A Journal of the Plague Year
A Whitechapel saddler decides against leaving London in the summer of 1665 and sets down what he sees week by week - the bills of mortality parish by parish, the shut-up houses with a watchman at each door, the pit at Aldgate, the quacks and prophets working the crowds. He keeps circling back to whether he should have gone, and to the families who did go and carried it into the country with them. Defoe was five years old in the plague year; what he assembled from Hodges, the parish returns and his uncle's memory reads like testimony rather than fiction.
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