Aug. 6th.
“Greenwich worse than ever it was, and Deptford too.”
Aug. 9th.
Aug. 10th.
} “Mrs. Rawlinson is dead of the sickness ... the mayde also is dead.”
It will be observed that the Plague lingered until the Great Fire of September 2 drove it clean away.
The best—that is, the most graphic—account of the Plague is that of Daniel Defoe. It is, perhaps, too long. The mind grows sick in the reading. He presents us, after his favourite method, with a series of pictures and portraits of individuals. When it is remembered that his book appeared in the year 1720, the year, that is, of the great Plague of Marseilles, and fifty-five years after the event, it is generally believed that his history is a work of pure fiction. I think it can be shown, however, that it was not a work of fiction at all, but simply a work of recollection. To the old man of sixty came back the memories and the tales that he had heard as a boy not yet in his teens.
Defoe was born in the year 1661. His father lived in Cripplegate, where, as we know, he had a shop. The child, therefore, was four years of age in the Plague year. A child of four observes a great deal and may remember a great deal. Children vary very much in respect to observation and memory. For instance, a child would remember, perhaps, anything out of the common in the buying and selling of goods in his father’s shop, where he looked on at the customers. Defoe says: “When anyone bought a joint of meat, he would not take it out of the butcher’s hand, but took it off the hooks himself; on the other hand, the butcher would not touch the money, but put it into a pot full of vinegar which he kept for that purpose. The buyer carried always small money to make up any odd sum, so that he might take no change.” This must surely have been seen by the child and remembered. It happened in his own father’s shop before his eyes. Another thing. The Great Fire not only drove the lingering Plague out of the City, but actually drove away the memory of it. Who could talk or think about the Plague with this other awful affliction to consider? Now Cripplegate—where the child Defoe lived—was not touched by the Fire; it was very heavily afflicted by the Plague, but the Fire spared it. Therefore to the people of Cripplegate the Plague continued as the chief incident in their lives; they continued to talk of their adventures, their escapes, their sufferings, and their bereavements long after the people within the walls had left off thinking of theirs. And the boy grew up amid such talk. Therefore he was never allowed to forget his childish impressions. The awful silence in the streets, save for the shrieks and groans of the plague-stricken; the rumbling of the burial carts at night; the houses deserted, infected, no longer marked but left with open doors ready for the robber who roamed about with impunity till Death seized him and he fell; the poor wretch, gone mad with terror and suffering and bereavement, moaning and crying in the street; the closed shops; the poor creatures sitting down in any porch or on any stall to die—all these things were told to the boy over and over again, until they were burned into his brain, to be reproduced in the most wonderful account of a plague that has ever been written. Therefore, and for this reason, Defoe’s History is a real history; the incidents are not invented but remembered. While we allow something for the embroidery of the novelist we must acknowledge that we have a contribution to the history of that terrible year larger, fuller, more human, than we can find in Pepys or in Evelyn, or in any other contemporary authority.
DANIEL DEFOE (1661–1731)
From a print in the British Museum.