It’s 1665 in London. People are dying in the streets, but the government is telling everyone not to worry too much. Sounds familiar, right? Most of us encountered Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year in a dusty literature class, or maybe you saw it trending during the 2020 lockdowns because it felt so eerily accurate.
Honestly, the book is weird. It’s not a novel in the way we think of them today. There’s no hero going on a journey, no romantic subplot, and basically no "plot" at all. It’s just a long, rambling, terrifyingly detailed account of a city falling apart. But here’s the kicker: Daniel Defoe wasn't even there.
Daniel Defoe Plague Year: The Ultimate Literary Fake-Out
When Defoe published the book in 1722, he was 62 years old. The Great Plague of London happened in 1665. Do the math—he was five when the bodies were being tossed into pits. He didn't write this from memory. He wrote it as a piece of "historical fiction" that was so good, people actually thought it was a real diary for over a hundred years.
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He signed the book only as "H.F." Many historians think this refers to his uncle, Henry Foe, who was a saddler in Whitechapel and actually stayed behind while everyone else fled. Defoe took his uncle’s stories, mixed them with official "Bills of Mortality" (the 17th-century version of data tracking), and created what we’d call a "docudrama" today.
The Gritty Reality of the 1665 Outbreak
Defoe doesn't sugarcoat anything. You’ve got people "shut up" in their houses—the original lockdown. If one person in a family got sick, the city would literally bar the door from the outside, paint a red cross on it, and post a guard. They were basically left to die together.
The narrator, H.F., walks the streets and describes things that would make a modern horror director blush. He talks about "searchers"—women hired to examine corpses for "tokens" (the black spots of the bubonic plague). He describes the "dead carts" rumbling through the night, the drivers calling out "Bring out your dead!" It’s grim. It’s heavy. And it’s surprisingly obsessed with statistics.
Why Defoe’s Style is Totally Bizarre
If you try to read it cover-to-cover, you'll notice something. It’s one giant block of text. No chapters. No breaks. Just one long, breathless stream of consciousness. Defoe does this on purpose to make it feel like a real journal written by a man who is too busy surviving to worry about "proper" formatting.
He’ll spend five pages talking about the price of bread. Then he’ll spend ten pages on a heartbreaking story about a family trying to escape by boat on the Thames. Then he’ll drop a table of death tolls from different parishes. It’s messy. It’s chaotic. It feels real because life in a pandemic is chaotic.
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Fact vs. Fiction: What Defoe Got Right (and Wrong)
Defoe was a journalist at heart. He used real documents, but he wasn't above a little "creative" embellishment to make a point.
- The Numbers: Most of the statistics he uses are from the official London records. However, H.F. (the narrator) constantly argues that the "official" numbers are too low because the rich were bribing clerks to list their relatives' deaths as "fever" instead of "plague" to avoid having their houses boarded up.
- The Medical Advice: People back then thought the plague was spread by "miasma" or bad air. Defoe mentions people smoking tobacco or carrying nosegays to keep the air "pure." He didn't know about the fleas on rats. He did, however, capture the psychological toll of not knowing how a disease spreads.
- The Human Drama: The story of the three brothers—John, Thomas, and Richard—who flee into the countryside is likely a composite of several real stories. It serves as a "how-to" guide for survival.
The "Cancel Culture" of 1665
One of the most relatable parts of the book is how Defoe describes the social tension. The rich fled to their country houses immediately. The poor were left to keep the city running. Sound familiar?
H.F. is constantly judging people. He judges the "quacks" selling fake medicine (like "anti-pestilential pills"). He judges the people who get too "religious" and start seeing ghosts or omens in the sky. He even judges himself for being curious enough to go outside when he should be staying home.
The book is less about a virus and more about how humans act when the world stops working. People become incredibly selfish, but they also show "brutal courage." Defoe writes about the nurses and "bearers" who risked their lives to help others, often dying in the process.
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Is It Still Worth Reading Today?
In 2026, we’ve lived through our own versions of "plague years." Defoe’s work hits differently now. It’s no longer a historical curiosity; it’s a mirror.
What most people get wrong about Daniel Defoe's plague year account is thinking it’s just a dry history book. It’s actually a psychological thriller. It’s about the anxiety of checking the news (or the "Bills") every morning to see if the numbers are going up or down. It’s about the guilt of surviving when your neighbors didn't.
Actionable Insights for the Modern Reader
If you’re going to dive into this classic, don't try to read it like a regular novel. You’ll get bored.
- Skip around: It’s okay to jump to the stories of the "dead pits" or the escapees.
- Look at the data: Compare his 1665 numbers to modern outbreaks. The scale of the loss—nearly 100,000 people in a city of 460,000—is staggering.
- Watch the narrator: Notice how H.F. oscillates between trusting God and trusting common sense. It’s a great study in 18th-century "survivalism."
Defoe’s final message isn't one of despair, though. The book ends with a little poem he supposedly wrote in his journal. It basically says: A dreadful plague in London was... yet I alive! It’s a celebration of survival, plain and simple.
To get the most out of your reading, try to find an annotated version. The references to London geography (like Aldgate or Whitechapel) mean a lot more when you realize these are real places you can still visit today. Start by mapping out the narrator's walks on a modern map of London to see just how close the horror was to the city's heart.