Episódios
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Although the London plague was not a pandemic as we now understand the word, for the citizens of that great capital, the experience of it was total. For those that did not flee the disease, the City was the World. In this postscript, I present some reflections on life during the plague in London as Defoe described it and offer some comparisons to our experiences during a pandemic of our own.
Credits:Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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Here at the end we find a bit of literary license, for the abatement of the plague is depicted by Defoe as a swift and decisive stroke from heaven, “the immediate finger of God." Suddenly the plague abates, and one week, on a day (a Thursday!) that is distinguished with such specificity that it is almost like reentering historical time after the nightmare plague, the bills of mortality show a precipitous drop in deaths from the disease. Physicians marvel that their sick patients appear to be recovering; strangers greet each other in the streets with expressions of amazement and gratitude to God; and the city rejoices.Defoe would like to end his account on a positive note, so he brings it to a close without going into the “unpleasing work,” as he puts it, of detailing the return to vice and immorality of the city, its lack of thankfulness for the reprieve that has been granted them. He has clearly made of the plague a morality tale, but here, as throughout the work, he chooses only to report on what he has seen and to allow readers to draw their own conclusions from the account.So this ends the reading of A Journal of the Plague Year. While it’s been a long and harrowing journey, if you’ve come this far you’ve clearly formed some impressions of the work as a whole and, possibly, its relationship to the concerns of our time. In that spirit, I’ve appended a postscript representing some of my own thoughts. If you’re interested, I invite you to “stay tuned” for one more episode. Thank you very much for your time and attention these past few months!
Credits:Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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Having reached very near the end of his narrative, the author is in a mood to reconcile his accounts, and in a spirit of tolerance he strikes a balanced tone, urging that compassion color the judgments made, particularly of those clergy and physicians who fled the city in fear. Here and there is a settling of scores, particularly with respect to quacks, mountebanks, and prognosticators, but in general he is inclined to forgive and move on, both as a matter of personal inclination and as a literary device toward concluding his story. He lists various offices that, in the main, distinguished themselves by their devotion to duty, speaks of the largely useless efforts to purge and purify houses affected by the distemper, and ends this episode as he began it, with a swipe at the uninvolved and indifferent national government.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits:Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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More on how the decline in the mortality rate put the people of London “past all admonitions.” As in the last episode, the author chronicles the city’s return to the usual vices and immoralities once the danger was perceived to have passed (which it had not), and the failure of all attempts to lessen the chances of reinfection. One of the more moving notes in the episode could almost pass unnoticed, so little emphasis is it given, as he describes how people returning from the countryside found entire families of their acquaintance wiped out, so stricken by the plague that there was no remembrance of them, and no trace of their belongings. At the end of this episode, Defoe describes the premature relocation of certain mass graves.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]Credits:
Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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Here is an account, as they say, “ripped from the headlines.” In the early fall of the year, following a week in which no fewer than 8,200 people died of all diseases, the plague began to abate, and the mortality rate dropped. No sooner did the epidemic begin to loosen its grip on the city than people began restarting their public lives in earnest, gathering in groups, visiting each other’s homes, going to taverns, and returning to work, where they had it. People who had fled the city, hearing this, began to return. Predictably, as their physicians and clergy warned, this behavior allowed the disease to rebound for a time before finally subsiding in earnest with the onset of winter. The author wonders whether the “precipitant disposition” of people to disregard reason and common sense is the same everywhere but will not commit himself to answer. Our own recent experiences, I think, argue strongly in favor of the proposition.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits:Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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Here continues a brief review of trade during the plague, this time with an emphasis on domestic trade. The author discusses the provision of coal and foodstuffs to the city and the general state of the trades, which naturally suffered tremendously during the visitation but which rebounded following the great fire in the summer of the next year, which consumed not only households but also the contents of the great warehouses along the river. In the aftermath of the fire, replacing those goods, including manufactures destined for the rest of England and for the Continent, fueled massive reemployment.This episode also makes mention of the great coal-fueled bonfires that the authorities placed strategically around the city in an effort to ward off the disease. The author punctuates his account with a discussion of the difference between atmospheric and coal-fired heat, the former, he claims, sustaining vermin and venomous creatures that breed in food, plants, and even in our bodies, the latter assisting to clear and purge the air of noxious, disease-bearing particles. While he does not elaborate, apparently the public fires became such a menace in and of themselves that they were extinguished upon the vigorous protest of certain physicians.