The six months it took for the disease to establish itself are portrayed as a time of ignorance and denial as a kind of ‘phoney war’ mentality held sway: (Whitechapel Bars marked the eastern boundary of the City’s liberties at the junction of Aldgate High Street, Whitechapel High Street and Petticoat Lane). The author, a well-connected city merchant, locates his address with characteristic exactitude: 'I lived without Aldgate, about midway between Aldgate church and Whitechapel Bars, on the left hand or north side of the street'. Giles, the hope it would be short-lived and parochial was shattered: 'Now there died four within the city, one in Wood Street, one in Fenchurch Street and two in Crooked Lane'. By June however, there were signs it had spread to the City and after sixty-eight deaths in St. Initially deaths were few and restricted to the St. The outbreak was believed to have started in December 1664 after goods imported from Holland were carried to a house in Long Acre. The net effect was more people living in crowded and insanitary conditions than ever before, alongside a thriving population of rats, whose fleas carried the plague. He is the ever-present narrator, right in the middle of things, gathering stories in the pubs and on the street, and we see everything through his eyes, if occasionally, somewhat voyeuristically. The author, signed only as 'H.F.', is the main character with few other names given. His genius is to construct a gripping novel filled with detail, statistics, gossip, hearsay and half-remembered stories that is totally convincing.Ī good journalist, he resists the temptation to sensationalise events realising that the story is itself sensational enough. After the mortality bills, his primary sources were the many contemporaneous accounts produced in the fifty years, or so, afterwards. But the book reads best as an historical novel that mingles fact and fiction, as Defoe was barely five years old at the time of the events. Defoe collected these bills, and other plague ephemera, which must account for the great amount of detail he brings to the text. The recurring use of weekly mortality bills to chart the spread and speed of the disease in each parish, adds to the administrative feel and gives the book an underlying authority. The journal style is simple and immediate and reads like an audit for the Lord Mayor’s office at times.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine: Guignol's Band I & II John Sommerfield: Trouble in Porter Street Pamela Hansford Johnson: This Bed Thy Centre

Daniel defoe diary of a plague year