Daniel DeFoe is probably best known for his authorship of the novel, "Robinson Crusoe", and I have read that novel in abridged form years ago as a child. I plan to eventually read "Robinson Crusoe" in unabridged form (in an 1869 edition that I inherited from my grandmother), but not until I finish my current stack, so I decided to read this smaller work of DeFoe until I have time for the larger book.
As a published writer in a time when proto-newspapers were first coming into being in England, DeFoe was very savvy about writing on subjects that related to current events so that he might enhance his sales. You might call him the Patterson of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. In the year 1720 the city of Marseilles had a major outbreak of the plague (I'll have to read more of this event, but one assumes that the term 'plague' refers to various strains of bubonic plague--known in 14th century as the Black Death). The re-occurrence of the plague that devastated Marseilles caused great alarm in London, because a similar devastation of London in 1665 had not entirely disappeared in England until 1679, and memory of it was still fresh in the popular mind. This alarm created a market for a great many publications on the topic of the plague. DeFoe seized the opportunity and wrote up an account of the great plague of London in the form of an eye-witness journal of a London tradesman who stayed in the City during that terrible year.
Another cause for my interest in this story is that I have had an interest in the history of the roots of the modern world and a few years ago I read the three book series by Neal Stephenson called the Baroque Cycle. In the first of this set of novels the story opens with one of the main characters in the time after the plague and just before and during the Great Fire of London in 1666. I thought it would tie in nicely to read more of that time period.
And while I have been concentrating on works from the nineteenth century, it is nice to flash backward in history for a short time. Yes, this makes the third book I am reading simultaneously, but it helps when the other things I am reading become tedious or I just need a change.
The story is written in the first person POV, but DeFoe does a great job with this work and it really does seem as if he lived through the events portrayed in the story. His research of firsthand accounts has allowed him to paint a very real picture of the horrors of the plague. Here is an example of some of his writing; this from the part of the story where the plague is just starting to ramp up and the death toll is mounting (the narrator is at a mass grave):
…but when they came up to the pit, they saw a man go to and again, muffled up in a brown cloak, and making motions with his hands, under his cloak, as if he was in a great agony; and the buriers immediately gathered about him, supposing he was one of those poor delirious, or desperate creatures, that used to pretend, as I have said, to bury themselves: he said nothing as he walked about, but two or three times groaned very deeply and loud, and sighed as he would break his heart.
When the buriers came up to him, they soon found he was neither a person infected and desperate, as I have observed above, or a person distempered in mind, but one oppressed with a dreadful weight of grief indeed, having his wife and several of his children all in the cart, that was just come in with him; and followed in an agony and excess of sorrow. He mourned heartily, as it was not easy to see, but with a kind of masculine grief that could not give itself vent by tears: and calmly desiring the buriers to let him alone, said he would only see the bodies thrown in, and go away, so they left importuning him: but so sooner was the cart turned around, and the bodies shot into the pit promiscuously, which was a surprise to him, for he at least expected they would have been decently laid in, though, indeed, he was afterwards convinced that was impracticable; I say, no sooner did he see the sight, than he cried out aloud, unable to contain himself. I could not hear what he said, but he went backwards two or three steps, and fell down in a swoon: the buriers ran to him, and took him up, and in a little while he came to himself, and they led him away to the Pye-tavern, over against the end of Houndsditch, where it seems the man was known, and where they took care of him. He looked into the pit again as he went away, but the buriers had covered the bodies so immediately with throwing in earth, that though there was enough light enough, for there were lanterns and candles in them, placed all night round the sides of the pit, upon the heaps of earth, seven or eight, or perhaps more, yet nothing could be seen.
This was a mournful scene indeed, and affected me almost as much as the rest; but the other was awful and full of terror. The cart had in it sixteen or seventeen bodies; some were wrapped up in linen sheets, some in rugs, some little other than naked, or so loose, that what covering they had, fell from them in the shooting out of the cart, and they fell quite naked among the rest but the matter was not much to them, or the indecency much to anyone else, seeing they were all dead, and were to be huddled together into the common grave of mankind, as we may call it for here was no difference made, but poor and rich went together; there was no other way of burials, neither was it possible there should, for coffins were not to be had for the prodigious numbers that fell in such a calamity as this.
The word usage is a little different from our language today but in context one can understand the intended meaning. The last part of the passage reminds me of a line from the Pink Floyd album, "The Final Cut" from the song, “Two Suns in the Sunset”:
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
We were all equal in the end.
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