Journal of the Plague Year
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Journal of the Plague Year
Narrated by:
Andrew Cullum
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Narrated by:
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Andrew Cullum
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By:
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Daniel Defoe
About this listen
First published in March 1722, 57 years after the event that struck more than 100,000 people, Journal of the Plague Year is a compelling portrait of life during London's horrific bubonic plague. Through the eyes of H.F. (speculated to be Defoe's uncle, Henry Foe, from whose journals the book was supposedly adapted) we witness great grief, depravity and despair: crazed sufferers roam the streets, unearthly screams resound across the city, death carts dump their grisly loads into mass graves, and quackery and skulduggery feed on fear. But there is kindness and courage too, as mutual support and caring are upheld through the worst of days.
Defoe's Journal is considered one of the most accurate accounts of the plague, and includes many contemporary theories about the disease, along with rolls of the dead and a literary mapping of London, street by street, parish by parish. It is a fascinating and intimate account from one of the earliest proponents of the novel.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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Amazing Insight into the Plague
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Whoa!
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Pandemic reading
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Defoe was but a wee boy when this plague epidemic occurred but it seems believable that he had an account by an older relative on which to draw, and has obviously done considerable research, far more than expected of a historical novelist then, and even now.
The plague is a far more deadly, infectious, and ghastly disease than the present pandemic, but nevertheless many of the measures taken to contain it and the behaviour of the population are now familiar to us. The destruction of the economy of London, and consequently of England was severe. All non-essential businesses collapsed. European trade was impossible.
Of course, as usual, the wealthy fled at the first hint of threat, the affluent stockpiled the necessities of life, and the poor tried to stay alive.
The authorities in London, however, did not flinch, and stayed to mitigate as best they could the disaster that had overwhelmed their city.
The reactions of the citizens weren’t very different from those we’ve seen this year, from panic to complacency, from denial to pseudoscience, from evasion of regulation to altruism.
Rumours and misinformation managed to spread even without newspapers and social media.
I don’t usually have much time for Defoe, English spy and agent provocateur in pre-1707 Scotland, but his analysis of the Plague Year reveals intelligence and a wisdom I have to concede, grudgingly.
Epidemic and human nature
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Pandemic story
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And there are the 'social isolation' measures of the time, perhaps one of the most painful controversial measures taken then; that of containing the infected household locked up and guarded in their houses. The chronicler argues that given, as now, that the plague was most efficaciously spread that those who were non-symptomatic, this measure had limited value.
There are chilling descriptions of plague pits, including horrible scenes of people throwing themselves into them alive, haunted by the bereaved, and of the symptoms, the 'tokens,' tumours, swellings and vomiting.
There are fascinating descriptions of the roles created to seek out those who were infected, diagnose, and eventually dispose of the dead. There are insights into the role of medical practice, both 'quackery' and the best guess science of the time, and of religion. There are fools, cowards and knaves as well as good people doing their best.
In one of the more gripping parts of the narrative, we follow the progress of a group escaping the city from the country, attempting settlements, and trying to overcome the hostility of suspicious and scared rural communities.
Its a shame then that given all this, I struggled to pay attention to a lot of this audio-book and kept tuning out. It is because that for me a lot of the real human interest stuff is buried in a lot of dry reporting. The narrator seems distanced from events, given that he is reporting first hand, and we don't get much of a measure of the impact of him and his own family and loved ones. He talks about his feelings and his faith, but he is hard person to get to know. The narrator, Andrew Cullum, reads clearly and does their best with a lot of this dry material.
Quite possibly, this is better to read than it is to listen to.
Ground zero of a pandemic
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The journal covers a wide variety of subjects: stories of individual people's experiences; the author's firsthand experiences from his neighbourhood and from walks around London; descriptions and criticism of the official response; theories about the cause and origins of the plague and discussion of how doctors (and quacks) tried to treat it. Sometimes amusing, sometimes heartbreaking, always interesting.
The journal is well written and well narrated. The only problem with this recording is the frequent bills of mortality - there's no easy way to narrate a table, but the information is important to the narrative and just hearing a list of statistics doesn't work for me. I found that after listening for a few hours I would look at the relevant tables online (on Project Gutenberg's copy of the journal) to get an overview of the bills I'd just heard.
Fascinating slice of history
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