Like the Journal, The Storm presents and attempts to reconcile the different ways in which natural science and religion might be used to explain mass death and destruction, contemplating the point where ‘the philosopher ends’ and ‘the Christian begins’. It defines that point as ‘the vast open field of infinite power’ which might reveal even to a confirmed atheist ‘some Cause to doubt whether he was not in the Wrong, and a little to apprehend the Possibility of a Supreme Being, when he felt the terrible Blasts of this Tempest’.

Defoe started writing about plague in 1709, when his primary concern was the danger of infection from the Continent. Six numbers of his Review in the autumn of 1709 had warned of the health risks of British troops assisting Sweden in the wars of the Second Coalition against Moscow and her allies, among whom the Prussians and Poles were in the grip of a severe epidemic. Protestant Sweden was a natural friend, and it is a sign of how plague occupied Defoe’s imagination that he should have highlighted it as a major factor in British foreign policy. In August 1712 he had documented recent outbreaks of the disease in Europe, attracting ridicule for his ‘Melancholy Notions’, and stung into brandishing the grisly item he would deploy throughout the Journal: a 1665 Bill of Mortality, in this case for the week beginning 12 September, the worst of the epidemic.2 Not content, he returned to the subject later in the month. For eight years interest subsided before, in July 1720, everyone else started talking about it. Writing to the editor of the London Journal in 1722, Defoe was content with understatement: ‘I cannot think that a Dissertation upon the Plague … can be very foreign to the Province of a News-monger.’

Resisting intense commercial pressure, Walpole’s government had drafted an Act of Quarantine to keep out vessels suspected of carrying the disease. An author in the government’s pay believed to be Defoe rose vigorously to the Act’s defence in a series of ten articles for the Daily Post, Mist’s Journal, and Applebee’s Journal, signing himself ‘Quarantine’. His Applebee piece dated 1 October 1720 is feverishly shocking, with reports from Marseilles of ‘dead Bodies lying in Heaps unbury’d, the Stench of which is unsufferable’, of mass starvation (in his 20 May contribution he had written of people eating ‘Leather, Starch, Soap’), of soldiers being murdered to be replaced by ‘Troops of Thieves and Murderers, that range the infected Streets’, one of whom claimed to have killed more than a thousand people. Having let his readers’ imaginations run riot, ‘Quarantine’, like the narrator of the Journal, assumes the guise of the responsible official: ‘We do not assert this Part of the Story at all, but relate it as we find it.’

Opinion was duly swayed and the Act of Quarantine gained the royal assent on 12 February 1722. Four days earlier, Defoe had published his first major work on plague, Due Preparations for the Plague, as well for the Soul as Body, and in the spring its blend of medicine and piety suffused the grand historical fiction that is A Journal of the Plague Year. If the Marseilles plague gave Defoe a publishing opportunity that had been simmering for years, it also spawned a wealth of new material for him to recycle or refute. For scientific information he consulted two books published in 1720: Richard Mead’s A Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion, and Loimologia, a translation from Nathaniel Hodges by John Quincy. He trawled through the collection of Bills of Mortality published in 1712 as London’s Dreadful Visitation, using his sources to take issue with false science and witness. Other events of 1721–2 left their imprint on the Journal–George I’s appeal in October 1721 for a new sense of industry and public welfare among merchants, the continuing ramifications of the South Sea Bubble crisis, even a move in April 1721 to root out ‘scandalous clubs and societies’ of blaspheming young drunks. But the book embodies a conflict of private gain and public-spiritedness, of opportunity and authority, which points to its author’s desire both to exploit and contain a crisis. Defoe makes his narrator, H.F., a man of divided loyalties, barely keeping in check a prurient interest in lives and places where, to use his own pun, he has no business.

Observations or Memorials

If Defoe’s motives for writing the Journal were complex, he carried it off with a breathtaking confidence in his ability to convince people that they were indeed reading an eyewitness account. Most readers did not cotton on until the 1780s and arguments about its authenticity persisted in the nineteenth century; even today it is easy to succumb to this most skilful of literary hoaxes.3 But our modern categories of ‘literature’, ‘history’, ‘truth’, and ‘forgery’ were still in the making as he created the work that falls neatly into none of them but takes up temporary residence in each: this is fiction masquerading as history and vice versa, a dazzling hoax that deploys the mechanics of truthful inquiry. In 1720 Defoe had published Memoirs of a Cavalier and commented on the vividness of personal witness compared with objective history or ‘memorials’, in which he took a strong interest. His talent for reportage even makes it difficult to swear that the Journal’s repetitious style—more marked than in his other fictions—is the outcome not of desperate cutting and pasting early in 1722 but of a conscious attempt to create the rough feel of half-planned personal testimony.

Could such confidence and style derive, after all, from witness as well as frenzied reading and writing? The narrator’s initials are those of Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe, who in 1665 was, like his counterpart, a middle-aged Whitechapel saddler; in 1684 Defoe would marry Mary Tuffley in H.F.’s parish church, one of the many ways in which the narrator retraces the steps of his author’s life. Foe saw his 5-year-old nephew Daniel evacuated to the country but lived long enough to be in a position to tell him about the windows flapping for want of people to shut them, about the grass growing in the streets, about the women screaming from upper storeys; Defoe was 14 when his uncle died. When H.F. visits his brother’s home and warehouse ‘in Coleman’s-street Parish’ he treads the exact ground where his creator had grown up, at least from the age of 7; visiting his brother, H.F. shook hands with Defoe’s father.

There is a slender but tantalizing connection to another eyewitness. The Journal and the Diary of Samuel Pepys share idiosyncratic details, a correspondence hard to explain when the decoded diary was not published until 1848. One answer lies in the man who tended to Defoe’s spiritual and scriptorial needs when he was sent to Newgate in 1703 for writing The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. Paul Lorrain was prison ordinary with a sideline in writing up scaffold speeches, some of which crop up in A General History of the Pirates, thought to be Defoe’s work. None of this would matter as far as the Journal is concerned but for a staggering coincidence: when Lorrain took up his Newgate job in 1698 he had for the previous twenty years been library clerk to Pepys. In York Buildings, just off the Strand, Pepys kept his catalogued collection under Lorrain’s eye, including the diary with its standard shorthand code. For a brief period, in other words, Defoe was in company with one of the very few men who could possibly have read the other great journal of the plague year.

Reception

Although the Journal was the most ingenious, dramatic, and eclectic work to have been prompted by the Marseilles plague, it was hardly the most popular.