“A History of Darkness, Pain, and Fear”: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)

Abstract

Daniel Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) almost simultaneously with another plague text, Due Preparations for the Plague (1722). It is not a coincidence that Defoe wrote these texts at the beginning of the 1720s, as they – typical for Defoe – were inspired by contemporary events. In 1720, the plague raged in Marseilles to a similar extent as it had in London some 50 years before, reminding the English and Londoners in particular of the dreadful year 1665, while at the same time fanning fear of another potential outbreak.

(Wall 2003: xix)