THE GREAT PLAGUE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3801, 28 August 1936, Page 3

THE GREAT PLAGUE

, CONDITIONS IN LONDON IN 1665. REFERENCES IN DEFOE’S JOURNAL. In his diary for August, 1665, John Evelyn makes the following entry: —“A solemn fast thr* England to deprecate God’s judgment against the land by pestilence and war; our Dr. preaching on 26 Levit., 41-42. That the means to obtain remission of punishment was not to repine at it, but humbly submit to it.” In a further entry of September: “Came home, there perishing neere ten thousand poor creatures weekly; however, I went along the city and suburbs from Kent-streete to St. James’s', a dismal passage and dangerous, to see so many coffins exposed in the streets now so thin of people, the shops shut up, and all in mournful silence as not knowing whose turn might be next.”

This is a picture drawn by one who like Samuel Pepys, lived and moved about London on his official business, which, in his case, included the care of the sick and wounded men drifting in from the ships engaged in the naval war with Holland. Like Pepys, and many other Englishmen of that time, the horrors of the situation, notwithstanding, Evelyn pursued his path of duty unflinchingly, but oddly enough, it is not to such men that we owe the most intimate and at the same time absorbing story of that terrible time, but to one who had then only reached years of infancy.

The Great Plague of London broke out in the summer of 1665, when Daniel Defoe was four years of age, so that no, personal recollection was possible, but he grew up in intimate touch with people who had passed through and survived its horrors, and whose experiences his gift for narrative turned to ready account in that amazing book "the Journal of the Plague Year.” Defoe did not come of exalted people. His brother was James -Foe, a London butcher, probably one of those who perished, for plague took heavy toll of the butchering class, and the son, growing up, sought a commercial extreme in the hoserie business. He took early and naturally, to politics and pamphlet writing, and was involved in the Monmouth rebellion of 1685, from which he emerged without loss of head or liberty; and, after certain vicissitudes, financial and otherwise, finally adopted writing as a profession and added the prefix “De” to his name. In the light of modem thought Defoe would probably be classed as a socialist.

His fearless advocacy of free speech and the rights of the individual landed him, on the issue of his pamphlet, “The Shortest Way With Dissenters,” published in 1702, in serious trouble. A Dissenter himself, his pamphlet, expressed in a spirit of irony, passed over the heads of that body which joined issue with the High Church party in condemning him to Newgate and the pillory, the one bright incident in his martyrdom being the intense display of public feeling in his favour. In Newgate the prison conditions must have been modified to meet his case, for there he published “The Review,” a journal written entirely by himself and dealing with popular subjects and matters of topical interest. Released from prison, Defoe found employment in writing political pamphlets and other articles for the publishers, and it was not till he had retired from public life and settled at Stoke Newington with his wife and family that he took to the serious business of literature. Essentially a realist, he had that gift which not every realist possesses, of telling his story in such a way that the reader is not conscious of any literary effort of affectations,

but only of a' pleasurable sensation of being entertained, as witness, “Robinson Crusoe,” “The Adventures of Captain Singleton,” the Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders” and other brilliant works of fiction. “The Journal” is a story told in the first person by a plain city business man, who found his private affairs of sufficient importance to prevent his fleeing and he locates his place of abode: “Without Aidgate, about midway between Aidgate church and Whitechapel bars,” a part of the city not touched by the first approach of the pestilence, but at the other end of the town he reports the disturbing spectacle of a continuous stream jf people in vehicles, with their families, servants and baggage, making for the open country, all of which impressed the observant citizen as “a very terrible and melancholy thing to see.” Had the telling been more obviously picturesque, the style more literdry, one might still have found interest in it as a clever bit of fiction based on fact: but Defoe, the perfect artist, has so consistently maintained the identity of the quiet, plain spoken citizen that the reader is moved to accept him as a creature of fact rather than of imagination.

The author is like the historian of a battle in which he did not take part, but describes from fragmentary first-hand statements gathered from those who did, sorted out and put together in such a way as to provide a convincing and authentic record. The apparent artlessness of the style is of course, deliberate—designed- to give accent to the recount of the horrors met with in these solitary wanderings through the desolated streets. There may seem to be some incon-1 sistency in the idea of a person with no persistent call, such as Pepys had, having the hardyhood to engage in these daily perambulations, but Defoe, in creating the essential character, has drawn him with so much care for the exigencies of the position as to eliminate any suggestion of incongruity.

The man was no daredevil. He records:—“ I confined my self indoors during the most violent raging of i-he pestilence.” “It pleased God that I was still spared and very hearty and sound of health, but very impatient of being pent up within doors, without air as I had been for fourteen days or thereabouts, and I could not restrain myself but that I would go and dbrry a letter for my brother to the post house.” Apart from the call of minor business matters he was clearly moved by an intense curiosity—a curiosity stronger than fear—to see what was going on. affairsto the quick brown fo punmp A more highly coloiured account of these walks abroad would have been excusable, but the simple incident of the small leather purse with money in it which lay untouched in the middle of the post-house yard, and the reclamation of the cash, “about thirteen shillings and some smooth groats and brass farthings,” by a sabotage process entailing the use of gunpowder and a pair of red hot longs carries a great deal of suggestion in its plain recital. With the King and Court removed to Oxford, and people of the richer class i’led to the country, there were still thousands of Londoners who had no choice save to stay and die where they had lived, but it stands to the credit of the city officials and many physicians and ministers of the gospel, that they sunk their personal fears and stood to their posts in ail loyalty and devotion. Despite the brooding horror which lay over the city, there were not wanting people who strove to drown their terror in drinking and ribaldry. A party of such, the observer notes, who frequented the Pie Tavern, and of whom, it is recorded in the journal —■ “it was not above a fortnight till they were, everyone carried to the great pit.” An interesting variation is the story of three men, a biscuit baker, who had been a soldier, his brother, a sail maker, and a joiner, all honest, worthy men, still untouched by the plague, who by mutual agreement left London in company. This takes the narrative into the country and provides a compelling word-picture of how the terror affected rural England. Having run its course, the grip of the pestilence began at last to show signs of relaxing. “In that every moment when we might well say, Vain was the help of man; I say, in that every moment, it pleased God to cause the fury of it to abate, though infinite numbers were sick, fewer died, and the first week’s bill decreased one thousand eight hundred and fifty-three a vast number indeed.” With the improved conditions the writer records that, going one day through Aidgate, and pretty many people passing and repassing, there came a man out of the end of the Minories, and, looking up the streets and down, he throws his hands abroad—’Lord, indeed an alteration here.’ Another man I heard add to his words, ‘ ’Tis all wonderful, ’tis all a dream.’ ‘Blessed be God,’ says a third man, and let us give thanks to Him, for it is all His doing.” In the following year came the Great Fire, which cleared away the last dregs of th plague still lurking in the purlieus of Alsatia, and, burning for over a week, destroyed eightynine churches, including old St Paul’s and more than thirteen thousand -houses.—A.C. in the Melbourne Age.