Literature of the Great Plague.
The writings called forth directly by the London Plague of 1665 were hardly more numerous or of better quality than those of 1603 and 1625. At its beginning in June, or in August, there appeared a number of tracts by enterprising practitioners, containing a few commonplace remarks on causes and the like, and advertisements of nostrums—by G. Harvey, Kemp, Garrencieres (“Plague is one of the easiest diseases in the world to cure, if” etc.), and Gadbury, an astrologer. The directions drawn up by the College of Physicians in 1636, for the preservation of the sound and recovery of the sick were re-issued, and an excellent set of “cautionary rules” by H. Brooke was published by order of the mayor. The writings which contain accounts of the Great Plague fall under two periods—the years immediately following 1665, and the years 1720 to 1723 when there was a sudden revival of interest in the subject in London owing to the great plague of Marseilles in 1720. To the latter period belongs the most famous work on the plague of 1665, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, which embodied in a picturesque form the substance of various writings that preceded it, together with traditions known to Defoe. A brief account of those writings that preceded Defoe’s in both periods will serve at the same time to show the sources of a great part of his information.
The weekly bills of mortality issued by Parish Clerks’ Hall, which showed the number of deaths week by week in each of the one hundred and forty parishes of London, with a rough classification of the causes of death, were reprinted at the end of the year 1665 in a volume with the title London’s Dreadful Visitation[1194]. The bills thus collected in convenient form were made great use of by Defoe, and became, indeed, the backbone of his work. Next to them in importance, although it is not certain that Defoe used it, is a treatise on the medical aspects of the Great Plague, which has never had the fortune to be published. The author of it was William Boghurst, a young apothecary practising at the White Hart in St Giles’s-in-the-Fields, who advertised in the Intelligencer on July 31, 1665, at the height of the plague in his parish, that he had treated forty, fifty or sixty patients in a day, that he was prepared to undertake the treatment of cases in the City, the suburbs, or the country, and that he had a water, a lozenge, and an electuary, as well as an antidote at eightpence an ounce[1195].
After the epidemic was over he employed his spare half-hours in writing a book upon his experiences, “considering that none hath printed anything either since this plague, or that forty years since—which I something wonder at.” He professes to have taken nothing from hearsay, or from books, or from the testimonies of others; he writes in English “for general readers and sale,” and he had omitted many things “so as not to make the book too tedious and too dear to bie.” The manuscript was completed for the press, with a title-page, at the foot of which is what appears to be a publisher’s name (the surname now torn off); but it was never published, although the author lived until 1685. It is conceivable that the printed sheets, or the composed type, may have been destroyed in the fire of September, 1666, and the enterprise abandoned. The manuscript came into the possession of Sir Hans Sloane, and is now in the British Museum[1196]. It gives much fuller clinical details of the plague than any other English work, although in somewhat aphoristic form; and it may be allowed the character of originality which the author claims for it, except in some of the more systematic chapters showing the influence of Diemerbroek.
Another medical essay following the plague was that of Dr Hodges, of Watling Street, first written in English in 1666 (May 8) under the title A Letter to a Person of Quality[1197], and expanded in 1671 into a Latin treatise[1198]. Besides a few pages at the beginning, giving some general facts of the London outbreak (which Defoe used), it is mostly a systematic disquisition, although a few cases are interspersed. One other medical piece of 1666 (June 16) is known, by Dr George Thomson, of Duke’s Place near Aldgate, a Paracelsist or chemical physician; it contains the account of a dissection of a plague-body, but is mostly occupied with a polemic against the Galenists, which the author carried on for a number of years in numerous other writings[1199].
