Myth is also where the differences lie. Where Crusoe articulates a ‘foundation myth’ that shows Western Man asserting his autonomy and dominance as if from scratch, the Journal charts his encounter with a phenomenon he cannot understand or control. Crusoe celebrates the resourcefulness needed to create a world from new; the Journal, the endurance to watch it fall apart. For that reason it is arguably this book that among all Defoe’s works speaks most eloquently to early twenty-first-century readers attuned to imaginary landscapes of nuclear and environmental devastation, to grim fantasies of alien invasion, to the panic and policies that accompany epidemic disease.

Its topicality is manifold. Where Robinson Crusoe has become fraught with postcolonial guilt, studied often on courses about literature and empire or as the pretext for more or less palatable adaptations and offshoots such as J. M. Coetzee’s Foe or Johann David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson, the Journal comes with no such baggage. Turning an eye on the commercial and spiritual centre of empire rather than an island outpost, it dares to envisage London consumed not just by disease but violent self-interest that tears at the social fabric. It is that very modern phenomenon, an illness narrative, but one in which the patient is a whole city. Works inspired by it—Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Albert Camus’s La Peste—do not so much dismantle its ideology as try to render afresh the uniquely disturbing impact of a work that permits readers to walk uncontaminated among the dead and dying; a work that exercises the classic appeal of reportage which, in John Carey’s words, ‘places [the reader] continually in the position of a survivor’, so conferring a ‘comforting sense of … immortality’.1

The comforts of immortality were far from the minds of Defoe’s first readers. To glance at the title page of the first or 1722 edition of A Journal of the Plague Year is to be arrested by a device that, whether it was Defoe’s idea or his printer’s, epitomizes the book’s singular project. The first four words are spelled out modestly enough and then, in bold Gothic, thunders the terrible topic: Plague Year, a warning about the future couched in the typography of the past. The Marseilles plague, virulent since July 1720, might reach London; the Bills of Mortality of the Great Plague of 1665, in circulation again, had used the same device, and the promise of authenticity was Defoe’s key commodity in 1722. This is, the title page goes on to promise, no mere story but a series of ‘Observations or Memorials, Of the most remarkable OCCURRENCES’ recorded during the ‘last GREAT VISITATION in 1665’—the work of no hack author but a genuine journal, ‘written by a CITIZEN who continued all the while in London’ and only just come to light, ‘Never made publick before’. To open the Journal in 1722 was to open up a past truer than fiction while confronting the dire suspicion that the ‘last great Visitation’ might not, after all, have been the last. It is the doubly paradoxical fascination of a book that is a dystopian fiction rooted in the past and a work of creative art that summons up a world uncreated.

Defoe would need every ounce of sensationalism he could get in a crowded market. The Marseilles plague was a threat to every major port in Europe, a test of the Walpole government’s nerve in facing down commercial interests, and a gift to anyone with the urge to publish. During the period from July 1720 to the publication of the Journal in March 1722 more than fifty works about plague appeared in London, while newspapers reported the spread of the disease across Europe. Defoe may disdain the superstitious ‘Predictions, and Prognostications’ that ‘frighted [people] terribly’ in 1665 (p. 19), but the flood of sermons, news reports, and medical books in the early 1720s cannot have had a dissimilar effect. Taken as a whole they show London juggling divine and natural causes while deriving lessons from plagues past and present. There were pragmatists: the ‘Eminent physician’ who in 1721 published A Treatise of the Plague with its pre-vision, pro-vision and pre-vention, and John Hancocke’s less confident 1722 Febrifugum Magnum: or common water the best cure for fevers, and probably for the plague. Doom merchants spoke from the pulpit: William Goldwin’s God’s Judgments on a Sinful People, Thomas Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City (both 1722), and Benjamin Grosvenor’s uncompromising and marvellously impractical 1721 Preparation for Death the best preservative against plague. Some hedged their bets, like Sir John Colbatch’s A Scheme of Proper Methods to be taken, should it please God to visit us with the Plague (also 1721). There were accounts of the Marseilles plague by Richard Bradley, Christopher Pitt, and François Chicoyneau, as well as a translation of the official report from the local authorities there. Comparing Marseilles 1720 with London 1665 was by no means uncommon. The late dreadful plague in Marseilles compared with that terrible plague in London, in the year 1665 ran to two parts, while A collection of very valuable and scarce pieces relating to the last plague in the year 1665 was reprinted within months of coming out in 1721. For Defoe’s booksellers, Nutt, Roberts, Dodd and Graves, demand for plague books must have seemed inexhaustible, and the Journal an original synthesis of—and argument with—well-tried territory.

Defoe and the Plague

Defoe’s interest in the subject knew no bounds; natural disaster was for him a favourite ground on which to explore questions of faith and history. In The Storm (1704) he had described the devastation wrought by extreme weather the previous year and the book was in many ways an early dress rehearsal for the Journal, assembling ‘the most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters’ that arose from a single, terrifying event. Defoe’s preface presents The Storm as a higher form of sermon capable of reaching more people and needing to exercise stricter standards in its use of evidence: ‘among such an infinite variety of Circumstances, to keep exactly within the bounds of Truth’ was its principal challenge.