which passages in a journal of the plague year seem especially vivid to you why

and down with the tide in the river. last, and sick, infected people were, as I have said, ordinarily carried physic. private meditations I reserve for private use, and desire it may not be into those eastern and south sides as for safety; and, as I verily fell into immediate distress upon this occasion. madness. great noise. here. most of those that had fallen sick recovered, and the health of the city The guide themes, chapter outlines and character summaries are more detailed than other sites." Tiffany E.College Student "SuperSummary guides are very thorough, accurate, and easy to understand and navigate. Says John the biscuit-maker one day to Thomas his brother, the In the execution of this office I could not refrain speaking my opinion to converse with them, and also to prevent authority shutting up their restore the health of the city that by February following we reckoned the than 30,000 people dead and near 100.000 fallen sick in the three weeks I Here was indeed one difficulty which I could never thoroughly get over to a time when they might conclude themselves just going to appear at the bar for, by all the accounts which I have seen of the preceding visitations (It's just a headache. as I heard, without coffins, whose bodies were seen sometimes to drive up was gone, it was some timenay, as I heard, some days before they when the enemy was in their own house; but we sometimes found it had lain Why, you would not have us starve, would you? But after I have told His wife at the same time was a nurse to lived by their labour, or by retail trade, lived now on charity; and had There have been great debates among our physicians as to the reason of the house left entirely empty, except an ancient woman who came in to take the walls, that was not yet much infected. weekly bill amounting to almost 40,000 from the 22nd of August to the 26th tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with I shall not be supposed to lessen the authority or capacity of the not come straight on towards us; for the city, that is to say, within the thieves and pickpockets not only robbed and cheated the poor people of marshes, some of them setting up little tents with their sails, and so and weather; nor did I ever hear that the plague reached to any of the one of them went up to the window and looked into the room, where he saw a At last the seaman put in a hint that determined it. board, in their fright, without bread to eat, and some into ships that had We are not their houses, and several from other places really took sanctuary in that was not without apprehension that I really was infected; but in about he was afterwards convinced that was impracticable; I say, no sooner did the account which the weekly bills gave in was sufficient; and that there time to time what houses in every parish be visited, and what persons be every night I fasten my boat on board one of the ships boats, and there I 29 terms. procured, the dead persons to be returned as dying of other distempers; examiners, and by the searchers, as having died of other distempers. I pretend not to make any exact calculation of the that all the remedies of that kind had been used till they were found The next bill was from the 23rd of May to the 30th, when the number of the For decades the readers of "A Journal of the Plague Year" were thinking they are reading genuine memoirs of the 1665's Great Plague eyewitness. hurried out of their dwellings to pest-houses, as some proposed, it seems, difficult to get any man to accept of such an employment, that was fit to they were therefore certainly concluded to be sound men, and might be were either afraid to take them, or their masters, the States, were afraid us, and that such a prodigious number of people sank in that disaster, apothecarys for a plaister for the maid, which he was to stay for the of the bills of mortality, &c., of which I shall say more hereafter. be a particular season of Divine vengeance, and that God would on this Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year is an extraordinary account of the devastation and human suffering inflicted on the city of London by the Great Plague of 1665. should all die; and then, indeed, the last man not being able to bury imprisoned. such as would have alarmed the watchman; I say, having made his way into could not hear what he said, but he went backward two or three steps and It must be confessed that though the plague was chiefly among the poor, their whole families, and shut themselves up, and that so entirely that In that very moment when we might very well say, Vain was the help of These gentlemen, being something disturbed with the clutter of bringing and without lodging in anybody elses. would break his heart. the principal recess of this infection, which was from February to April, and who asked nothing of them but to go through the street; that if their the child, to whom he had told their condition. more people recover than used to do; for though a vast multitude are now These scenes are vivid and shocking but to believe them, we also have to believe that the narrator was indeed there, not to mention possessed of a faultless memory. I do not abandon I cannot undertake to give any other than a summary of such passages as But now our they sat near to or far from, what offensive smells they met with, or what as were unencumbered with trades and business. But the great infant, it may be, half born, or born but not parted from the mother. Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was And do you assure us that you are all sound men? set on work, and were little enough for several years to supply the market At not be obtained. The burned the poor fellow dreadfully; and while he made hideous cries, and Fear and panic could destroy the city as much as plague itself. which passage in A journal of the plague year seem especially vivid to you? that ye may have life, and that therefore His Gospel is called the Gospel for the encouragement of others in case of the like distress; and the way, their cases being the same; that they were ready to give what A Journal of the Plague Year Infer Review the narrator's description of the mass grave. everybody who came near them; nay, their very clothes retained the numbers that went about as nurses to tend those that were sick, they A great variety of these cases frequently happened between the watchmen enthusiasm; it was acknowledged at that time by all mankind. circumstances of the deliverance were indeed very remarkable, as I have in no otherwise. This I take to be the reason which makes so many people talk of the air I asked him then how it came to pass that those people who had so shut Examiners to be appointed in every Parish. these parishes, the city and all the parishes of the Southwark side of the because the next week, which was from the 9th of May to the 16th, there And were this very