A Journal of the Plague Year: Daniel Defoe's Account of the Great Plague of 1665 | Hacker News Reader

A Journal of the Plague Year: Daniel Defoe's Account of the Great Plague of 1665

gutenberg.org

60 pointsgerbilly11 comments

Journal of the Plague Year is actually a fictionalized novel but one written very soon after the actual events so it seems very true to life. I found it a great antidote to the tiresome zombie apocalypses plots that infest our tv screens.

Large swathes of London were dying in horrible ways, nobody knew why, and efforts to contain the plague often seemed to make things worse. People fled the cities (which worked, sometimes) but I found it heartening that people didn't immediately form the sort of murderous, paranoid, isolationist mobs that film and tv would have you believe.

I read it when I was a kid, and loved it. It's pretty cool to see this on HN, I almost never run into anyone who has read this book.

Well bump

> I found it heartening that people didn't immediately form the sort of murderous, paranoid, isolationist mobs that film and tv would have you believe.

I wonder how much of that was due to ignorance about how the disease spread. Knowing what we do about pandemics these days, I could see modern people being far more reclusive and distrustful of outsiders than people were back then.

They knew that people could spread the disease.

History of Quarantine - http://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/historyquarantine.html

  > The practice of quarantine, as we know it, began during the 14th century
  > in an effort to protect coastal cities from plague epidemics.

The Origin of Quarantine - http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/35/9/1071.long

  > societies have, since ancient times, used strategies to isolate persons with
  > disease from unaffected persons. Some of the earliest references to these
  > strategies are found in the books of the Old Testament.

  > ...

  > The profound impact of the epidemic (the plague) led to the institution of
  > extreme infection-control measures. For example, in 1374, Viscount Bernabo...
  > declared that every person with plague be taken out of the city into the
  > fields, there to die or to recover.

Well, about 40 years after which isn't that soon. Given that DeFoe was 5 when the plague struck it is probably mostly based on the stories his Uncle told him.

Here is a recent book on the Plague following real people in 1348:

http://cobblestonepub.ie/events/book-launch-1348-a-medieval-...

See also Pepys and Evelyn. The plague was followed by the Great Fire of 1666, which both recount in their diaries.

Also, Walter George Bell did a quite interesting book on the 1665 plague outbreak.

At times a bit dry, it still provides the best account I've read on the plague and how it affected both londoners and their rulers.

Ty. Took a look at pepys. Thought it was odd he referred to "2 o'clock" I was under impression time was not recorded or referred to often in that manner .

Also two entries I read seems to be readable - as if it was somehow massaged

The originals were in shorthand, so versions in readable English have been edited for readability. He also wrote some bits in "code" which he didn't want his wife reading. http://www.pepys.info/bits.html

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