Postscript: Some Thoughts on Reading A Journal of the Plague Year
“As if their lives were of no consequence compared to the work which they came about there.”
As I became aware of the growing COVID-19 pandemic in January and February of 2020, I remembered passages I had read long ago from A Journal of the Plague Year, and in conversations with friends and coworkers I sometimes found myself mentioning these passages as representing mostly spurious parallels with our own experiences. Since there seemed to be no relationship whatsoever between the two afflictions in terms of their severity, these references were usually delivered in half-humorous or even ironic tones. The experiences of well-fed, white, middle-class citizens of a modern technological state appeared to have no true analogue among those of a late medieval citizenry that lacked the foundations of modern public health and medicine, let alone Netflix or Zoom.
But by March, as social and economic structures worldwide began to fracture under the stress of the pandemic, I went back to the book with a renewed interest in seeing to what extent there might be genuine parallels, this time not in terms of prevention, clinical treatment, or mortality rates but rather in terms of social control and the psychological effects of a prolonged period of mass stress. And lo and behold, this approach yielded a much different appreciation of the text, for there are indeed parallels, and they are not pretty.
Elsewhere on this website I have provided a brief concordance of the social controls and their associated behaviors described by Defoe, so that the reader can see for him- or herself just how common are our experiences. Social distancing, fake cures, official indifference, lack of preparedness, defiance of expert opinion—it’s all there. But one common element stands out above all the rest: the differences that wealth and social class confer in determining who gets sick and who does not. Who lives and who dies. In fact, you could almost say that this, along with Defoe’s observations about the speed at which the spiritual focus aroused by the imminence of death dissolved when things “returned to normal,” are the thematic elements that hold this book together, that save it from being simply a collection of anecdotes.
The principal social fact of the plague of 1665 was the enforced shutting up of houses, a policy pursued with exacting rigor by the city authorities. In Episode 7 we see how the various offices of watchers, searchers, nurse-keepers, surgeons, and others were deployed, often ruthlessly, against these infected households, consigning many to death who otherwise might have survived. And we know from repeated references that the majority of the people who remained in London at this time, and were thus subject to these and the many other rigid controls described in that episode, were the poor and working classes, the Court and the wealthier classes having fled en masse at the rumor of an epidemic or having bribed local authorities to report deaths in their households under rubrics other than “plague.”
Whether this regimen constitutes, as Braudel has suggested, quite the degree of social control expressed in his claim that the poor were “penned up in the contaminated town, where the State fed them, isolated them, blockaded them, and kept them under observation”[1] is a matter that admits to more nuance than that. After all, the citizenry were free to flee the city at any time; they were not “penned” or “blockaded” in the strictest sense of the words. And they were not “observed” with anything like the exquisite precision we are capable of today. Nor, as we have seen, does such a characterization do justice to the desperately well-intentioned efforts of the city administration to lessen the likelihood of mass death. But it is certainly true that the shutting up of houses and the other regulations imposed on the citizenry represent a level of oppressive control that the wealthy could and did avoid. They also represent a degree of control we think is scarcely possible in the United States.
Unless you understand that the decision to remain in the city was anything but voluntary.
Episode 1 describes the way in which during the initial wave of panic the roads leading out of London were clogged with the well-to-do retreating from the disease, and in Episode 2 the narrator admits that his decision to stay was taken despite his having ample opportunity to leave pretty much any time he wished. If, unlike Defoe’s narrator, one did not have the means to flee—a second home, the wherewithal to live in a tent or a cave for several months, or a relation living in a less-congested area willing to take you in—that person remained tied to his or her belongings, job, family, social network, and support system for his or her very life. In that sense, for the majority of those who stayed, to remain in the city during the visitation was indeed to live in a pen, dependent upon public relief, on price controls on essential foodstuffs, and on support from the local parish. The people who remained were the poor and working classes, and being poor meant to have no choice. And in what sense is that not identical with the situation in our country now?
