A-Z 2021 D: A Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe, 1722)

 

There's a tendency among many people to think that modern culture is more knowledgable about how to handle disasters.  That we've learned from the past, and won't repeat it.  We've got modern technology, we won't have the same kinds of problems arising that were around in the past.  Technology, however, can only go so far.  It doesn't get you past human nature, or sheer bullheadedness, and certainly won't get you around misinformation.  And so, we have a book about the 1665 plague epidemic in London that just... keeps... looking like what the last year looked like.  And thus, we get what we just lived through.

Let's address the nature of this book, first.  A Journal of the Plague Year is not precisely what it claims to be.  It's a work of fiction, and yet manages to be possibly the most authoritative book on the realities of urban life during a plague epidemic.  It was written as a warning of sorts, trying to give the people of London a heads-up as to what it would look like if the plague epidemic that was active at the time in Marseilles were to take hold there, and Daniel Defoe went out of his way to do a vast amount of research.  However, a nonfiction work wouldn't have necessarily gotten to the masses the way he needed; it had to be formatted as a novel instead.

What Defoe crafted here is, ostensibly, a document that relates the experiences of a Londoner who lived through the epidemic, combining statistics and primary documents with anecdotes and narration to create what is less a journal and more a long-form history of the titular plague year, beginning with the first deaths from the plague in early 1665 and finishing with the return to something resembling normalcy at the end of the year.  It's formatted as something akin to the narrator writing down a remembrance after everything has ended; several times the Great Fire of London is alluded to in a religious context.  The narrator (a "Dissenter", as Defoe himself was) posits that the "Visitation" (itself rather a telling word) of the plague is God punishing the sinners of London, and that the Great Fire the following year is a follow-up when everything returns to the old ways so quickly afterward.

Defoe's narrator often goes on tangents, breaking midway through discussing one topic to go to another, but manages to always come back and finish the thought.  This is most obvious in the case of an extended anecdote he delivers, making up close to 1/10 of the book, about several men making their way about the countryside over the months of the epidemic while trying to find somewhere safe to ride it out.  The story, which functions largely as a way to describe the effects of the plague outside of London, is introduced about 60 pages in, but then gets left aside almost immediately, and isn't returned to for another 60 pages.  There aren't any loose ends left of this nature; if something is brought up and left unfinished, it is always returned to.

So, how is this all relevant now?  Well, let me give a quick summary of the overall narrative we see in the book:

• News of the pandemic appearing overseas happens
• A couple of overseas travelers die of the plague in London
  
• Trade and travel from the location where the initial outbreak was occurring is shut down.
• The plague starts to gain a foothold in London
• Numbers are manipulated by those in power to make it look like everything is under control until the point where it's impossible to pretend otherwise
• People start to engage in social distancing, doing everything they can to not breathe near anyone who might be sick
• Most of the people with the means to isolate themselves effectively (e.g. clergy, rich folks) skip town, while poor folks have to take the crappy high-infection-risk jobs to make sure everything keeps working and they have food to eat, and largely get sick as a result
• Everything shuts down
• Quacks start peddling sure-fire remedies for the illness
• Everyone starts looking at everyone else suspiciously, nobody wants to let anyone from out of town into any village
• Death tolls rise, then begin to fall again
• Everyone decides that the numbers falling means it's all over, stop behaving intelligently while the disease is still present
• Numbers go up briefly but then resume downward trend
• Everything's fine, we can go back to normal now, everyone back into London and let's proceed without having learned anything from all this
• Next year, everything burns

So... in the current pandemic, I believe we're at the 'Everyone decides that...' step right now.  And unfortunately, looking outside, I get the sense that we're facing another year of 'everything burns', too.  I could write a lot more about the parallels here, but...  welcome to pandemic fatigue, I just don't want to.

It's no surprise that this book was one of the top classics sold last year.  At least once, UK sellers actually ran out of copies of Penguin's edition.  It's basically a blueprint for... well... exactly what we saw happen this time around.  What's that thing where you don't learn from history?  Oh yeah, you repeat it.

But we're definitely a more advanced society now than in the 1600s.  I mean, they didn't even have cell phones or antibiotics or social media to tell them what to believe!