Archetypes of London enshrouded by the darkness of plague
Our plague was characterised by the emptiness of Oxford Street, deserted Waitrose supermarkets and the mind-numbing silence of our favourite rumbling, bustling city. Defoe’s uncle’s plague (whose accounts may have inspired Journal of the Plague Year) was characterised by a decrepit wooden cart that carried away the languid, buboes-covered corpses of those struck by the disease, with their local grim reaper crying: “bring out your dead!” (Jordison, 2020). Sometimes, the bodies were left to fester for several days before burial, emitting their putrid fog of decay. Instead, pristine, fresh coffins with musky odours and little funerals marked by the pungent, electric stench of hydro-alcoholic gels and disinfectants were what we came to witness when our loved ones died.
We retreated to the confinement units of our bedrooms with fuzzy blankets, cups of tea, books and smartphones – Solomon Eagle foundered around the streets of the Fleet, fully nude on occasion, with a “pan of burning charcoal on his head” (Ibid., 2020) crying out and renouncing the sins of London’s dwellers. We may have prayed but we never let the disease spread through the parishes of St. Andrew’s Holborn, St. Clement’s Danes or St. Mary Wool Church, where those afflicted with ‘distemper’ or ‘spotted feaver’ or ‘teeth’ were buried (Defoe, 1722). Our bedrooms became our churches (and mosques, in my case at least).
Click-bait rumours and chain text messages about ‘cures’ for Covid, from salt-water gargles to aspirin tablets, were used to mislead us. Street astrologers, quack doctors and wizards were used to mislead them (Kavanagh, 2020). Armed watchmen who shut down plague-stricken homes and neighbourhoods and imposed house arrest in their days metamorphosed into black, white, neon-yellow clad metropolitan police, whose strongest deterrent was a £800 fine, in our days of plague (BBC News, 2021).
Defoe’s work and its accuracies in depicting the Black Death-infested city of London serves as a striking contrast to our plague experience, which seems quite diluted and less morbid by comparison. Apart from our socio-economic privilege, the privilege of time, technology and development is one that we have to consider.
It really is fiction, don’t be fooled
I found it unusual that Defoe depicts several of his works as authentic contemporary accounts and observations even though most of them weren’t. Don’t let the excessive ‘logos’ of the text (with its many tables and statistics) misguide you. Robinson Crusoe was supposedly written by a stranded man who lived on an island for 28 years, Moll Flanders stemming “from her own memorandums” and A Journal of the Plague Year allegedly stemmed from direct accounts of the plague (given that the book was credited to HF, this may have authentically been the perspective of his uncle who was alive when the plague raged across London) (Jordison, 2020).
Bibliography
BBC News, 2021. Covid: £800 house party fines to be introduced in England. [Online]
Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55757807#:~:text=Fines%20of%20%C2%A3800%20for,a%20maximum%20of%20%C2%A36%2C400.
[Accessed 21 Jan 2021].
Defoe, D., 1722. A Journal of the Plague Year. London: E. Nutt.
Jordison, S., 2020. A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe is our reading group book for May. [Online]
Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/apr/28/a-journal-of-the-plague-year-by-daniel-defoe-is-our-reading-group-book-for-may
[Accessed 2021].
Kavanagh, D., 2020. Daniel Defoe: ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ – 1722. [Online]
Available at: https://www.londonfictions.com/daniel-defoe-a-journal-of-the-plague-year.html#
[Accessed 2021].