Defoe’s London is uniformly white and Christian. We hear nothing of the plight of those few Jews who might live in the city, just emerging from centuries of practicing in secret.[2] Muslims are mentioned only in conjunction with the “predestinarianism” of their religion. And to read this book one would think there were no people of color in the whole of England. But there was most definitely an underclass, and in the author’s own words, they died “by heaps.” Compare that with our own visitation, in a “free and open” society where, for instance, African Americans as a group are poorer, more likely to have low-paying jobs that require their physical presence, less likely to be able to work from home, have a higher incidence of underlying health conditions, and less access to medical care than do whites. Not surprisingly, they also suffer a COVID-19 mortality rate that is at least twice that of their proportion in the total population and 2.7 times higher than the rate for whites.[3] While not physically confined, they are penned up in another, no less rigorous, fashion, along with other disadvantaged groups who have failed to benefit from decades of “trickle down.”
As the disease creeps into our economic system, exposing the effects of institutional racism and decades of income redistribution, it only exacerbates the differences in race and social class. Who can work from home? Who has high-speed Internet? Who has sufficient savings to weather months of unemployment? Who has access to adequate health care? The list goes on and on, and in every particular it illuminates the gulf between those who can insulate themselves from the disease and those who cannot. Nothing much has changed.
In Defoe’s plague, those with the means to do so found safety in flight. In our time, we stay at home and carry on our social and professional lives in relative safety, with nothing of the profound interruption that the shutting up of houses causes. So why do we feel so disoriented?
When people think of plague literature, they usually think first of Camus’ The Plague (La peste), and one of the questions that inevitably seems to follow concerns the relationship between that novel and Defoe’s. Certainly there are significant differences between the two, beginning with the fact that Defoe’s account is exactly what it claims to be, a journal, with not an allegorical bone in its body. Moreover, it has nothing like the character or narrative development that characterizes Camus’ work. Nonetheless, it takes its place as a founding member among a wider body of literature describing the breakdown of social and psychological order following some catastrophe, works like The Plague, José Saramago’s Blindness (Ensaio sobre e cegueira), or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
A common element in these works is the way in which they describe the experience of such times as a condition of exile. Sometimes this exile is physical—the journey along the road, the separation from one’s home or family, or the loss of a sensory organ critical to normal human life. In the Journal, there is the physical “exile” that accompanies being shut in one’s home, divorced from the outside world and, often, left on one’s own to die. But Defoe believes the exile to be deeper than this. The physical exile he describes has a psychological and spiritual dimension as well, as revealed in the language he uses to portray some of the victims, whom he describes as having “lost the government of [their] senses,” being “frighted out of one’s wits,” or “never coming to herself.” As Defoe depicts it, the sense of separation from one’s self is central to the experience of the plague at its height.
The sense of self that is encoded in terms such as self-esteem or self-worth is an integral part of our identity as social beings, as persons who come fully into “themselves” as occupying a particular place in a family, a community, and a social order. It connotes a certain agency over our lives, the power to control what happens to us. The loss of this agency, as anyone who has found herself out of work at a critical time in her life can tell you, can be devastating. It is the loss, potential or otherwise, of self at this level, fueled by separation from the predictable and the commonplace, that is the source of our own anxiety during this time of uncertainty.
But we see at once that the experiences Defoe is describing go beyond this and are to be understood fundamentally in religious terms, no less then than at any other time when people perceive themselves to be on the brink of death. And indeed, religious usages are present on every page of the novel. At the height of the visitation people attempted to reintegrate their lost selves by turning themselves over to God with a furious single-mindedness. “Looking upon themselves all as so many dead corpses, they came to the churches without the least caution, and crowded together as if their lives were of no consequence compared to the work which they came about there.” This language clearly suggests that it was a dismissal, or rather, an emptying out, of one’s earthly self (as they would have it) and an alignment with the holy that was seen as the only possible antidote to the exile they experienced.