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits:Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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In a welcome respite from his catalog of horrors, the author looks beyond the streets of London and considers the effect of the disease on trade and commerce, starting here with its impact on foreign trade. London in 1665 was the second most populous city in Europe, after Paris, and English ships were part of a burgeoning international trade with Europe, certainly, but also with its colonies in the Americas. At the same time, England was involved in a series of wars with the Dutch that would result in continued Dutch naval supremacy. Naturally, the arrival of the plague in London did not help either the war effort or British foreign trade, as ships departing from London were not allowed to dock at most European ports. For a time, English ports along the coasts continued to prosper, but finally the arrival of the plague in those cities, accelerated by trade with the capital, shut them down as well. And, as related here, the Dutch and others fully capitalized on the situation to increase their economic advantage.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits:Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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Now the author returns to a consideration of the first months of the visitation. How is it, he wonders, if the plague is spread through contact with infected persons, that the bills of mortality recorded such wide gaps, one as long as nine weeks, between plague-related deaths during the spring of 1665? Could it be that the disease can lie dormant inside people before rendering them contagious? Could the disease be spread by other methods? Did cold weather impede its spread? No, he concludes, the gaps in recording were not caused by a slowing of the rate of infection but were the result of official corruption, as families bribed searchers and parish officers to record deaths under other rubrics and so avoid shunning and the shutting up of their houses.But as the extent of the disease became impossible to conceal and as people came to understand that seemingly well people could be carrying the infection, they began to sequester themselves in earnest, in a manner that is going to sound familiar to those listening to this podcast in the spring and summer of 2020. But then as now, some people could not observe or otherwise ignored this tactic, whether out of need for employment or a disregard of the danger. There follows at this point in the narrative what can only be described as a rant against the poor, who “went on with the usual impetuosity of their tempers, full of outcries and lamentations when taken, but madly careless of themselves, foolhardy and obstinate, while they were well.” How closely the accounts in this episode accord with the behavior of some today, including some of our own officials, I will leave to you to decide.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits:Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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After some reflections on how mass evacuations (the term he uses here is disposing) of the city, thereby reducing its population density, might proportionally reduce the impact of the disease in any future calamity, the author resumes a familiar theme: the lack of a method to test for the illness among those who have no symptoms, and thus a lack of a means to prevent the spread of the disease.After relating anecdotes of those who were themselves infected, and who infected others, prior to becoming visibly ill, he reviews some theories of the day about how to test for the disease. Some said the plague could be detected in the breath of the infected; others, that their breath would kill birds. In one passage, he mentions the belief of some of his contemporaries that the breath of plague victims, when examined under a microscope (which was unavailable at the time of the plague itself, he says) would reveal tiny monsters: “dragons, snakes, serpents, and devils, horrible to behold.” Just short of a decade after the plague in London, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek had used a microscope of his own design to reveal the existence of microbes for the first time, and Robert Hook’s Micrographia was contemporaneous with the London plague, so possibly the author would be referring to these discoveries, or at least, popular misconceptions about them, in this account, written in the 1720s.[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]Credits:Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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This longish episode takes up a terribly important topic: beliefs among the author’s contemporaries as to how the plague was transmitted. Londoners of the 17th century clearly had a notion of contagion, and naturally enough they believed that the plague was transmitted through contact with infected persons, with their breath, or sweat, or even their clothing. The actual agent of transmission was unclear, neither bacteria nor the role of the flea being known to them. Nonetheless, if the plague was the result of contact with infected persons, it follows then that the best form of prevention was to avoid contact with them. Hence the shutting up of houses.The problem, as the author points out, is that the disease also appeared to be transmitted from people who were ostensibly well, and against that contingency no quarantine was practical, although people did practice a form of social distancing by secluding themselves voluntarily, avoiding crowds, and walking in the middle of the streets, this last a practice known to us today. In one particularly interesting passage, he sketches a basic epidemiological technique of discovering the source of an infection by tracing the contacts the sick person had prior to becoming ill, a method (formalized today as “contact tracing”) he acknowledges has problems of its own, for “none knows how far to carry that back, or where to stop.”There is also the question of the role of God in this calamity. The author acknowledges that while the visitation is an act of God, it is an act carried out through natural means, through physical agents, such as those mentioned above. It is in the miraculous recoveries he occasionally sees, including, perhaps, his own escape from infection, that he discerns the possibility of divine intervention in the day-to-day affairs of humans.In the end, unable to assign either a first cause or a specific means of avoiding the plague, he recommends the one true method of staying safe: flight.