That distinction goes to Richard Bradley’s The Plague at Marseilles consider’d, which went into five editions in 1721, and to Hancocke’s Febrifugum Magnum, which enjoyed a long afterlife among those deluded by the idea that merely drinking water could ‘probably’ save them. The Journal, by contrast, was not reprinted until 1755. Frank H. Ellis blames its ‘crazy cobweb of repetition’ that created ‘serious attention-deficit problems for the reader’, but the success of other plague works from 1720–2 points to over-supply and a problem of genre.4 Plague books started to dry up in 1722 as the Marseilles scare abated, and Defoe’s was the last substantial title to make it to the marketplace, probably a few months too late. The very measure he had worked hard to see into the statute books, the Act of Quarantine, had helped to defuse the scare that saw the Journal into print. Perhaps he wondered whether he had been lurid enough. In an article published in Applebee’s Journal on 23 November 1723, he criticized newsmongers who had indulged ‘the Pleasure of Writing Dismal Stories’ in order to arouse ‘Surprize and Horror’, a claim that required some nerve on his part.

Defoe was doubly hoist with his own petard in so far as the quality that distinguishes the book today, its elusive blend of the literary and the historical, made it a distraction from the business of planning for survival. One plague book recommending a simple cure was worth a million memoirs, true or not. Ellis speculates that if the plague ‘had reached London in 1722, A Journal of the Plague Year would have sold like hot cakes, for it is … a How-to-do-it book’ full of suggested and false remedies. Perhaps so, but there had been more thorough-going how-to-do-it books and in any case the title page describes it in other terms. Thinking to intervene decisively in a scientific debate, Defoe gave the world what is, for all its repetitions, a work of art.

Subsequent generations free from the threat of its subject, and from the somewhat snobbish disparagement the Nonconformist Defoe met with in the highest Augustan literary circles (Swift found him ‘grave, sententious, dogmatical’, while Pope thought Robinson Crusoe his only ‘excellent’ work), had leisure to enjoy the Journal on its own mixed terms. Sir Walter Scott was an influential advocate of Defoe’s fiction, although scarcely blind to its defects: ‘the incidents are huddled together like paving-stones discharged from a cart’, he wrote. He thought the Journal Defoe’s finest work after Robinson Crusoe and categorized it as ‘one of those peculiar character of compositions that hover between romance and history’. The plague was ‘a fit subject for a pencil so veracious as that of De Foe’, whose instinct for recording the surface of ordinary life enabled him to draw ‘pictures almost too horrible to look on’. William Hazlitt saw Defoe’s characteristic focalization of extreme circumstance through banal perception as a matter of genre. The Journal had one foot in ancient literature and the other in the soap opera that was sentimental fiction, its ‘epic grandeur’ leavened by ‘heart-breaking familiarity’ (John Dunstall’s 1665 broadsheet prints of the Great Plague had similarly combined mass funerals against the London skyline with people dying painfully in their beds).

Generic classification has preoccupied critics since. In accounts of the rise of the novel, the Journal charts the distinctions between emerging genres by blurring them—a classic ‘boundary text’ that not only defies classification but threatens to discredit it. Such concerns perhaps mask the book’s immersion in two material domains that cannot be reduced to questions of literary discourse: the disease that was plague and the city that was London. Rarely has any work by a major novelist evoked such specific, real-world knowledge as A Journal of the Plague Year, which demands of its editors the unusual apparatus of factual appendices on plague and London’s topography. Fittingly for a new generation of literary scholars and students versed in urban theory, its discordant poetry of London has become its chief fascination.

Imagining London

In his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6), Defoe would describe London in terms that recall storm and plague: ‘infinitely difficult in its particulars’ and a ‘great and monstrous Thing’, its ‘straggling, confused manner’ was aesthetically a ‘disaster’.5 If plague demanded a strict regime of public order so did London, and the restrictions ‘Conceived and Published by the Lord MAYOR and Aldermen’ that occupy seven pages of the Journal (pp. 34–41) are also a dark manifesto for Puritan government: clean streets, no beggars, no plays, no public feasting, no ‘Tipling-Houses’, and an apparatus of examiners, watchmen, searchers, surgeons, and nurses appointed to ‘give present Notice’ to the authorities and implement a system of mass house arrest. It is no wonder that one of the most influential among recent essays on the Journal is to be found in John Bender’s 1987 study, Imagining the Penitentiary. In 1992, Paula Backscheider prefaced her edition with remarks on the management of AIDS, but now readers might draw parallels with the CCTV cameras, identity cards, and DNA databases that embody twenty-first-century insecurity. H.F. maps the alleys where the dead carts cannot go; he mentally unpacks suspicious cargoes from the Continent; he scans the Bills of Mortality for evidence of the growing threat; he attempts to impose on the ‘straggling, confused’ city and its innumerable inhabitants the rational discourse of public order. He is not slow to admire the city authorities.

Yet he is not their tool. Called to be a parish examiner, he protests that ‘it would be very hard to oblige me, to be an Instrument in that which was against my Judgment’ (p. 137). As he distances himself from superstitious ‘Predictions and Prognostications’, so he mistrusts the policy of ‘shutting up houses’. His very mobility, his compulsive desire to range the infected streets, helps construct an individualism as resilient as Crusoe’s, alone on his desert island; he will not be tied to a house or neighbourhood or deterred by the straggling and confused city, because there he is in his element, intuitively confident of his proverbial taxi-driver’s ‘knowledge’ and eager to share it: ‘I liv’d without Aldgate, about mid-way between Aldgate Church and White-Chappel-Bars’ (p.