Now the author returns to a consideration of the first months of the visitation. How is it, he wonders, if the plague is spread through contact with infected persons, that the bills of mortality recorded such wide gaps, one as long as nine weeks, between plague-related deaths during the spring of 1665? Could it be that the disease can lie dormant inside people before rendering them contagious? Could the disease be spread by other methods? Did cold weather impede its spread? No, he concludes, the gaps in recording were not caused by a slowing of the rate of infection but were the result of official corruption, as families bribed searchers and parish officers to record deaths under other rubrics and so avoid shunning and the shutting up of their houses.
But as the extent of the disease became impossible to conceal and as people came to understand that seemingly well people could be carrying the infection, they began to sequester themselves in earnest, in a manner that is going to sound familiar to those listening to this podcast in the spring and summer of 2020. But then as now, some people could not observe or otherwise ignored this tactic, whether out of need for employment or a disregard of the danger. There follows at this point in the narrative what can only be described as a rant against the poor, who “went on with the usual impetuosity of their tempers, full of outcries and lamentations when taken, but madly careless of themselves, foolhardy and obstinate, while they were well.” How closely the accounts in this episode accord with the behavior of some today, including some of our own officials, I will leave to you to decide.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
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.
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© 2020 Mark Cummings