admits, impossible to ‘come at all the particulars’ of every horror story, so however hard he tries he cannot entirely obliterate the stain on human nature.

Philosophy and Society

This is to give Defoe credit for a level of philosophical engagement often thought to be beyond a writer so pedantically empirical; in fact he had skirted the nature of evil in the exchanges between Crusoe and Friday, and would return to the subject later in 1722, with Colonel Jack. The topic was in the air as much as the Marseilles plague, for the decade preceding the Journal had seen the publication of two cornerstones of early English enlightenment writing: Shaftesbury’s Characteristics (revised in 1714) and Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714, reissued in 1723). Shaftesbury had argued that since man is inherently sociable, there is no fundamental distinction between private and public good. Feelings of pity, compassion, and friendship gave pleasure to those who share them, and our categories of the ‘evil’ or ‘unnatural’ merely reflect deficiencies in our thinking; we should always refer to natural feelings in seeking to explain why crimes are committed. Accordingly, Shaftesbury rejects the idea of religion based on rewards and punishments. Mandeville set out to puncture such optimism, describing a world in which general welfare is made possible by individual greed, where public good is merely the sum of private vice.

In some respects Defoe’s instincts inclined him towards Shaftesbury but in the extreme conditions of the plague year the sayings of natural philosophy are apt to sound shallow and complacent. Faced with reports of victims deliberately passing on the disease, H.F. can only throw up his hands: ‘What natural Reason could be given, for so wicked a Thing, at a Time, when they might conclude themselves just going to appear at the Barr of Divine Justice, I know not: I am very well satisfy’d, that it cannot be reconcil’d to Religion and Principle, any more than it can be to Generosity and Humanity’ (p. 48). The space vacated by reason, religion, principle, generosity, and humanity can only be occupied by ‘so wicked a Thing’, and as with the plague itself—‘the thing [that] began to show itself’—the monstrous evil it releases defies description, reduces language to emotive flailing. Attempting to sum up the horrors of 10 September 1665, when the plague was at its height, the best H.F. can do is assert that ‘it is impossible to say any Thing that is able to give a true Idea of it to those who did not see it, other than this; that it was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such as no Tongue can express’ (p. 53). If the Journal is a boundary text in the sense that it occupies the fringes of known genres, it also charts boundaries when attempting to speak of what lies beyond its moral pale, beyond its ability to speak at all. Its category of the unspeakable has the new discourse of natural philosophy shaking hands with the old iconography of apocalypse: plague induces ‘so wicked a Thing’ that cannot be squared with natural reason and it shows itself in ‘Tokens’, in the mark of the beast (Revelation 13: 17).

Throughout the Journal, however, Defoe goes out of his way to raise iconographic expectations only to modify them, and vice versa; he was too particular a writer to be carried away by the mythologies he created, too convinced a Nonconformist to do God’s job for Him. When H.F. visits the ‘terrible Pit’ in Aldgate, there are worldly causes for the apocalyptic sight: ‘Coffins were not to be had’ (p. 55). Blaspheming men in the Pye Tavern become infected and are ‘every one of them carried into the great Pit, which I have mentioned above, before it was quite fill’d up’ (p. 58). Frank H. Ellis lists the relative clause there among an ‘annoying’ and ‘nameless class of repetition-indicators’,10 but Defoe uses it to defer to divine judgement by cautioning us not to conclude that the pit stands for the men’s damnation. Typically, however, he has it both ways: the allusion in ‘quite fill’d up’ to the ultimate sealing of the gates of hell reassures readers that there, in all probability, is where the blasphemers will end up.

The same particularity prevents the Journal from hardening into satire, for all its grisly puns and jokes, its inverted vision of the everyday: ‘The Inns-of-Court were all shut up … Every Body was at peace, there was no Occasion for Lawyers’ (p. 16); ‘Abundance of Quacks too died, who had the Folly to trust to their own Medicines’ (p. 32); looking for a word to describe the increase in the number of ‘Feaver’ victims, Defoe comes up with—of all things—‘swell’ (p. 7). Even the names of streets—Bell Alley, Token House Yard—reverberate to the vocabulary of plague. H.F.’s favourite topic, the forcible shutting-up of houses, turns the Englishman’s home from castle to lethal penitentiary, and it is the Dutch who are the true Englishmen, fortifying their homes against intruders (p. 49). As well as mapping the city, H.F.