Texts for the Times
This is a period when episodes from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year come easily to mind. In one of these, his narrator decides to visit a local churchyard at night and watch the `dead-carts’, as they were called, depositing their loads into the huge pit which has been dug there. There were so many deaths that coffins have had to be dispensed with and many of the bodies come only in a sheet which unravels as they are shot into the pit. In some cases, the linen in which they had been wrapped has been stolen at some point on their journey to the churchyard.
Defoe’s narrator is not the only observer of these gruesome events. Also present is a man whose wife and children are in the cart and who collapses with grief as their corpses disappear into the ground. Those in charge of the operation take him to a local inn where he is known and looked after. The narrator eventually retires to this inn himself and finds there a group of men who have a direct view on the approaches to the churchyard and spend some of their time jeering at anyone they see who exhibits too obvious signs of grief, and especially at those who call loudly on God to forgive and protect them. He reproaches these sacrilegious mockers and receives back for his pains an earful of profane abuse. It is with satisfaction therefore that he is able to report that all of these individuals very shortly afterwards caught the plague and met miserable deaths, `every one of them carried into the great Pit’.
Things are not quite so bad now as they were in 1665 and the authorities are not quite so over-whelmed. We have not yet had to paint crosses on the doors of houses where the infected live, or pay watchmen to make sure they never to go out; and the bank card saves us from having to drop coins into a jar of vinegar when we buy meat. But some of the feelings the present crisis has provoked are quite similar, especially perhaps in the resentment felt against those who fail to take the crisis seriously and, by refusing to follow the regulations on social distancing or wearing masks, endanger not only themselves but everyone else. As far as they are concerned, we may sometimes not be too far from envying Defoe in being able to record that those who mocked him in the pub soon got their comeuppance.
The way he represents these people suggests that there is nothing to be said for them but on the issue of the causes of the plague they may well have represented a minority view he is taking care to suppress. For him, or for his narrator, the plague must be a punishment from God for the sins of the nation so that the proper response involved repentance and prayers for forgiveness, difficult though these might be to practice in public when so many clergymen had fled from London and left their churches closed or empty. But this is a position which raises intellectual difficulties Defoe is not the kind of writer to deal with easily. He realises well enough, for example, that the vengeance of the Lord is not always specifically targeted and there will be many harmlessly innocent women and children who are just as much its victims as drunken blasphemers. He attributes the licentious tone of society in recent times to the Court of Charles II, believing that `their crying Vices might, without Breach of Charity, be said to have gone far, in bringing that terrible judgement on the whole Nation’; yet he knows that when so many Londoners were dying, all the members of the Court were safely out of harm’s way. The problem also is that his awareness of the plague as a supernatural event runs parallel with his understanding that it has rational causes and can best be countered or avoided by rational means. It was in fact, he reflects, `for Want of timely entring into Measures, and Managements, as well publick as private’ that so many people died needlessly; and, as for himself, although he prays to be spared, he also adopts all the measures of social distancing his more sensible friends and neighbours take in order to have the best chance of not falling ill. There are contradictions here which Defoe struggles to resolve and which would have given much less trouble (one feels) to a writer like Dr Johnson.
The strengths of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year are not ratiocinative but its author has, as always, an unusually strong feeling for the minutiae of ordinary life. So much is this the case that one easily forgets, in reading the book, that he was only five years old in 1665, and that he published his book in 1722 after there had been rumours of the plague having re-emerged in Marseilles the year before. It is in fact the kind of fabrication characteristic of him, although one based on a good deal of research and his highly developed skills as an investigative reporter. By having a narrator who claims to be a saddler and who hesitates about leaving London but then finds himself trapped there, he is able to create a atmosphere in which the often uncertain structure of the Journal, and its frequent repetitions, are apparent signals of authenticity. That is to say that the weaknesses in the writing fulfil the same function as the narrator’s occasional confessions that he is unable to recall certain details accurately, cannot always `vouch the Truth of the Particulars’, or may have misremembered them. Defoe is especially skilled in gestures like these which work to convince readers that they are dealing with a genuine autobiographical and eye-witness account when of course they are not.
A passage which is likely to strike a chord at this present stage in our own crisis occurs when the narrator describes how, as the mortality rate began to decline, the authorities tried to warn people against easing the lockdown too quickly. `But it was all to no Purpose’, he writes,
the audacious Creatures were so possess’d with the first Joy, and so surpriz’d with the Satisfaction of seeing a vast Decrease in the weekly Bills, that they were impenetrable to new Terrors, and would not be persuaded, but that the Bitterness of Death was pass’d, and it was to no more purpose to talk to them, than to an East-wind; but they open’d Shops, went about the Streets, did Business, and conversed with any Body that came in their way to converse with …
The consequence of `this rash and foolish Conduct’, he claims, and also of an influx of people from the outlying country back into London, was a sudden increase in the number of people dying.
The Journal of the Plague Year is not a masterpiece but there are times when it is a compelling read, and this is one of them. Its chief lesson did not perhaps need such copious exemplification when we could have guessed, if we did not already know, that major crises will always bear down much more heavily on the poor than the rich. For many in London it was a time when there was an unenviable choice between safeguarding their health and putting food on the table: `I had as good have the Plague as perish for want’. The organisation of whatever poor relief there was cannot have been efficient from authorities who were struggling to cope in so many other ways, and had been taken by surprise. Part of Defoe’s motive for writing the Journal was apparently to ensure that the government should be better prepared for dealing with the plague than they had been in 1665; but since 1721 was a false alarm, he was never in a position to know whether his work had any effect: there are always voices crying wolf but it is only occasionally that he comes scratching at the door . Yet although Defoe believes that imprisoning people in their houses did not really serve its purpose, partly because he understands that sufferers from the plague could by asymptomatic and therefore a danger to others well before they fell visibly ill, he concedes that the London authorities did a reasonable job in 1665, given the challenges with which they were faced. Bubonic plague is a bacterial infection which has now been brought under control by antibiotics, and it thrived in insanitary conditions. There may therefore have been merit in such crude measures as burning the bedding and clothes of all plague victims once they were dead and, since the disease is now thought to have been carried chiefly by fleas, even in such an apparently heartless and cruel instruction that went out that all dogs and cats should be killed. Yet a more severe but, at the same time, far more effective measure came in the year following the epidemic when there was the Great Fire and most of the medieval London which Defoe describes so lovingly, with its close, airless streets and over-hanging upper stories, was burnt down. For some, this must have felt like a double dose of bad luck although for those with the mind-set of Defoe’s narrator, it might also have seemed further proof that God works in mysterious ways.