If reading Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year has made you want to hear more from the people who witnessed the events of 1665 and 1666, you’re in luck. There are plenty of genuine accounts from that remarkable time.
Some are strange and confusing to read now. Take Thomas Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City. (There’s no denying the power of that title.) Vincent was deeply immersed in the horrors of the plague, having lost seven family members – which makes it all the stranger that he doesn’t seem to care about the disease. Vincent was a dissenting minister, and far more interested in citing biblical precedent over what was actually happening on the ground, linking the 1665 and 1666 events to London’s sinning “drunkards and swearers”. But the book is as all the more striking for those omissions and a useful counterpoint to Defoe. Where the latter describes much that we can recognise now, Vincent reminds us that the past is also a foreign country.
There’s a similar fascination to Loimologia, a book written by a physician called Nathanial Hodges, first published in Latin in 1672 and translated in 1720. Hodges opens with head-spinning descriptions of how the “predictions of astrologers” spread fear among the “meaner sort” of people and so “rendered their constitutions less able to resist the Contagion”.
But there’s also more down-to-earth material. He gives a remarkable firsthand account of seeing the “black hue” of the buboes on a “young man in fever”, of the crosses on people’s doors, and the “shutting up of houses”. Defoe borrowed liberally from such passages, as well as the details Hodges provides about where and when the plague was prevalent, the public health measures taken to protect the “trembling inhabitants” from calamity, and the “quacks” who tried to profit from it. He is wonderfully damning of the latter, even if his own science may sometimes seem questionable. For example, he writes “it is clear as Light at Noon-Day” that
The Pestilence is a disease arriving from an Aura that is poisonous, very subtle, deadly and contagious, affecting many Persons at the same Time together in one Country chiefly arriving from a Corruption of the nitrous Spirit in the Air, attended with a Fever and other grievous symptoms.
The best measure of just how grievous comes in London’s Dreadful Visitation, a book of the “bills of mortality” and all the burials in the city compiled by Ellen Cotes in 1665. It is the definition of stark reading, although probably only of interest to historians or anyone curious about where Defoe got his figures.
More compelling is a book that Defoe himself could never have seen: the diary of Samuel Pepys. This is the calamity played out in real time, from 30 April 1665 where a long diary entry on other matters ends with the words:
“Great fears of the Sicknesse here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.”
God didn’t preserve them, although it took a while before Pepys started to really worry. A month later, on 28 May, he briefly brings up the topic of “sickness”, only to break off because he’s far more interested in something he saw that day - “a fine rarity: of fishes kept in a glass of water that will love so for ever; and finely marked as they are, being foreign.”
Just over a week later, he records: “This day, much against my Will, I did in Drury-lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there – which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind to that to my remembrance I ever saw.”
From then on, references to the plague come thick and fast. Soon he’s drawing up his will. There’s a chilling entry on 10 August 1665 when he finds himself dining with Alderman Bence, whose wife was then sick – a detail “which continued a trouble to me all the time I was there.” There’s the death of Pepys’ physician just a few days later, a “poor unfortunate man”. And then, by October, Pepys observes that when he is in the highway there comes “close by the bearers with a dead corps of the plague; but Lord, to see what custom is, that I am come almost to think nothing of it.”
It’s a treasure-trove of insight and information. There is startling and brilliant observation of the horrors he experienced. That said, he’s often as interested in making notes about his extramarital liaisons, his periwigs and his nocturnal “pissing” as he is about the ongoing calamity. Even when the plague is at its height, Pepys gives over more space to notes about where he has dined, the money he has invested in Tangier and all the rest of his day-to-day life. Which is part of the fascination. Like us, Pepys had to find a way to live with so much death around him – and to escape it. His account becomes remarkable for how little he mentions the plague, a gradual descent until October 1666 where he writes that he is off to the playhouse to see “the first play I have seen since before the great plague” and we realise it’s all safely in the past tense. It’s enough to make you almost hopeful.
