Bodies are being shot from a cart into a pit by the light of a torch, which a man is holding.
6. Escape of an Imprisoned Family
The door of a house has been hacked down, and is lying on a dead body.
George Cruickshank contributed four plates to Brayley’s edition of the Journal of the Plague Year. Three of them, the ‘Dead Cart’, the ‘Great Pit in Aldgate’, and ‘Solomon Eagle’ are vivid and powerful; the fourth, ‘The Water-man’s Wife’, feeble and commonplace.
The preaching of Solomon Eagle is the subject of a picture by P. F. Poole, R.A., in the Mappin Gallery at Sheffield. The scene depicted is taken from Harrison Ainsworth’s novel Old Saint Paul’s. It shows Solomon Eagle, with the brazier of live coals on his head, nude but for a loin-cloth; and discoursing to the terrified citizens outside old St Paul’s Cathedral, during the plague. All around are strewn bodies of dead and dying: a house displays the damning red cross and the words ‘Lord have mercy upon us’. In the background bearers are carrying away a corpse to burial.
An incident, that Pepys describes in his Diary under September 3, 1665, as follows, is represented in a modern picture by Miss Florence Reason.
‘Among other stories, one was very passionate, methought, of a complaint brought against a man in the towne for taking a child from London from an infected house. Alderman Hooker told us it was the child of a very able citizen in Gracious Street, a saddler, who had buried all the rest of his children of the plague, and himself and his wife now being shut up and in despair of escaping, did desire only to save the life of this little child: and so prevailed to have it received stark-naked into the arms of a friend, who brought it (having put it into new fresh clothes) to Greenwich; where, upon hearing the story, we did agree it should be permitted to be received and kept in the towne.’
In 1679 a terrible epidemic of plague broke out in Vienna, then an opulent city, with a population of some 210,000, and the seat of Leopold, the Holy Roman Emperor. Our chief knowledge of the visitation is derived from Sorbait (Consilium medicum oder freundliches Gespräch), Abraham a St. Clara (Merk’s Wien), and Fuhrmann (Alt- und Neu-Wien). The disease was preceded by an epidemic of the ‘Hot Sickness’, (Hitzige Krankheit), which was very fatal. Bubonic plague followed in its wake and Vienna presented the spectacle of one huge lazaretto for the sick, one gigantic plague-pit for the dead. Convicts, as at Naples, were employed both to nurse the sick and bury the dead. Clothing, furniture, and bedding lay littered in the streets mixed with the dead and dying. When carts failed, the bodies were thrown into the Danube. A Plague Committee strove in vain to shut up all infected houses and segregate the inmates in lazarettos and stations of quarantine. Death by public hanging was the penalty of disobedience. Some of the royal princes, and foremost among them Prince Ferdinand of Schwartzenburg, together with many of the nobility, devoted themselves courageously to fighting the plague, undertaking even the most menial duties. But many of the citizens and the Emperor himself fled. Leopold conceived his obligations to his people discharged by a pilgrimage to Maria-Zell to pray for cessation of the plague. Then he moved his court to Prague, whence plague drove him to Linz.
During the plague the Viennese set up a wooden column, to which frequent processions were made, observing the ancient ritual of the Flagellants. At the end of the plague Leopold made a vow at St. Stephan’s to replace it by a marble column, which was duly erected in the Graben between 1687-93.
An incident of this plague, the story of the street-singer Augustin, who was thrown alive, but drunk, into the plague-pit, but escaped none the worse for his experience, recalls the like occurrence in Defoe. The man is said to have composed the familiar ‘O du lieber Augustin’ in a beer-house on the very night he was thrown into the plague-pit.