A Journal of the Plague Year (Oxford World's Classics)

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Note on the Text, Explanatory Notes © Oxford University Press 1969, 2010
Introduction, Select Bibliography, Medical Notes,
Topographical Index © David Roberts 2010
Chronology © Thomas Keymer and James Kelly 2007

First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1990
Reissued 1998, 2009
Revised edition 2010

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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

DANIEL DEFOE

A Journal of the Plague Year

Edited with Notes by

LOUIS LANDA

With an Introduction by

DAVID ROBERTS

OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR

DANIEL DEFOE (1660–1731) was born in London, the third child of James Foe, a tallow chandler, and his wife Alice. He attended Charles Morton’s dissenting academy in Newington Green before establishing himself as a hosier and general merchant in Cornhill, and married Mary Tuffley in 1684. A year later he joined the Duke of Monmouth’s disastrous rebellion against James II, and was lucky to escape the ‘Bloody Assizes’ following Monmouth’s defeat at Sedgemoor. Persistent overinvestment precipitated his bankruptcy in 1692, after which he turned to writing.

Defoe’s first great success came with his satirical poem The True-Born Englishman (1701). The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), an audacious parody of High Anglican extremism, brought him a charge of seditious libel and he was briefly imprisoned. Defoe was employed by successive ministries as a polemicist until about 1717, and continued to write prolifically thereafter in a range of fields including politics, economics, and religion.

Between 1719 and 1724, Defoe produced the pioneering fictional narratives on which his reputation has come to rest. The first part of Robinson Crusoe was published on 25 April 1719, with a sequel in August. A third part, Serious Reflections, followed in 1720, in which year Memoirs of a Cavalier and Captain Singleton were also published. Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and A Journal of the Plague Year appeared in 1722 and Roxana in 1724, to be followed by further major works of non-fiction, including A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6) and The Complete English Tradesman (1725–7). Defoe died following a stroke on 24 April 1731 while in hiding from a persistent creditor. He is buried in Bunhill Fields.

The late LOUIS LANDA, Professor of English Emeritus at Princeton University, was the author of Swift and the Church of Ireland (Clarendon Press) and numerous other studies of eighteenth-century literature.

DAVID ROBERTS is Professor and Head of English at Birmingham City University. He has published extensively on literature from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, including The Ladies (Oxford, 1989) and an edition of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters for Oxford World’s Classics. His most recent book is a biography of Thomas Betterton (Cambridge, 2010).

CONTENTS

Introduction

Note on the Text

Select Bibliography

A Chronology of Daniel Defoe

A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR

Appendix: A Medical Note

Explanatory Notes

Map: The City of London in the late seventeenth century

Topographical Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE text and explanatory notes of this edition are substantially as they appeared in Louis Landa’s Oxford English Novels volume in 1969. The following people assisted Professor Landa in preparing them: George Rousseau, John Sekora, Mr John Bromley of the London Guildhall Library, Mr Herbert Ward of the Tower Hamlets Central Library, Dr Edwin Clarke of the Wellcome Foundation, Dr R. S. Roberts of Queen Mary College, University of London, Dr John Walker of Worcester College, Oxford, and Mrs Louis Landa. For advice and assistance relating to the 1990 reissue of Landa’s text and the current revised edition I record my own thanks to Stephanie Blackden, Peter Davidson, Beverley Dodd, Stephen Gregg, Tracey Hill, Thomas Keymer, Richard Luckett, Christine Porter, Peter Robinson, Yutaka Senba, Barry Turner, and Toshiharu Yamamoto. I stand indebted to the fine work done by the three most recent editors of A Journal of the Plague Year: Paula R. Backscheider, Cynthia Wall, and John Mullan. Judith Luna at Oxford University Press has, as always, been an exemplary editor, while Fiona, Joe, and Maddy Shaw Roberts have, as ever, been unparalleled dedicatees.

D. R.

INTRODUCTION

READERS coming to A Journal of the Plague Year fresh from Robinson Crusoe are struck by similarities: the hypnotic first person focus, the risk to survival and the aching for personal deliverance, the style steeped in the literature of religious nonconformity, the eye for unnerving detail, the creation of myth from routine observation.