Defoe's Plague Year was written in 1722 but speaks clearly to our time
Reading A Journal of the Plague Year, the first uneasy jolts of recognition come on page one. The narrator tells us that he and his neighbours heard that the plague was “return’d again in Holland” at the beginning of September 1664. We are told the government were given warnings but kept their private counsel; that the people began either to forget this foreign problem, or to regard it “as a thing we were very little concern’d in”.
As I write this in May 2020, the parallels with our initial response to a problem far off in China are so striking that it feels almost ridiculous to point them out. And so it goes: turn the page, and we get the first report of the “weekly Bills” showing the increase in deaths in each parish in London, which
are obsessively noted by our narrator throughout his account. The tallies provide their own grim commentary on the terror of the sickness, just like the deaths tolls we’ve been receiving every day for weeks.
Then we find out that these tallies may not be reliable. The authorities’ figures are always low: “The next Bill was from the 23rd of May to the 30th, when the Number of The Plague was 17: But the Burials in St Giles’s were 53, a frightful Number! Of whom they set down but 9 of the Plague.” Later it was discovered at least 20 more “were really dead of the plague”, but had been “set down of the Spotted-Feaver or other Distempers, besides others concealed.” In 1665 as in 2020, the figures for excess deaths give a more useful insight than the number of deaths actually attributed to the infection.
The parallels continue. The narrator notes that the measures necessary to contain the outbreak were taken too late:
That’s hard to read, here in posterity. Elsewhere, there are haunting passages about the emptiness of familiar streets, “for when the people came into the streets from the country by Shoreditch and Bishopsgate, or by Old
Street and Smithfield, they would see the out-streets empty and the houses and shops shut, and the few people that were stirring there walk in the middle of the streets.”
We can all now recognise his wonder that London should be so quiet. I also felt a queasy recognition of my own habit of walking down the middle of roads to avoid people.
Defoe is also fascinating on self-isolation. We haven’t yet got to the stage of painting red crosses on the doors of infected houses, or posting guards outside so that the people starving and dying inside can’t escape. Nor have we imposed the 40-day isolation period that gives “quarantine” its name. But any reader today will recognise the fear and pity with which the narrator talks about the people who have the disease and may transmit it, especially those who do so unwittingly:
Breathed death! Unsurprisingly, everyone in Defoe’s London is jumpy. And it’s not just people they have to fear. There’s little mention of the rats whose fleas transmitted the plague – but there are familiar worries about household pets. Horrifyingly, Defoe notes, “a prodigious number of those creatures were destroyed. I think they talked of 40,000 dogs, and five times as many cats.”
Defoe also tells us of the rich fleeing to the country and taking death with them, noting how the poor are far more exposed to the disease. He describes “quacks and mountebanks” peddling false cures and the poor people who “even poisoned themselves beforehand for fear of the poison of the infection”.
The correspondences are so clear that it feels strange to remember that Defoe was describing events 355 years ago – and that A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, is not even a firsthand account. But in that, at least, there’s hope. It may often feel like Defoe is writing about our present, but this is a book set in the past tense. “A dreadful Plague in London was,” he writes at the end. And this too, shall pass.
1980 and later filmed with Sean Connery and Christian Slater), though for me it also brings to mind famous Pomposa abbey near Ferrara and a hundred other medieval piles. The bestselling writer and academic brilliantly conveys carvings and frescoes through the way they blow the mind of young novice Adso. This mix of history and mystery is a readable way in to Eco’s writings on love, learning and the search for meaning, while also evoking the ancient worlds and dramatic scenery that Italy does so well.
Acqua Alta by Donna Leon
With bodies discovered in canals, piazzas and even La Fenice opera house, the Venice of Commissario Guido Brunetti has, a bit like Inspector Morse’s Oxford, an astonishingly high rate of intriguing murders. Donna Leon’s 29 detective novels are all set in, or near, the city she lived in for decades and have a passionate fan base everywhere except Italy (they have never been translated into Italian). Lovers of La Serenissima at its less-touristy will like this story that unfolds in grim February weather, with acqua alta(floods) in the city (as happened last autumn). With food even more important than life and death in Italy, the book opens evocatively with opera singer Flavia in her kitchen chopping onions, garlic, tomatoes and “two fat-bottomed aubergines”.
Ratking by Michael Dibdin
Umbria was being called the new Tuscany 20 years ago, but its arty, walled capital, Perugia, is still underrated, despite budget flights to San Francesco d’Assisi airport. Bestselling crime writer Dibdin transplanted himself to the city as a university English teacher in the 1980s and in this, his first Aurelio Zen novel, the Venetian
detective is unexpectedly posted to the city known for “chocolates, Etruscans, that fat painter, radios and gramophones, the University for Foreigners, sportswear”. I could recommend all of Dibdin’s 11 complex, satirical and sometimes surreal Zen books, as each is set in a different part of Italy: Vendetta in wonderful Sardinia, say, or A Long Finish among the vineyards of Piedmont.