected to plague. While death counts from each part of London had been recorded and published in bills of mortality since 1603, these official records often underreported deaths, especially if they could lead to panic and civil unrest. This failure to identify a developing crisis and the delay in a municipal response led to sudden spikes in plague deaths by the summer of 1665, when nearly eight thousand people died in a single week. Like Dickens’ novels of social reform over a century later, A Journal of the Plague Year illuminated the tragic personal and collective costs of unpreparedness, which greatly exacerbated the suffering of thousands of Londoners dying from bubonic plague.
By 1722 Defoe, businessman and government spy, had retired from such work and moved on to journalism and fiction. His 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, which generated countless editions, sequels, and translations, was his first extended foray into fiction. He was prolific, writing two other novels in 1722—Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack—but only A Journal of the Plague Year was built upon the plague essays he had been publishing in periodicals like the Daily Post and Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal since 1709, covering topics such as the conditions of plague-ravaged France and the cruelty of household quarantine measures. His own memories of the epidemic, coupled with his research, made A Journal of the Plague Year so evocative that the book was believed to be a memoir authored—as the title page claimed—by an anonymous “citizen” instead of a novel penned by an already famous writer known for propaganda that had led to his numerous arrests. Commentary on the book did not even start mentioning Defoe’s authorship until the late eighteenth century, when critics began to debate whether the account could be considered history. The argument continued into 1920, when a Times Literary Supplement reviewer decreed, “Defoe is historian, not romancer.”
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