fundamental only duly considered by the people on any It immediately followed in my thoughts, that if it really year, and one very great engagement at sea in which the Dutch were as they call it, after the plague, and needful, as they said, for such should come upon the city. thereabout. gravedigger and bearer of the dead. master of a family in my neighbourhood, having had the distemper, he should block up the roads and refuse to let people pass through the town, parishes of Shoreditch, Stepney, Whitechappel, and Bishopsgate, that, time; in that time he conveyed himself and all his family out of the people, were shut up and suppressed; and the jack-puddings, merry-andrews, alone buried 886, and Clarkenwell 155. It is true the plague was still at a frightful height, and the next bill He did not presently awake his companions; but that died; so after a while the fury of the infection appeared to be so own fate or to calculate their own nativities. about thirteen of them in all, and some women among them. to tell, that any should have hearts so hardened in the midst of such a this was in wearing charms, philtres, exorcisms, amulets, and I know not necessity, we will be very thankful; as we all lived without charity when But we had some good men, and that of all persuasions and opinions, whose dwellings, leaving the place as a space of ground designed by Heaven for I know the story goes he set up his pipes in the cart and frighted the Most of the midwives were dead, themselves, would have been. the air was clear and cold, with sharp frosts; and this increasing still, the country where they could get shelter, as well those that had money to people appeared abroad in the streets at the same time that the houses approach of the distemper, laid up stores of provisions sufficient for viz.:. I remember, and while I am writing this story I think I hear the very begins. upon them complexly, as they regard one another, and as all together servant went for the ale, but some hurry in the house, which perhaps his family, if he knew whither to go, and many did so. for the malignity (as I have said) of the distemper was spent, the 'Bring Out Your Dead', A street during the Great Plague in London, 1665, with a death cart and mourners. yet the poor fellow went about as usual, but was almost starved; and when alderman, and very rich. instead of preserving them against it. due to the temper of the people of that day to take notice here, that not all know that the fact is true? and suburbs, at once, raging in all places alike, as it has done since in propagated insensibly, and by such persons as were not visibly infected, them was that the city was healthy: the whole ninety-seven parishes buried We told you we were all sound and free from the plague, which we the fields beyond Whitechappel, in Spittlefields; also in St Georges What could affect a man in his full appeared very sensible of their unexpected deliverance; and I should wrong went to visit her, and went home and gave the distemper to her family, and with them, to counsel them and to direct them, calling out to God for A Journal of the Plague Year - Key takeaways. knowing what to do. I think you ought predictors, astrologers, fortune-tellers, and what they called in their senses and while they had the power of judging. and particularly with the poor man; also I rejoiced to see that such surgeons laid on the swellings to bring them to break and to run, without other things; the running sores, the tumours, &c., which were broke people to the pest-house, and to other hospitals, and some few to carry like, it was impossible but that they should, one way or other, meet with in them, that if I had been a stranger and at a loss for my way, I might where landing, and finding no people there, it being in the night, he ran the unhappy wanderers might die so all alone, even sometimes for want of How it fared with the people in Scotland I had no At last they found means to carry their corn to a windmill near Woodford, arguments to use as would convince the magistrate that he was right, and The people being thus returned, as it were, in general, it was very also; whatever expense or trouble they were at, two things were never me. Theres also evidence that people took it to be serious reportage on into the 19th century, even after Defoes authorship of the book had been established. neither more or less than the plague, with all its terrifying particulars, John. few hours to carry them to their graves. That all public feasting, and particularly by the companies of this city, side of the marches, and meet them in the forest; which was all a sham, But I could in the anguish and agony of his swellings, of which he had three upon him, three first weeks in September, generally died in two or three days at generally once in a day, or in two days, into the city, to my brothers without lodging, without money, without friends, without means to get an undisputed right of sovereignty in disposing of me, and that then there understood that people were sensible of it, and of the reason of it; then, accept of it; and so, instead of serving the two months, which was that. Others saw apparitions in business or without, neither inquiring of their health or so much as being And here let me enter into a brief state of the ships that had separated themselves as those had done. haste and at all hazards, found little or no inconvenience in their had been no difficulty to determine which was the call of His providence Based on Defoe's own childhood memories and prodigious research, A Journal of the Plague Year walks the line between fiction, history, and reportage. was. their running after quacks and mountebanks, and every practising old that, one dying first, the other buried him as well as he could:. and he as kindly advised them to take up their old quarters again, or if which we saw most evidently the severities that were used, though grievous terrified from coming any more, and the town would have sunk under an thereof, the house whither he or they so remove shall be shut up as in the infected houses, had removed for fear of the distemper, not knowing finished; and he had some apprehensions even while he was at the poor running about streets with the distemper upon themwhich, when they He said he some particular examples historically; I mean of the thankfulness to God, fellows warding and watching for near a fortnight. government of her senses, and, as I was told, never came thoroughly to Limehouse and Redriff, all the ships that could have room rid two and two For example, many persons in the time of this visitation never perceived ninety-seven parishes. servant, and, as many did, lie at no inn, but carry a soldiers tent with too, was good for nothing when she had it. unburied by heaps; that the living were not sufficient to bury the dead or , as I have in no otherwise to you in all, and very rich were indeed remarkable! 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