listens to it: here, however, the cries of London are not those of salesmen hawking wares, but plague victims screaming for release from their pain. The idea of circulation becomes contaminated. Rumour is a kind of plague, concealed, passed on, and then breaking out everywhere. The tenderest act in nature, a mother feeding a baby, turns deadly. Communication itself is like a disease which people walk down the middle of the street to avoid; in Due Preparations, Defoe had explained how to sterilize letters by smoking them in brimstone, then sprinkling them with vinegar. If Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was an ironic tribute to the success of Robinson Crusoe, it also nods towards the Journal when its hero comes home unable to bear the stench of humanity; some of Defoe’s Londoners take to the streets only with nosegays to hand. Best of all for this great writer about commerce, cash becomes carrier, requiring sterilization by vinegar. Defoe was fond of taking the longer view of currency: Crusoe had reflected on the pointlessness of his coins; Colonel Jack’s would weigh him down like guilt as he fashioned another escape.

H.F.’s reactions to the prevailing horror suggest that Defoe wanted to keep his readers’ sensibilities fresh: where others are ‘hardened’, as incapable of pity as they are of sensing personal danger, the narrator is constantly ‘surprized’, ‘curious’, and ‘tender’. He expects the terrors to make the stoutest heart bleed and is shocked when they have the opposite effect. His role as a model citizen, fostering social thinking through right feeling, is nowhere more evident than in his meeting with the virtuous, impoverished waterman. Resolving to find out about the people who fled to moored ships, he meets a boatman who supports his plague-ridden family by rowing provisions across the Thames. Had he not abandoned them, asks the narrator? Lifting his eyes to heaven, the boatman gives thanks for having been preserved so that he can fend for them, prompting H.F. to the reaction of sentimental heroes throughout the eighteenth century. With two inseparable gestures, he sheds tears and digs into his pocket: ‘As I could not refrain contributing Tears to this Man’s Story, so neither could I refrain my Charity for his Assistance’ (p. 95). The boatman reciprocates with tears of his own and more thanks to the almighty. If H.F. is always ready to remind his audience that ‘the Cries of the poor were most lamentable to hear’ (p. 83) and that their sufferings were alleviated by charity, the episode of the boatman also shows that he expected them to deserve their handouts through piety and industry, not through the ‘brutal Courage’ that made them, like the inhabitants of Marseilles, ‘range the infected Streets’.

If that distinction tars the desperate poor with a brush that has touched H.F. himself, it epitomizes the contradictions of A Journal of the Plague Year, a book that brilliantly creates the illusion of an individual perspective on a world running out of control. Reportage may, as John Carey says, leave readers with the feeling of having been there and got out, and the great work of imaginary reporting that is the Journal certainly charts the exhilaration of survival and the comforts of justification. But such journeys are no more comfortable now than they could have been to Londoners in 1722, fearful of what might be nestling in a bale of fabric fresh from the Mediterranean. Then or now, only the most unfeeling reader of Defoe’s uniquely unsettling landscape could fail to wonder what it would mean to be not the pious man who walks amid the shadows and emerges thankful, but the nameless woman whose part it is merely to throw open a window, utter ‘three frightful Skreetches’, and then cry ‘in a most inimitable Tone’, ‘Oh! Death, Death, Death!’ (p. 70).

NOTE ON THE TEXT

A Journal of the Plague Year was first published in 1722, the only edition to appear during Defoe’s life. A second edition appeared in 1755. The present text is that of 1722, printed from a xerox reproduction of the Huntington Library copy, through the kindness of Mr James Thorpe, Director of the Huntington Library. The long ‘s’ of the first edition has been eliminated, and I have silently corrected obvious errors of the press. In a very few instances where the text of the first edition is unintelligible, the result of an omitted word, I have supplied an obvious reading in square brackets. I have occasionally reduced the excessive punctuation of the original to avoid confusion. Aldgate, or Algate, the parish inhabited by Defoe and by the narrator of the Journal, I have printed consistently as Aldgate.

L.