In his Diary on 7 September, in the worst period of the plague and just three days before H.F. visits the plague pit, John Evelyn wrote: ‘I went all along the city and suburbs from Kent Street to St. James’s, a dismal passage, and dangerous to see so many coffins exposed in the streets.’ Doubtless coffins were scarce and expensive. Bell reports that Cripplegate purchased four and that these were used to take the dead to the grave and then returned to be used again (The Great Plague in London, 148).

enthusiastick: a pejorative word connoting the irrationality and fanaticism associated with Nonconformists.

about 200000 People were fled: any estimate must be the merest surmise. Sydenham, referring to the autumn, wrote that at this time ‘two thirds of the citizens had retired into the country’ (Works (1848), i. 98). In Due Preparations for the Plague, Defoe asserts that ‘according to the most moderate guess’ at least 300,000 had fled (Aitken edn., p. 73). In the same work he wrote that 7,000 houses were empty in the City (p. 24). In the Journal this figure became 10,000 in the City and Suburbs.

conveyed the fatal Breath: Defoe’s contagionist view of plague is stated here in brief. Cf. Kemp: ‘One Cause of the Sickness, is the Corruption and Infection of the Air; for when the Plague begins to raign in any Place … the Sick continually not only breathe out of their Mouths, but send out of their Bodies steams and vapours, which being disperst and scattered in the Air, are soon after drawn in by the breath of others; and thence whole Families are extinguisht, and the Plague not only creeps, but runs from one House to another: and hence it is that the Plague destroyes more in Cities than in Countries, and more in narrow Streets and Lanes of those Cities, than in open places, because usually there are narrow and little rooms, which are soonest fill’d with infectious vapours … for though the Air be never so corrupt, you must draw it in with your breath continually’ (A Brief Treatise … of the Pestilence, 35).

Steams, or Fumes … Effluvia: Blackmore describes the spread of ‘Pestilential Putrefaction’: ‘When the Effluvia or invisible malignant Reeks flow from an infected Body greatly corrupted, the poisonous Particles … are endow’d with such Velocity, Activity, and Penetration, that they flie with Ease thro’ the Air, maintain their fatal Influence in despight of all Opposition, and convey the Infection from House to House, and from Town to Town, and depopulate great Cities. This high Venom advances with resistless Fury … and is so far from being enfeebled while it is ventilated by the Winds … that it acquires more Strength by converting into its own Nature the Exhalations and Vapours it meets with in its Way’ (Discourse, 37–8).

immediate Stroke from Heaven: the wrath of God theory was a venerable one. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, 7.532 ff.; references in Numbers 16; Deuteronomy 28; 2 Samuel 24; 1 Kings 8; and Psalms 89, 91, and 106; Procopius of Caesaria, History of the Wars, ii, chs. 22–3; Boccaccio, introduction to Decameron. The theory was still popular in Defoe’s day; see Nathaniel Hodges, Vindiciae Medicinae & Medicorum (1666), 34, and Loimologia, 30–1; Blackmore, Discourse, 28–9; William Hendley, Loimologia Sacra (1721), 6, 41. The view that divine anger works through natural means is set out in Isbrand de Diemerbroek’s Tractatus de Pesle, translated in 1722 by Thomas Stanton as A Treatise concerning the Pestilence. Defoe seems to have possessed a copy.

infection … by … Insects, and invisible Creatures: H.F. here reflects and rejects the theory of infection set forth by Athanasius Kircher and his disciples on the Continent. Kircher’s famous work, Scrutinium Physicomedicum … Pestis (1658), was often referred to in English plague tracts. His theory, based upon concepts of fermentation, generation, and putrefaction, held that organisms of minute size acted as the vehicle of contagion. The chief proponent of this theory of ‘vermicular’ infection in England was Richard Bradley, whose The Plague at Marseilles consider’d (1721) was well known when Defoe was working on the Journal. Bradley wrote that ‘all Pestilential Distempers, whether in Animals or Plants, are occasion’d by poisonous Insects convey’d from Place to Place by the Air, and that by uncleanly Living and poor Diet, Human, and other Bodies are disposed to receive such Insects into the Stomach and most noble Parts’ (p. 57). The rejection of this view, by Mead and Hodges, Defoe probably knew. Hodges refers to the famous Kircher’s opinion ‘about animated Worms’, a view he believed to be ‘disconsonant to Reason’ (Loimologia, 64); and Mead calls it ‘a supposition grounded upon no manner of Observation’ (Short Discourse, 16). Blackmore, who considered the views of Kircher and Bradley in his Discourse, maintained that ‘Worms are by no means the Cause, but the Effect of Pestilential Putrefaction’ (p. 36). See also for a vigorous attack on the theory of ‘vermicular infection’, Philip Rose, A Theorico-Practical, Miscellaneous and Succinct Treatise of the Plague (1721), 43 ff.

Supine Negligence: the failure of people to prepare for the plague even though long warned of its approach is extensively treated in Defoe’s Due Preparations.

Meditations upon Divine Subjects: Defoe himself composed some meditations upon divine subjects in his youth.