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits:Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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Although I haven’t mentioned it in these notes before, throughout the Journal the author has praised the work of the city administration—the Lord Mayor, the Court of Aldermen, magistrates, the city council, the sheriffs, and others—for their leadership and devotion to duty in such a time. This episode highlights several of the steps taken by them to preserve civic order, from the prompt disposal of the dead and an attention to what little they knew about public health to the regulation of the markets to the administration of justice. The presence of the Lord Mayor himself on market day helped to sustain morale until that time when no such gesture could have any effect. At the end of this episode the author excerpts the Bills of Mortality to chart the progress of the disease from west to east, and from the suburban parishes to the city itself, and from there across the Thames to Southwark.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits:Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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This episode continues the author’s cataloging of the miseries endured during the epidemic. From the weekly bills he notes that close to 40,000 people died in the five weeks between August 22d and September 26th (although not all from the plague), but he is skeptical of that number, believing that as many as 10,000 a week may have died during that period. Another theme he enlarges upon here is the effectiveness of the city government in maintaining adequate supplies of provisions for the poor and seeing to it that the dead were promptly disposed of. As one of the effects of their administration, he notes, the price of bread remained relatively stable throughout the entire period, and communal ovens remained open for households that made their own bread.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits:Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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After several episodes in which the author has been content simply to relay incidents and anecdotes of suffering and distress, here now he draws a breath and offers his personal reflections about the experience of Londoners at the height of the plague. I believe that some of the most moving passages in the Journal are to be found in this episode. He speaks of the way in which, at the most extreme hour, the populace became heedless of the differences among them or the things they fought over so vigorously, and, because they anticipated death coming at any moment, thronged together in their churches, regardless of who was preaching, “as if their lives were of no consequence compared to the work which they came about there.” And he is eloquent in expressing the way the immanence of death removes all animosity and petty strife. But the author is no sentimentalist. He is only a faithful recorder of what he observed, and he knows that this mood, which he says possessed the city for several weeks in the late summer of the year, cannot be sustained, and that a true transformation of the human heart has not yet occurred.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits:Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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Episode 22: All Regulations and Methods Were in Vain
By now the author’s belief that the policy of shutting up households was futile and cruel should be abundantly clear, but just in case it isn’t, here are more anecdotes illustrating that point. You will recall that a few episodes ago the author mentioned that he was appointed a watcher himself, over his most strident protests, including his assertion that he couldn’t discharge his duties faithfully because of his objections to the policy. Here he reveals that he was able to pay someone to take his place after a mere three weeks, but particularly as these weeks were at the height of the epidemic, his experiences overwhelmingly confirmed his objections. During his brief tenure as a watcher, he comes to the conclusion that a superior way to manage the disease would be to remove the healthy from infected households rather than imprisoning them there. Finally, however, as the epidemic reaches the apex of its fury, even the shutting up of houses stops, and “the people sat still looking at one another” in shocked silence.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits: Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission. Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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But what happened when the infected got out? When they escaped from shut up houses or roamed the streets, delirious, before the authorities became aware of their illness? This episode relates several incidents in which persons dying of the disease ran amok, assaulted others, threw themselves in the river, or other equally dire things. So, notwithstanding his belief in the general inefficacy of the quarantine, the author allows as how it had one beneficial effect: reducing the number of these incidents, thus saving many lives.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits: Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission. Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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While praising the “prudence” and “moderation” of the magistrates who oversaw the shutting up of houses, the author nevertheless continues his condemnation of the practice as ineffective and unfair. Yes, he says, if all and only infected persons could be quarantined, the method would have been effective, but he allows as how the disease appeared to have been spread “insensibly” between persons who appeared completely healthy, which was quite true, inasmuch as it was the bite of a flea, not person-to-person contact, that was the principal vector of transmission.
