It has been compared to the diary of Samuel Pepys, which I haven’t read so I can’t comment, but Defoe really strove for accuracy and his attention to detail makes this feel more realistic. which may be a reference to his uncle, Henry Foe, who, like the narrator, was a saddler who lived in the Whitechapel district of East London at the time of the plague. He originally published it under the initials H. Defoe was actually 5-years-old at the time of the Great Plague, the last outbreak of the bubonic plague in London, and so this is a fictionalised diary rather than a representation of Defoe’s own experience. It was very interesting but, honestly, I found sections rather difficult to get through because they reflected our own situation so vividly.Īlthough the book was first printed in 1722, Defoe is reflecting on the events of the plague outbreak in 1665. I think I made a mistake when I decided to read this book this year. Above all it is the stories of appalling human suffering and grief that give Defoe’s extraordinary fiction its compelling historical veracity. Purporting to be an eye-witness, Defoe’s fictional narrator recounts in vivid detail the rising death toll and the transformation of the city as its citizens flee and those who remain live in fear and despair. Summary: Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year is an extraordinary account of the devastation and human suffering inflicted on the city of London by the Great Plague of 1665.
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