Descriptive pieces, in prose or verse, such as the plagues of 1603 and 1625 elicited, are entirely wanting for that of 1665. But there was the usual crop of religious and moral exercises to improve the occasion. These appear to have come mostly, if not exclusively, from Dissenters. “Many useful and pious treatises,” says a Dissenter in 1721, “were published upon the occasion of the last visitation, as by Mr Zach. Crofton, Mr Shaw, Mr Doolittle, and others.” But the only one that attained popularity, having gone through five editions at once, and been often reprinted, even as late as 1851, was God’s Terrible Voice in the City[1200], by the Rev. Thomas Vincent, of Christ Church, Oxford, who had been ejected from his living of St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, and was then a leader of Dissent. Vincent preached in several parish churches (deserted by their parsons) all through the plague, and ministered constantly among the sick. His book, which moralizes also upon the great fire of 1666, will be drawn upon in the sequel.
We come next to the revival of interest in the Great Plague of London, which was occasioned by the Marseilles epidemic in the summer of 1720, an event that alarmed Western Europe as if the old recurrences of plague were about to begin afresh after a long interval. In London, in 1721, several books were published upon the Marseilles plague itself; and the years from 1720 to 1722 saw a whole crop of writings,—new essays and reprints of old ones,—upon the last London plague of 1665. Among the books reprinted were Hodges’ Loimologia, in an English translation by Quincy, his Letter to a Person of Quality, the Necessary Directions of the College of Physicians, the Orders drawn up by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City (these three in 1721 in a Collection of very Valuable and Scarce Pieces relating to the last Plague in 1665), and Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City. The new medical books on the Great Plague were by Scarborough, Hancock and Browne.
When Defoe in 1722 wrote his Journal of the Plague Year, he had these recent reprints and original books convenient to his hand. He had to go back to 1665 for the collection of the weekly bills of mortality in the plague-year (in a volume called London’s Dreadful Visitation), and he may have consulted Boghurst’s manuscript, which was probably then in the possession of Sir Hans Sloane. But it is impossible to trace all his copious narrative of the Great Plague to these sources, even if we make due allowance for his legitimate construction of incidents out of the generalities of contemporary writers. It is possible that he may have had some unknown manuscript, less technical than Boghurst’s, to draw from. At all events, he was a likely person to have had many stories of the plague in his memory. He was a child of four when the plague was in London, the son of a butcher named Foe in St Giles’s, Cripplegate, which was one of the most severely visited parishes. The most graphic parts of his Journal are those which contain such tales as he might have been told in boyhood concerning the plague in Cripplegate, the scene of them being carried round to Aldgate, opposite to the Butchers’ Row (still there) in Whitechapel High Street. He must have had some testimony from which to construct the visit to Blackwall, the view of the shipping moored all up and down the Thames, and the other particulars of the river-side population in the plague-time. The rough experiences of the three Stepney men in the country near London are in the manner of Robinson Crusoe, and needed only a few hints from Dekker’s stories, or from the writers of 1625. His account of the burials by the cart-load in plague-pits is also suggestive of Dekker. The somewhat meagre references by Hodges might have sufficed him for his frequent theme of the hardships and horrors of shut-up houses, even if he had not seen two other tracts, of 1665, on the same. The accounts of the Marseilles plague, one of the worst in history, would have kept him right in picturing that of London.
Whatever materials Defoe took from Hodges, Vincent, or the writers on other plagues, he enlarged them by his power of circumstantial construction into a narrative which must be accounted on the whole veracious. He based upon figures, whenever he could get them; he seems even to have sought among the archives of the City for accounts of monies distributed to the poor. He prints in full the orders of the Mayor and Aldermen, and professes to give the text of a formal resolution which they passed to remain at their posts throughout the crisis. His table of the number of plague-deaths in each of twenty-six towns or villages near London does not, indeed, agree with the figures in the parish registers, as the table on a later page will show; but it can hardly have been drawn up at a guess.
The best instance of Defoe’s skilful use of authentic documents is his description of how the infection invaded one part of London after another from the western suburbs to the eastern, so that its intensity was nearly over in one place before it had begun in another. That is the most interesting epidemiological fact in the whole outbreak; and Defoe has done ample justice to it. Boghurst had stated it with equal clearness and emphasis in his manuscript of 1666, which Defoe may or may not have seen[1201]; however the latter deduced it afresh, and illustrated it by numerous tables from the bills of mortality, which showed the incidence of plague upon each of the one hundred and forty parishes from week to week.