But in any case, the quarantine didn’t work that way, and the sick were indiscriminately sequestered with their entire household, with ill effects for them all. If ever there were an unfortunate example, it’s a family in a house in Whitechappel, who just can’t catch a break. This family had a maid who was erroneously diagnosed with the plague. So the household was quarantined for forty days. Examiners arrived near the end of that period, found that one family member had a fever, and quarantined them for another forty days. One by one the family fell ill from various ailments, most associated with being shut up in their home, and the quarantines were extended again, until on a subsequent visit, the author says, it was the examiner himself who introduced the plague into the household, and they all died.
This episode also gives some small details of the relationship between families shut up and the watchers posted to keep them there. As you might imagine, these relationships were not in the main cordial, and the life of a watchman was not of a sort to inspire pity. Included here are some observations on the process of reassigning watchmen accused of neglecting their duties and harassing the family.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits: Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission. Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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Readers of the novel will note that at this point I have entirely passed over a long account about three men from Wapping, whose tale of taking to the highways and fields is instructive, but perhaps too long and detailed for modern listeners. However, the final paragraphs of their story are so compelling, and so seamlessly connected with what follows, that I have inserted them, out of order, at the beginning of this episode.
The main theme of this episode centers around a phenomenon seen again in our own times: the resistance of rural areas to the arrival of strangers fleeing the epidemic. More generally, it speaks to our habit of ascribing all manner of wickedness to outsiders. The author mentions the several species of rumor and myth, some even sanctioned by official voices, that charged the victims of the plague with the desire to infect others. On their part, fleeing Londoners spoke of the uniform cruelty and inhumanity of rural folk, who forced them to return to the city to face death. Here as before, Defoe is careful to separate fact from rumor. He understands how isolated incidents can be accepted as innate characteristics and is having nothing of it.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits: Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission. Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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This episode is one of the most disturbing in the novel. It concerns the death of newborn infants and their mothers at or shortly after childbirth as the result, direct or indirect, of the plague. Some died along with their mothers at the moment of birth, others died for lack of skilled midwives, the better of whom had fled, and there were even cases of infants dying at the hands of their mothers driven mad from the disease. From the Bills of Mortality published weekly during the visitation, the author reports that maternal mortality, so-called deaths in Birth-Bed, and incidents of miscarriages, premature births, and stillborn infants were roughly twice as high in 1665 as in the preceding year, on a population base he estimates as one-third smaller.
And of course, newborns were no less susceptible to the plague than any others, and many died in their mother’s arms in the first weeks of life as disease swept through the entire household. In sum, this episode is a litany of horrors, told without literary embellishment of any kind, horrors that lead the author to conclude that in future visitations pregnant women and women nursing young children should use every means at their disposal to flee at the first rumor of plague.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits: Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission. Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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Here is a pious little tale about an act of loyalty and human kindness that the author witnessed on one of his forays along the waterfront. It contains some information about how the more resourceful among those who lived near the river found provisions for their survival and how some people lived on boats, thinking themselves safer there than on land. Near the end of episode, the narrator is taken to Greenwich, where, from the top of a hill, he sees hundreds of ships moored in the river and estimates that as many as ten thousand people survived the plague sequestering themselves in them.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits: Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission. Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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Although Defoe’s account is scarcely chronological, at this point in the novel we have come to the height of the epidemic, when, by official accounts, around 7,000 people were falling victim to the plague every week. Here he describes what are by now the familiar horrors of the epidemic and his growing restlessness at his self-imposed seclusion.
By the way, the so-called Solomon Eagle mentioned in this account was a real person, a composer by the name of Solomon Eccles, who became a Quaker and renounced music as profane entertainment.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits: Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission. Visit our website: www.londonplague.com© 2020 Mark Cummings
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