agonizes over whether to flee or stay (pp. 8–11), is a structural precondition for the rest of the narrative. In method as much as myth, therefore, the Journal reorients the world of Robinson Crusoe.

The effect is to accentuate the reader’s engagement with the mission of survival, but on Defoe’s ideological terms. If H.F. is no rounded character he is an urban Everyman, staring death in the face and getting home safely; his chief characteristic is neither reckless curiosity nor historical pedantry, but rock-solid bourgeois sobriety. He is disdainful of the court, respectful towards the mayor, horrified by the feckless poor, unimpressed by public drinking, mindful of the Bible, and Defoe expects us to admire him for it. If the Journal is a kind of practical manual for avoiding the plague, it is also a conduct book that sets out how to live this day when tomorrow might be your last. However, while H.F. keeps a low profile in order to serve history, he cannot escape history’s brute fact: his subject is dominated for each of its participants by the challenge of survival. The Journal ends on a more starkly personal note than any other work by Defoe: ‘yet I alive!’ It tells of those, including H.F. himself, who abandon public office to save themselves; the work as a whole charts the same course, starting out by suppressing the first person and ending with an assertion of its miraculous survival. So, if the Journal ‘hovers between romance and history’, it is partly because plague flattens out the basic ingredient of the emerging novel form, the autonomous self, and in defence of a piety with which all readers can thereby identify. Before H.F. ends with the ‘coarse but sincere Stanza’ that celebrates his own survival, he reminds readers of what it meant to survive in the wrong way. The ‘Generality of the People’ were ungrateful: ‘they sang his Praise, but they soon forgot his Works’. God had delivered them ‘from the Host of Pharaoh’ and let them see ‘the Egyptians overwhelmed in the Water’ (p. 212).

But it is an alarming call to piety that treats the dead as conquered enemies, and just as Robinson Crusoe imagines a world without society, so the Journal tests the strength of social bonds in extreme circumstances. Plague attacked not just the constitution but the conscience. Even H.F. bribes his way out of his responsibilities as a parish examiner, while others turn to violence to save themselves. To almost everyone, however, H.F. extends compassion. Not always coherently, he tries to draw a line between plague behaviour and general human nature, his inner life called into being through judging others. Just occasionally, he gives up trying to draw that line. When the houses of the dead are looted, when gravediggers rob corpses of their linen, when nurses smother their patients in fear for themselves, when people are confined to their houses ‘maliciously’, when—worst of all—victims go out of their way to try and infect passers-by, he contemplates a world of irredeemable depravity. The sceptical historian in him may come to the rescue, as it did among reports from Marseilles. Murderous nurses always seem to operate on the opposite side of town and they are in any case not ‘so common … as some have since been pleas’d to say’ (p. 72). Deliberate infection is a fiction rife among country people afraid of giving help to fleeing citizens, the fruit of ignorance about a disease one could have without knowing it. But it is, H.F.