![]() “Passing through Token-House Yard in Lothbury, of a sudden a casement violently opened just over my head, and a woman gave three frightful screeches, and then cried, “O death, death, death!”īracingly vivid. Defoe, responding to demand, provided them with an instant book, fashioned out of statistics, reminiscences, gossip, anecdote and blood-curdling dramatic detail. Anticipating its spread, readers wanted to know what it had been like in 1665. Defoe’s motive for writing A Journal of the Plague Year was an outbreak of bubonic plague in Marseille in 1720. We turn to historical witnesses who can explain what it’s like. The sudden, powerful need to know what’s coming is predictable, too. ![]() “Many families,” he writes, “foreseeing the approach of the distemper laid up stores of provisions sufficient for their whole families, and shut themselves up, and that so entirely, that they were neither seen or heard of till the infection was quite ceased.” ![]() ![]() Defoe would have recognised the impulses behind the strange tableaux of life interrupted in central London: piles of ice melting outside abruptly closed bars a truck unloading gym equipment at an oligarch’s house in Mayfair jittery shoppers with overloaded trolleys. ![]()
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