Interesting book to read during the COVID pandemic. A lot of eerie similarities. ( )

Even 400 years after the plague, we are still making the same mistakes they did. ( )

Even 400 years after the plague, we are still making the same mistakes they did. ( )

I wanted to read this book, since I couldn't get"The Plague" by Camus on an ecopy, to see any similarities between now, in March and April of 2021, and the spring and summer of 1665. There were many. DaFoe took his uncle's notes from living through the bubonic plague striking London, and turned them to a fictionalized account. People thought it was catching through the air, and through contact with those who were sick. Fleas are what spread "the black death." There were empty streets, when they were normally thronging with people. There was a great outpouring of charity to give food to those who were sick at home and out of work. So many died everyday that the dead were buried in Mass graves. I think there were about 100,000 died. ( )

The year is 1665, and the plague has come to London. It has come like a thief in the night, stealing into town one or two fatalities at a time and then growing to a level that is uncontrollable and unimaginable. The account is fiction, since Devoe was too young to have remembered most of the events he covers, but it is so obviously based on the first-hand memories of those who did survive and the records of the time, that it reads like non-fiction. The voice of the narrator reinforces the feeling of reality by inserting from time to time his assertions that this is his own recollection, not necessarily the only truth or full truth, but the truth as he can tell it, as it seemed to him at the time.

What I found the most interesting about this account was the correlations I could draw to the attitudes and reactions to the disease, as it pertains to our own situation with the COVID-19 pandemic. If anything would make you feel better about the current situation, it would be hearing the details of what people endured during this one. We think social distancing and sheltering in place is difficult, but imagine being locked into your house, and having your children confined with you, because one person in the household has the disease. Instead of removing the sick person and caring for the well, the sound were penned inside with the ill, and in almost every house that experienced this scenario, every person inside died.

There were looters (sadly this has not changed), who took advantage of the emptied houses and businesses that were unable to function. What a sad commentary on mankind that these people would be willing to steal, even at the risk of contracting this horrid disease.

The power of avarice was so strong in some that they would run any hazard to steal and to plunder; and particularly in houses where all the families or inhabitants have been dead and carried out, they would break in at all hazards, and without regard to the danger of infection, take even the clothes off the dead bodies and the bed-clothes from others where they lay dead.

There were charlatans who preyed upon the desire of people to get well or avoid getting sick. There were, happily, also those who risked their own lives in caring for the sick, in feeding those who fled in hopes of outrunning the plague, in carrying away the dead bodies so that they did not rot in the houses and streets and endanger even more of the population. This kind of courage we also see today.

I think it ought to be recorded to the honour of such men, as well clergy as physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, magistrates, and officers of every kind, as also all useful people who ventured their lives in discharge of their duty, as most certainly all such as stayed did to the last degree; and several of all these kinds did not only venture but lose their lives on that sad occasion.

People were asked to distance themselves from one another, but many defied the warnings and mingled at will, some had no choice but to go abroad to obtain necessities, some had jobs (nursing, carrying off the dead, supplying the houses that were locked down, ministering to the people) that prevented them from distancing. Many fled the city into the country, and as a result were either prohibited from passing through towns and died of want, or inadvertently spread the disease to areas that might have otherwise escaped the blight. More than a few paid with their lives.

I enjoyed reading most of this account. There was a tendency toward repetition, and there was no attempt to make the narrator anything other than an observer, so there was no central figure on which to hang one’s hopes or emotions. It was a recounting of the most horrible things that could have and did happen during this tormenting event. I confess to being brought to a gasp by the killing of all the animals: dogs, cats and ponies, in an effort to stop the spread of the disease. This, without any understanding that a flea was most likely responsible for the disease in the beginning. This was simply a measure I had not considered when imagining what had happened during the battle against the plague, and one that took me off-guard more than all the human suffering, which I was entirely braced for.

If you ever think there is something going on in this world that has never been experienced before, it is good to turn to history and realize you are wrong. Others have endured all this and more. It is good to be grateful for what has changed; it is odd to realize how little has changed. It is the story of your life, but perhaps it is just the story of life.
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