STARS AS PORTENTS

Taranaki Daily News, 18 August 1934, Page 13 (Supplement)

STARS AS PORTENTS

DEFOE AND THE PLAGUE

(By the

Rev. B. Dudley, F.R.A.S.)

One of the most remarkable stories in the English language is the account of the London Plague of 1665 as told by Daniel Defoe. It may be said of his book that it is bad enough to be quite interesting. Though not to be taken as literal fact, it is modelled on what actually transpired. The “Journal of the Plague Year” throws many sidelights upon the habits and thoughts of the people who lived in the time of the author. We note, for instance, the view commonly taken concerning the stars and other celestial objects as having a bearing on the course of human affairs. Defoe was entirely sceptical in these matters. He describes how, when the plague was in its earliest stages, the public alarm in London was greatly increased by the fact that a blazing star or comet had appeared for some weeks before it started, like that which shone out later (in 1666) a little before the great fire. “The old women and the phlegmatic hypochondriac part of the other sex, whom I might almost call old women, too, remarked (especially afterward, though not till both those judgments were over) that those two comets passed directly over the city, and that so very near the houses that it was plain they imparted something peculiar to the city alone.”

The plague comet, he states, was of a faint, dull, languid colour, and its “motion very heavy, solemn and slow. The comet that preceded the great fire, on the other hand, “was bright and sparkling, or, as others said, flaming, and its motion swift and furious.” The interpretation generally put upon this apparition of 1665 was, according to the author of the Journal, that “a heavy judgment, slow but severe, terrible and frightful,” was already begun. Certain it was that the course of the plague as it developed' was of this nature; while the terror of 1666 was, like the comet which allegedly portended it, sudden, swift and fiery.” Some of the people, we are informed, particularised so closely as they looked on at the awful sign in the heavens—the comet preceding the fire —that they claimed (after the event) they “could perceive the motion with their eye, but even they heard it; that it made a rushing, mighty noise, fierce, and . terrible, though at a distance, and but just perceivable.” Defoe saw both these objects, he tells us, and at the time, as he reluctantly confesses, “had so much of the common notion of such things in my head that I was apt to look upon them as the forerunners and warnings of God’s judgments.” He was impressed with- the thought that perhaps heaven had not yet “sufficiently scourged the city.” # ■ But he mollified his alarms always by reflecting upon the fact that natural causes are assigned by the astronomers for such things,” and that- their “motions and even their, revolutions are calculated.” Being thus determinable, the motions and appearance of these bodies, he rightly argued, could not be “perfectly called forerunners or foretellers, much less the procurers, of such events as pestilence, war, fire, and the like. But having given his own point of view in these matters, he goes on to show how different it was among the ordinary public who had “almost universal melancholy apprehensions of some dreadful calamity and judgment coming upon the city.” , To make matters worse, certain books were issued which “strongly increased the public apprehensions,” so that they became “more addicted to prophesies and astrological conjurations, dreams, and old wives’ tales than ever they were before or since.” He is not sure whether “this unhappy temper was raised by the follies of some people who got money by it, that is to say, by printing predictions and prognostications,” or whether it was just “the error of the times. The books which frightened the people most were Lilly’s Almanack, Gadbury’s Astrological Predictions, Poor Robin’s Almanack, and the like, to cite Defoe’s own examples. The writers, or compilers of these miserable productions (which have their survivors even now) appeared to find sinister pleasure in carrying out their deadly programme, as they “foretold, directly or covertly, the rum of the city.” Some vendors of these publications also ran about the streets with oral predictions, pretending they were sent to preach to the people. One of these “madcaps” actually employed the style of Jonah: “Yet forty days, and London shall be destroyed.” Defoe confesses uncertainty, however, whether this itinerant “said yet forty days or yet a few days.” Another ran about naked, crying day and night his words of warning, repeating them incessantly. Nor could anyone “ever find him to stop or rest, or take any sustenance, at least that ever I could hear of.” The stars had convinced him, so that through him “abundance of people were put out of their wits.” Some, he states, “heard voices that never spake, and saw sights that never appeared, but the imagination of the people was really turned wayward and possessed.” Even the clouds by day came to have “horrible portentous shapes, as, . for example, a “flaming sword held in a hand coming out of a cloud, with a point hanging directly over the city. Other shapes were coffins, hearses, heaps of dead bodies lying unburied. The author declares that he could have filled his book with the strange accounts which people gave of what they had seen by day and night, and that there was “no contradicting them without breach of friendship, or being counted rude and unmannerly, on the one hand, and profane and impenetrable on the other.” Defoe speaks with disgust of the astrologers who intensified the alarm of the people by their “stories of the conjunction of planets,” told in “a malignant manner and with a mischievous influence, one of which conjunctions was to happen, and did happen, in October, and the other in November, filling the people’s heads with predictions on these signs of the heavens.” Attempts were made to suppress tne publication of such books as terrified the people.. But tfie Government had enough on hand m dealing with the devastating . consequences of the plague itsblf, and could do nothing effective in this other direction. Thus it was still possible to see signs and inscriptions set up at the doors of houses: “Here lives a fortune teller, “Here lives an astrologer.” And many frightened people entered these places to ascertain whether tire plague would get them or pass them over (on condition, of course, that the fee was paid in advance). “Tire wizards always talked to them of such-and-such influences of the stars, of the conjunctions of such-and-such planets, which must necessarily bring sickness and distempers, and consequently the plague. Defoe appears rather pleased to inform us that when the visitation was overnot one of these gentlemen could be found; they had practically all succumbed to the pestilence, being unable to regulate the stars in their courses in their own favour. “They were gone and vanished,” is his summary word.