Escaping to moored ships did not guarantee safety, not only because they might already contain infected people, but because rats either lived there too or could scale the mooring ropes. That made the official quarantine measures inadequate. For the same reason, shutting oneself up at home could only work in the unlikely event of the house being secured against rats and fleas, a cause which the official policy of killing cats did little to advance. Defoe’s best schemes for controlling the disease were his most ambitious ones: the building of more pest houses and the isolation of infected areas would have checked the plague better than anything the miasmatists proposed.

Until the very end, H.F. dismisses the idea that plague was the direct instrument of God’s wrath, preferring to believe that it had arisen from ‘natural Causes’ and been spread by ‘natural Means’. This was divine power operating within ‘the Scheme of Nature’ (p. 166). Yet the final abatement calls for no other explanation than direct intervention, even if it is proposed as hesitantly as we would expect from a burgeoning natural scientist: ‘just then it pleased God, as it were, by his immediate Hand to disarm this Enemy’ (p. 210). That, perhaps, is merely to be wise after the event and because H.F. is concerned not to indulge in ‘an officious canting of religious things’ once the ‘Sense of the thing was over’, he refrains from ‘going on’.

EXPLANATORY NOTES

Louis Landa’s 1969 Explanatory Notes have been lightly edited for consistency and economy. For place citations, readers should consult the new Topographical Index and map, which better serve readers wishing to track Defoe’s frequent and necessarily repetitious references to London’s streets and buildings.

ABBREVIATIONS

A Brief Treatise … of the Pestilence

William Kemp, A Brief Treatise of the Nature, Causes, Signs, Preservations from and Cure of the Pestilence (1665)

A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce Pieces

A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce Pieces relating to the Last Plague in the year 1665

Discourse

Sir Richard Blackmore, A Discourse upon the Plague (1721)

Lee

William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings, extending from 1716 to 1729, 3 vols. (1869)

Loimographia

William Boghurst, Loimographia, Or an Experimentall Relation of the Plague, of what hath happened Remarkable in the Last Plague in the City of London … with a Collection of Choice and Tried Medicines for Preservation and Cure etc. 1666. Printed for the Epidemiological Society of London, ed. Joseph Frank Payne (1894)

Loimologia

Nathaniel Hodges, Loimologia, Or an Historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665 … to which is added An Essay on the Different Causes of Pestilential Diseases, and how they become Contagious, by J. Quincy, MD (1720; 3rd edn., 1721)

Medela Pestilentiae

Richard Kephale, Medela Pestilentiae: Wherein is contained Several Theological Queries concerning the Plague, with Approved Antidotes, Signs, and Symptoms: also an Exact Method for curing that Epidemical Distemper (1665)

Necessary Directions … by the College of Physicians

Necessary Directions for the Prevention and Cure of the Plague, with Divers Remedies of small Charge, by the College of Physicians (1721). Contained in A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce Pieces

Short Discourse

Richard Mead, A Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion, and the Methods to be used to prevent it (1720; 6th edn., 1720)

again in Holland: on 4 May 1664 Pepys made the first of several entries in his Diary concerning the reappearance of the plague in Holland. A busy port trading with plague-infected countries in Asia, Amsterdam was watched with apprehension. According to John Graunt’s Natural and Political Observations … upon the Bills of Mortality, 5th edn. (1676), in 1663 it suffered 9,752 plague deaths; in 1664, 24,148.

Candia: Crete.

matter’d not … whence it come: Defoe reflects the prevalent view that plagues originated in Asia and Africa and were transmitted by commerce, as stated by Mead’s government-approved Short Discourse. Mead denied Britain had any ‘Pestilential Disease’ that had not been received ‘from other Infected Places’, i.e. ‘the Eastern and Southern parts of the World’ (pp. 4–5). It was a controversial subject: the author of Medicina Flagellata (1721) believed that troop movements, not trade, were to blame. In reality there was an outbreak in Turkey in 1661; the plague spread to Greece and then, by 1663, to Amsterdam.

no … printed News Papers: there were at least anticipations of the newspaper. In 1665 the Oxford Gazette (later the London Gazette) made its appearance and carried news of the plague, as did Sir Roger L’Estrange’s The Intelligencer and The Newes.

Tokens: in modern parlance, cutaneous lesions resulting from subcutaneous haemorrhaging, a common plague symptom. Defoe owned a copy of Kephale’s Medela Pestilentiae, which says they were otherwise known as ‘Gods Tokens’; Kephale unwittingly alluded to the key to transmission when he compared the lesions to ‘the bigness of a flea-bitten spot, sometimes much bigger’. He attributed their different colour to ‘the predominancy of humour in the body’ (red for choler, black for melancholy, etc.) and claimed that they appeared most commonly on the breast and back because ‘the vital spirits strive to breathe out the venom the nearest way’ (pp. 84–5).

the Hall: the Hall of the Company of Parish Clerks in Broad Lane, Vintry Ward.