Welcome to The Visitation!
This podcast is a reading of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, an account of the plague that afflicted London in 1665. Published in 1722, the work represents itself as the testimony of an eyewitness living in London at the time of the plague, but it is actually a work of fiction, based on exhaustive historical research. Many of the topics related in the novel will have an immediate resonance with our own experiences, particularly as we are now facing a pandemic of our own (granted that COVID-19 is nearly so devastating). They include the author’s indecision about whether to stay in the city or to flee to the countryside, the relaxing of sectarian religious affiliations in a population united by terror, the role class distinctions played in determining who lived and who died, and the proliferation of quacks, faith healers, fortune tellers, and others, who profited from the general misery.
To make the work accessible to modern readers, we have divided it into manageable episodes of between fifteen and twenty minutes each, and we have omitted certain passages in the interest of time, and when doing so did not harm the narrative flow of the work as a whole.
This brief (9 minutes) introductory episode introduces the podcast and contains some more information about the novel and about the great plague of 1665. Then it’s on to this remarkable and disturbing tale!
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