Title page of Journal of the Plague Year
Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is a factitious account of 1664-1665 in England, a period when mainland Britain experienced some of its worst outbreaks of plague infection. Hot, dry weather and the behavior of English citizens, particularly those living in London and other large seaports, inadvertently helped the spread of disease. People fleeing from infected cities took infection with them, bringing it inland, away from the ports that were the classic loci of illness. Historians studying the outbreak generally suggest that the fire of London in 1666 helped to stem and break the tide of infection, although it may have been ebbing naturally before then.
The trick with the Journal is that Defoe was only 4 or 5 years old in 1665; while he may have been precocious, writing an entire novel about experiences he may have only barely understood at the time would have been a real feat! The Journal was written in the early 1700s, within living memory of the plague years of the 1660s but not in the heat of the moment. The edition featured here was republished in 1888 under the aegis of Henry Morley, an educator, writer, and lecturer who popularized a series of reprints called Morley’s Universal Library:
Titles in Morley's Universal Library
Morley wrote pedagogical introductions to his volumes — which span a wide range of topics and titles as the above list demonstrates — and planned a 14-volume history of England, but died before he could finish it.
This copy of the Journal provides insight into the history of publishing in Britain: what titles might have been popular, what was being marketed to what audience — Victorian Britain had a strong sense of the need for self-improvement and entire societies were dedicated to educating the working- and lower-classes in particular, traditionally seen as undereducated or even ineducable for anything higher than manual labor. And, of course, the Journal provides scholars with a valuable digital copy of a text which provides a fascinating look at the plague experience in England, a fictionalized account to set next to Samuel Pepys’ recollections in his famous diary.
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