Daniel Defoe (–1731)

Journal of the Plague Year is a careful reconstruction of catastrophe rather than a direct witness account, and that distinction shapes the entire reading experience. Defoe, writing decades after the event and drawing on research rather than memory, produces something more structured and interpretive than the immediacy found in contemporary accounts like The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Where Pepys records what he sees, often unevenly and without narrative shaping, Defoe’s narrator, H.F., show more organizes the plague into a coherent moral and social story.

That coherence is both the book’s strength and its limitation.

On the one hand, the novel offers a detailed picture of how people thought and behaved during the plague: the tension between flight and containment, the spread of rumor, the strain placed on civic systems, and the improvisational nature of survival. It reads as deeply researched and attentive to the mechanics of crisis, making it valuable as a kind of social document.

On the other hand, the interpretive layer is impossible to ignore. H.F.’s repeated insistence that survival signals divine favor becomes increasingly frustrating. The logic feels less like observation and more like justification. Survival in the text often correlates not with righteousness, but with means: the ability to leave, to isolate, to endure. The theological framing, while historically appropriate, narrows the analysis by attributing outcomes to providence rather than to material conditions.

This tension highlights a larger issue: Defoe imposes meaning on events that, in reality, would have felt chaotic and unresolved. The plague becomes not just a disaster, but a moral system, and that system reflects the biases of the narrator.

Despite this, there are moments where the book cuts through its own structure. The story of the three brothers stands out as a vivid and human episode, suggesting a more flexible, less doctrinaire understanding of survival and chance. Similarly, the closing reflections provide a sense of containment and retrospective order, even if that order is shaped by H.F.’s assumptions.

In the end, Journal of the Plague Year is best read not as a transparent window into 1665, but as a layered text: part history, part narrative, part moral argument. It is well written, thoughtful, and often compelling, but its insistence on theological interpretation can feel at odds with the more material realities it inadvertently reveals. show less

As a child I was introduced to the Ladybird version of the book, so was under the misapprehension that this was a children’s novel. It is not, as it deals with themes such as slavery, cannibalism, piracy and survival. The only other novel by Defoe I had read was Moll Flanders, so I probably should have realised this was not going to be a sanitised novel. In Wilkie Collins novel The Moonstone the old butler whenever he was troubled or needed guidance would seek it in the pages of Robinson show more Crusoe, rather like a moral oracle. I found this curious, surely for a good victorian the Bible would have been the book to turn to. Finally I now understand why, Crusoe is the story of a man who despite appalling circumstance never gives into despair and melancholy, while at the same time remaining resolutely human. Sometimes in novels these great hero’s feel out of reach, like they are set apart, but Crusoe demonstrates that as well as heroism there is also fear and cowardice, humanity and savage violence. While it is certainly a novel about surviving slavery and shipwreck, to leave it at that is to miss its depth, its message of hope that however bad our external circumstances may be we still have the power to make the best of them. show less

We all learnt of the 1665 Black Death in school- "Bring out your dead"; plague pits, infected houses marked....but what was it LIKE living through it? What were the feelings, the responses, of the people?
This is an absolutely FASCINATING social document, visiting topics I'd never really pondered.
Daniel Defoe was only 5 at the time; he seems to have re-worked notes kept by his Uncle Henry Foe, who lived through it, unscathed, after ignoring advice and remaining in the city.
A recurrent theme show more is Defoe's conviction that the state policy of barricading an infected family (the healthy along with the dying)in their home, with a guard on the door, did no good at all. He tells of much dissimulation, so that the authorities shouldnt find out; of people fleeing (and spreading the disease far afield) for fear of being so confined.
Many who could escape did so...though patrols began preventing outsiders from entering the parish and possibly infecting them. Many were living rough in tents throughout that summer (it reached a crescendo in Aug/Sep).
Religion and sundry dire prognostications became more important. Defoe observes an eradication of usual religious differences as Dissenting ministers stepped into the breach to hold services for other sects (their own priests having died or fled.)
Terror and trauma naturally abound; suicides of those who realise the tell tale signs of the "distemper".
Defoe considers the govt to have done a pretty good job at ensuring constant food; at ensuring the burials were done promptly and at night. A lot of donations were received- though with the economy almost shot, there was much need of it.
And, with the realisation by the late autumn, that it was on the way out, an imprudent rush to resume normal living.

When youve read this, you realise more strongly than ever, that whatever covid is, it assuredly ISNT any kind of pandemic!! show less

This is one of those classics that a lot more people know about, and even have opinions about, than have read it. And somehow I'd missed reading it up till now, myself. I found it surprisingly readable -- after all, it was published in 1719, in archaic English, and it is notoriously tedious in its repetitive and detailed accounts of Crusoe's planting and other activities to sustain himself on his island. The detail is almost Thoreau-like, in its accounting of barley-planting and harvesting, show more bread-making, etc.

You could read the story as a straight-forward adventure. How does Crusoe come to be marooned? How can he sustain himself, for over 20 years, most of it alone, on the island? How will he survive against the native cannibals on other islands? Will he ever escape the island? All good stuff, and it helps to make the book more of a page-turner than you might think.

But another way to look at it is as a kind of (fictional) memoir of personal growth, from the perspective of an early 18th century Englishman. Defoe himself was bound for the ministry as a young man, but changed course. His character, Crusoe, abandons not the ministry itself but the normal course of life set out for him by his family. He leaves home at a young age, against his father's wishes, and sets out to sea. He wanders through adventures along the Africa coast before his fateful trip across the ocean to "the Brasils".

Crusoe's life on the island begins with self-pity, but he undergoes both a spiritual and psychological awakening -- one that inspires him to the hard work and strong mind that support his many years alone on the island. At first, this awakening is a kind of religious conversion, and Defoe revisits that theme of the lone man's relationship with God throughout the book. But it comes and goes, self-consciously in the writing. Defoe does not fall into a simple story of reliance on faith to get Crusoe through his ordeal -- to a great extent, it's Crusoe who gets Crusoe through his ordeal. In fact, there is a consistent ambivalence toward faith throughout the story right to the end, excepting Crusoe's initial spiritual awakening.

The story can be read as a kind of externalization of the path of self-development that anyone growing into adulthood must take.

The role of Friday was a little surprising to me. Mainly, what's surprising is how late in the story Friday arrives. It's hard not to comment on Crusoe's treatment of Friday, how Friday pledges his service to Crusoe after Crusoe has rescued him from (other) cannibals, and how Crusoe first teaches Friday to call him "Master". Much of this has to be seen as a reflection of an early 18th century outlook, including Crusoe's conversion of Friday to Christianity. It has all the feel of assumed superiority, myths about the spiritual depravity of native peoples, and all the rest. No excuses for any of that. show less