Reading and Remembering History in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year

Abstract

A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a fictionalised account of the bubonic plague that swept through London in 1665, highlights the uneasy accommodation that exists between Daniel Defoe’s interest in historical detail and the development of the novel, as it is generally understood. The novel both relies upon and incorporates printed historical documents, including civic orders promulgated to prevent the progress of the plague; epidemiological observations as to how infection spreads and might be forestalled; and mortality statistics published weekly throughout the epidemic (Bastian 1965, 160-1). This explicit concern with historicity is often understood to disrupt the narrative, compromising its fictional status and constraining the text’s ability to imaginatively reconstruct the history of this ‘great visitation’ (Richetti 1976, 240; 1987, 119). But this reading overlooks the fact that many eighteenth-century readers of A Journal of the Plague Year, including Sir Walter Scott, identified the text not as history but as romance — a mode that privileges imaginative and sympathetic identification with the past.