A Journal of the Plague Year was published some fifty-seven years after the last great plague to strike London. The work purports to be a first-hand account of the epidemic, written in the first person by a merchant living in the city. It is full of meticulous details of daily life during the visitation (as he terms it) and numerous small incidents illustrating the horrors of the epidemic, incidents set on familiar streets and in real taverns, making it seem all the more like the account of an eyewitness.

Defoe was born in 1660 and thus was only five at the time of the events related in the work. This makes A Journal of the Plague Year, however faithful to historical accounts, a work of fiction, a novel. 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 (albeit one not 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.