It is impossible to remain in such as state for long. Prior to the moment of confronting immanent death, the people of Defoe’s London are the same as those anywhere. Self-absorbed, venal, contentious, sometimes kind. Defoe hopes that the experiences of the people in extremis will bring about a transformation of society and of people’s hearts, but he is no fool. Well before the danger has passed, but at the first sign that the epidemic is waning, people revert to their former ways, congregating in groups when they should remain sequestered, entertaining in their homes, even sleeping with the sick. Doctors, clergy, and city officials warned against this premature license, but, as the narrator says, “They might as well have talked to the air,” and he goes on to admit that “the general practice of the people was just as it was before, and very little difference was to be seen.” The narrator wants to end his work in a spirit of thankfulness, not hand-wringing sermonizing, but he cannot help but note in the very last paragraphs that even as the plague disappears people have forgotten the act of grace that removed it.
Still, it is important to remember that despite what appears to be the gentle moralizing of an eyewitness, a bourgeois small business owner, at the end of the day the Journal is the product of a professional novelist writing a fictionalized account of an event that took place almost sixty years earlier. As evidence of this we need look no further than his account of the abatement of the plague. That event—not the slow waning of the disease from natural causes but rather a swift stroke from God—is a literary invention designed to reflect the beliefs of a man of the narrator’s social class and upbringing and to reinforce one of the central themes of the novel: the plague as God’s judgment upon the city.
Other instances of the author’s craft are more subtle. There is, for instance, the literary form of the account itself. The work is a novel, yes, but a novel written in the style of a journal, with many of the conventions that characterize the genre. In keeping with this, Defoe makes his narrator an objective and scrupulous reporter of incidents. He cites statistics from the bills of mortality published during the outbreak, reproduces official orders verbatim, and ladens his work with references to the real streets and easily identifiable landmarks of the historical city. At the time of its publication, a reader of this account could still visit the traces of the mass graves he describes by finding their location in the book. To further the illusion of authenticity, Defoe has the narrator note the instances in which he has recorded events for which he has no reliable evidence or has not personally witnessed, and when he does venture an opinion, such as his repeated assertion that the shutting up of houses worked contrary to its purpose, he raises counter-arguments as well. A careful, balanced account. These things all tend to lull the reader into half-believing that he or she is reading something close to history, thus concealing the artist’s craft at the same time he is practicing it.
What are the shortcomings of the work? If I may be allowed to venture an opinion of my own, there are two. The first is the scarcity of any real-life characters. With few exceptions, the people we encounter in the novel are only the strangers we ourselves might see on the street. They have no interior lives, no history, no future beyond surviving the disease. The narrator has a brother, whom we hear of only in passing, and one named friend, Dr. Heath, with whom he evidently converses frequently; all the rest are reportage and hearsay.
The other shortcoming is that the work has only the barest narrative arc. The plague begins; terrible things happen for several long months; then really terrible things happen; then the plague lifts. In between are anecdote and semi-history. I believe you can argue, properly, that these are just the features you would expect of the journal as a literary form, but its seeming lack of depth in these respects forces the reader to rely more on the pleasure of the language or the terror of the events than on an understanding of the humans who experienced them for enjoyment or edification.
Finally, it remains to pay homage to the Journal for the rich iconography of the plague that it has bequeathed us. Thanks to Defoe the visual language of the plague in popular culture is firmly rooted in the cities and towns of Northern Europe, in such places as Hamelin, Bremen, London, Wismar. During visitations, people dance madly in town squares or wander crazed in the streets, having abandoned themselves to their fate. Bonfires burn at crossroads. The dead lie untended until carts carry them away to the great pits amidst cries of “Bring out your dead!” Searchers carry red staffs, and red crosses mark the doors of the dead or dying, evoking the blood-smeared doors of the Israelites during the plague in Egypt. The one ubiquitous plague image missing from the book is the rat. In fact, there is not a single mention of rats or other pests in the entire work. Instead, the plague is transmitted by “steams” or fumes, “effluvia” wafting upon the breath or lurking in the sweat of the dying. In the end, though, we can overlook this minor omission in favor of the many other images Defoe has left us, images we recognize but are happy to consign to the archives of history and memory, until a pandemic of our own comes along to rattle our self-composure.
Mark Cummings
April 2020
[1] Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life. New York, 1981. p. 85.
[2] Jews were officially expelled from England in 1290 and were not permitted to live in England and/or practice openly again until 1655.
[3] Through April 28, 2020. https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race. Accessed 4/28/2020.