‘It was a most surprising thing, to see those Streets, which were usually so thronged, now grown desolate’
In 1665 the Great Plague swept through London, claiming nearly 100,000 lives. In A Journal, written nearly sixty years later, Defoe vividly chronicled the progress of the epidemic. We follow his fictional narrator through a city transformed: the streets and alleyways deserted; the houses of death with crosses daubed on their doors; the dead-carts on their way to the pits. And he recounts the horrifying stories of the citizens he encounters, as fear, isolation and hysteria take hold. A Journal is both a fascinating historical document and a supreme work of imaginative reconstruction.
This edition contains a new introduction, an appendix on the Plague, a topographical index and maps of contemporary London, and reproduces Anthony Burgess’s original introduction.
‘The most reliable and comprehensive account of the Great Plague that we possess’
Anthony Burgess
‘Within the texture of Defoe’s prose London becomes a living and suffering being’
Peter Ackroyd
A Journal of the Plague Year
Chronology
Introduction
Notes
Further Reading
A Note on the Text
A Journal of the Plague Year
Appendix I: The Plague
Appendix II: Topographical Index
Appendix III: London Maps
Appendix IV: Introduction by Anthony Burgess to the 1966 Penguin English Library Edition
Glossary
Notes
