7), he says, never doubting that he makes instant sense.

The confidence is partly an illusion, since Defoe had to plan his portrait of London carefully. True to a writer so intrigued by the effects of natural disaster, he had in mind two versions of the city: the one partially swept away by the Great Fire of 1666 and the one that emerged in its wake. In 1700, Edward Chamberlayne had tried to calculate the damage and given up:

The Buildings on 373 Acres were utterly consumed, by that late dreadful Conflagration; also 63 Acres without the Walls, in all 436 Acres, 89 Parish-Churches, and 13200 Houses, besides that vast Cathedral of St Paul’s, and divers Chappels, Halls, Colleges, Schools, and other public Edefices, whereof the whole Damage is hardly to be computed or credited.6

‘Then’ and ‘now’ are common terms in H.F.’s lexicon. He notes changes of name and explains how particular alleyways disappeared or came into being. He evokes a smaller London in which the streets of 1722 were once green fields, sometimes going right back in its archaeology to the ‘Remains of the old Lines or Fortifications’ (p. 198). His knowledge of the old city may have derived partly from Foe family history (and it should not be forgotten that much of the city’s ground plan was unaffected by the fire) but there is also evidence that his creator wrote with an older plan of London to hand, picking out places and journeys among old alleyways and yards with the pedantry of the route-fetishist: ‘They told us a Story of a House in a Place call’d Swan-Alley, passing from Goswell-street near the End of Oldstreet into St. John-street’ (p. 142). Defoe made occasional mistakes that to the most astute reader of 1722 would have undermined the Journal’s claim to authenticity, but by and large his bifocal topography was painstakingly accurate.

Evocations of London past turn into warnings about the future when Defoe compels us to imagine the great streets where we walk—Leadenhall, Bishopsgate, and Cornhill—covered in grass for want of traffic, with people walking down the middle to avoid human contact; even the Exchange, nerve centre for London’s thriving business community, goes to seed. The very houses where his first readers lived conceal plague pits for the burial of the poor. London’s great historian John Stow had represented the city as a mighty palimpsest, layers of history settling and maturing through a process of constant reinvention beset by unending nostalgia. For Defoe such visions evoked the nightmare of entropy for commerce and for humanity: the dead are beneath our feet and we are in danger of joining them. In a work of modern urban theory, Eduardo E. Lozano has examined the ‘associations’ and ‘reinforcements’ that bind city communities to their environment, off setting the alienation of sheer scale.7 The Journal’s success today, and perhaps its failure in 1722, lies partly in reviving associations that most people preferred to forget. Few readers then could have welcomed the obsessiveness with which H.F. traces, ‘Parallel with the Passage which goes by the West Wall of the Church-Yard, out of Houndsditch, and turns East again into White-Chappel, coming out near the three Nuns Inn’, the outline of a former plague pit (p. 53). Today such precision, sign of the book’s disconcerting mixture of genres, seems the result of its tentatively embodying what in the 1720s was a wholly new genre with rules as yet unwritten: the historical novel.

Defoe fashioned it through the representation of what remains the best way to appreciate London: walking. Recent criticism has been preoccupied with different expressions of the peripatetic, whether in city parades of the Renaissance, Restoration strolls in the park, Romantic rambles in the hills, flâneurs taking in the modern city with an amused, cynical eye, or postcolonial subjects arriving to pace the British motherland. Defoe’s urban walker is a prototype for the wandering speaker of Blake’s visionary ‘London’, marking in every face he meets ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe’ and so exposing the poor and pitiable to the bureaucratic gaze of the rich and comfortable, the better to awaken their charity. ‘In these Walks’, H.F. says, ‘I had many dismal Scenes before my Eyes’ (p. 70). A reluctant instrument of officialdom by virtue of the parish examinership he accepts and then discards, he inhabits the margins of ‘folk’ geography by referring to local names for alleys or rivers sometimes at the distance of ‘they call’, at others ‘we call’, irrespective of whether the feature in question is near his home. For readers he is also a time traveller, allowing us to penetrate a city partly lost and always hard to navigate. Richard Bradley’s best-selling The Plague at Marseilles consider’d had evoked an older London of narrow, unpaved streets with overhanging houses ‘so that the Air within the Streets was pent up, and had not a due Freedom of Passage’.8 The Journal similarly lingers in ‘a great Number of Alleys, and Thorough-fares very long, into which no Carts cou’d come’ (p. 77) where the living must retrieve the dead on foot—the epitome of H.F.’s work as a narrator-cum-reporter.

The other walker of the Journal is the plague itself, which, Defoe had written in The Review back in 1712, had ‘come a Step nearer and nearer to this Nation’.9 In The Wonderful Year, published in 1603, Thomas Dekker had imagined the disease ‘like a Spanish leager, or rather like a stalking Tamburlaine… in the sinfully-polluted Suburbs’ and Defoe, wary of metaphors, occasionally envisages plague as some creature out of M. R. James: ‘the thing began to shew itself’ (p.