7); ‘the Plague which had chiefly rag’d at the other End of the Town … began now to come Eastward towards the Part where I liv’d’ (p. 14); having hovered ‘over every ones Head only’, it started to ‘look into their Houses, and Chambers, and stare in their Faces’ (p. 31); it moved erratically from Westminster, negotiating the crooked alleys and slow to cross the water before unleashing ‘its utmost Rage and violence’ in the City. When fiercest in the east it declines in the west; as pervasive as it is, and though its unpredictable movements make it the double of the ‘straggling, confused’ city itself, it cannot rage in two places at once, this monster in the labyrinth.

Time, History, Narration

If the nature of the city makes both walkers, narrator and plague, hard to follow, so does Defoe’s attention to time. Even more than his other works, the Journal has little respect for chronological sequence, returning repeatedly to that autumn of 1664, when two men ominously ‘died of the Plague in Long Acre’ (p. 3), as if the chief concern were to explain the disease rather than chronicle it. Yet the Journal is rich with the documentation of time. When the weekly Bills of Mortality tell the tally of the dead, the calendar is dissolved among parishes, their losses the true index of time passing. H.F.’s eastern perspective lends the book its most reliable narrative clock as 1665 becomes a year of two parts: ‘till the beginning of August’ and the virulent spread through the east that came afterwards. Charting the epidemic’s progress, the narrator is drawn to the clock of individual suffering, the handful of days left to victims. A family living near H.F.’s house in Aldgate ‘were all seemingly well on the Monday, being Ten in Family’, but ‘by Saturday at Noon, the Master, Mistress, four Children and four Servants were all gone, and the House left entirely empty’ (p. 149). Such vanishings are part not only of the book’s poignancy but its disconcerting modernity, its futile struggle to impose a single, all-encompassing narrative scheme on ‘an infinite variety of Circumstances’.

All Defoe’s best-known novels use the convention, widely practised in his day, of a fictitious editor claiming to print the protagonist’s manuscript autobiography. In the Journal, the editor is the protagonist. He marshals evidence from the Bills of Mortality, Lord Mayor’s orders, and from medical tracts. He has anecdotes to hand, waiting their turn to be recounted and assessed. The ‘editor’ of the novels conventionally claims that his manuscript speaks for itself, but the patchwork of texts assembled for the Journal demands constant interpretation and comparison: tallies on the Bills of Mortality may be misleading, oral history biased or merely conventional. Where Robinson Crusoe is presented as ‘a just history of fact’ and Moll Flanders a ‘genuine’ private history, the Journal claims authenticity through the process of its writing as well as in its content. The desire to exercise authority as a historian is, with his stubborn pedestrianism, one of H.F.’s key characteristics.

Characteristics in the plural do not mean that H.F. should be regarded as a complex fictional creation comparable to, for example, Moll Flanders. In a book whose concerns are public, this narrator shields himself in semi-anonymity, his brother, relatives, and neighbours named only as such, others left nameless under the pretence of protecting their surviving relatives; it is largely officials who have names. Defoe’s other fictional protagonists begin with a summary of their family background but here plague facts and suppositions submerge the narrator within his community from the start. For six pages, ‘we’ and ‘everyone’ perceive, think, and feel, and not until page 7 does the ‘I’ that is H.F. disclose himself. Alone among Defoe’s narrators his death is recorded; fittingly enough he is buried amid his own narrative, in a Nota Bene on p. 199. Like his fellow protagonists he keeps a memoir, but says he derived the book from it rather than transcribing it whole. Some of it, he declares, is not suitable for public consumption—the ‘meditations’ that occupy the days of his confinement at home are edited out, as if there were something indecent, given the preoccupation with public calamity, about the self-centred form of Defoe’s novels, their easy access to private consciousness. Even a diary must be carefully explained, its contribution to history assessed. The period of deepest introspection, where H.F.