A Journal of the Plague Year is an eyewitness account of the events and the experiences of one man during the year 1665, in which the bubonic plague swept through London, an epidemic that came to be called the Great Plague of London.  Written in the years preceding its publication in 1722, its author was identified only as “H.F.”, a saddler living in the Whitechapel district of East London, who is likely based on Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe, who kept a journal. Defoe intended the book as a warning that the plague in Marseilles might make its way to London and as a handbook about what and what not to do in that event. The account proceeds in a generally chronological sequence, with frequent digressions and repetitions and tables of casualty statistics, then known as bills of mortality. At first the book was thought to be a non-fiction work, largely due to the scope and accuracy of its details and anecdotes, and it is often compared to the accounts of the plague in the diaries of Samuel Pepys. By the 1780’s critics came to realize that Defoe had combined a wealth of research that conveyed a verisimilitude with his own inventions, so much so that his biographer Walter Wilson wrote that “that it is impossible to distinguish one from the other; and he has given the whole such a likeness to the dreadful original, as to confound the sceptic, and encircle him in his enchantments”.  As such, it stands as one of the first examples of an historical novel.

Download a PDF datasheet