Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year

Since the start of the COVID-19 emergency last year, I have largely avoided the great literature of plague and epidemic—a break with my frequent practice of letting current events somewhat guide my instinct as to what to read next. Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year certainly came to my mind early on in this crisis. I even used it as the title of a post I wrote back in the first week or so of the pandemic lock-down. The ready-made phrase seemed to lend itself too obviously to the stuff of journalistic cliché and punning headlines to resist (this was the same season in which a million variations on "love in the time of cholera" began to appear, for instance, with "covid" swapped in, and in which copies of the Decameron were, possibly for the first time, in hot demand). 

But we must recall that there was a gruesome several-week period when books, though thought of, were not therefore within reach. Deliveries ground to a halt, and in-person book stores were shut down. To wish to read a title in hard copy, therefore, did not mean it would be possible to do so. 

More than any practical limitations, however, there was a psychological barrier. Whenever I thought of reading about pandemic disease and mass suffering, it was as if there were a heckler at the back of the room of my inner stand-up act yelling "too soon!" Put simply, I was not ready. I needed reading matter that would take me further from, rather than closer to, what was happening in the world. I also, for several weeks, was not quite ready to accept that this pandemic had caused and would continue to cause such a rupture in my previous existence. I wasn't willing to admit that it had the right to put my previous intellectual projects on hold. I clung to the latter in an effort to achieve some feeling of continuity, however tenuous.

Now that the crisis has abated somewhat, however—at least in this country, at least for now—the experience is ready to be assimilated. This is my life; the last year has been a part of my life, and can be looked at more squarely. I've therefore become of a sudden ravenously curious about what other times and places have to teach us about the experience of epidemic disease. I'm ready to try to make sense of what we've been through, now that we have exited the most acute phase, I myself am close to fully vaccinated, and my more immediate fears and apprehensions have been put to rest. Perhaps in this respect, writing this blog is a bit like what Wordsworth said of poetry—it is fed by emotion, but it must be emotion "recollected in tranquility," rather than in the moment of intensest feeling. 

All of which is quite relevant to Defoe's work, because it too was the product of recollection in tranquility; albeit on a much larger time-scale than I am talking about here. A Journal of the Plague Year was published some sixty years after the great London plague, and its author was only five years old at the time of the events it describes. The book could therefore scarcely be said to be based on his own experiences, and must instead be categorized as an "historical novel"—but this fact is undeniably at odds, as others have remarked before, with the book's astonishingly personal, documentary, and testamentary feel. If it is a work of historical imagination and reconstruction, as it appears to be, it is among the most visceral and convincing that has ever been done. 

Perhaps the most eerie thing about reading Defoe's book in this plague year of our own, 2021—amidst the still-glowing embers of the COVID-19 outbreak—is how incredibly different our reaction to it must be now than it would have been if we had read it at any other time of our lives. For me, as for no doubt many others, the book had been on my list for years, due to the intrinsic interest of its subject-matter. But if I had opened it at some earlier moment in history—a time, say, before 2020, before Trump, before COVID, when I felt much more confident in the long-term stability and modernity and enlightenment of our society—I would have mostly approached it in a spirit of horrified fascination. 

One would have come to the book, that is to say, chiefly in order to shudder and gawk at its outré horrors: the dead-cart rumbling through the streets of London, the bell-ringer crying "Bring out your dead!" (yes, this happens in the book, not just in Monty Python); the mass graves many feet wide and deep that are still too small to contain the volume of corpses cast down into them pell-mell, and so on. 

We would also snort in mockery of the ineffectual remedies and off-base theories to explain the disease that the people of the time employed—Defoe's references to using perfumes to ward off dangerous odors, to the statements he attributes to "learned Physicians" of the time cautioning against noxious "vapors," "spirits," "bad air," etc., recommending the burning of gunpowder to warn off disease, and other such maunderings as vapid and insubstantial as the miasmas they warned against. 

In short, one would have seen in the book little more than the ghastly record of the ravages a disease could inflict before the time of modern medicine, urban sanitation, and the germ theory of disease—nothing more. One might feel a kind of pity, perhaps, but it would not strike one that the experiences described in the book could have any analogy to one's own. One's pity would be shot-through, that is to say, with E.P. Thompson's "condescension of posterity." 

Very different, painfully different, to read this book in the context of COVID-19. We see now that all the manifestations of ignorance and superstition that Defoe decries, the various mental short-cuts that tend to lead us astray and prevent us from reckoning with disaster, are still with us, and that the mere existence of modern medicine and the germ theory of disease have not in all respects left us in a better position when confronted with a new pandemic than were the people in Defoe's day. 

The last year has, to be sure, reassured us that modern medical science is able to create and ramp-up production of effective vaccines, and can do so relatively quickly, even when faced with a new virus. This surely provides us with one powerful tool to resist a pandemic that was not available to the people of seventeenth-century London. 

Yet, as Mike Davis's book about the danger of a coming avian flu pandemic (The Monster at Our Door) warned back in 2005, until the vaccine is developed or other effective treatments come on line, human beings in large parts of the world will be nearly as defenseless in the face of a new virus as if we had none of our modern theories at our disposal.* We would thus be forced to resort to the same rough-and-ready containment methods that Defoe discusses in such detail in his book—social distancing, isolating the sick, and culling domesticated animals who might otherwise form a reservoir. 

It is easy to laugh at Defoe's engagement with the "serious" medical literature of his day, to be sure, all of which sounds to us like only so many blind allies (was disease caused by tiny swarms of invisible insects? Or perhaps poisons and unhealthy odors that wafted through the air?) As far off the mark as most of these ideas may have been, however, they display a basic understanding of the principle of contagion and infection, and they led people to attempt roughly the same sorts of public health and containment strategies we would now employ. 

Defoe knew as well as we do today that for the healthy and "sound" to come into close contact with those afflicted with plague was a sure way to catch the disease and risk spreading it still further. He therefore understood the basic mechanism of transmission. Even if insects and vapors are not exactly the same thing as microbial pathogens, they would be warded off by the same methods. 

Of course, there were some people in Defoe's day (or the slightly earlier epoch he was chronicling) who denied that such transmission was possible. They pointed to cases in which people were struck down by plague while attesting that they had never come into contact with anyone who was visibly sick. They therefore argued that there was no such thing as infection, and that the plague simply attacked people at random through the direct supernatural intervention of God. 

The author of the Journal rightly dismisses such theories, however, and his argument against them leads him to formulate a remarkably prescient theory of asymptomatic transmission (one of the features of our present pandemic that has made it so much harder to contain than its predecessor SARS). People can evidently harbor the disease for long periods before they notice the signs of illness in themselves, he observes, but during which time they can nonetheless unwittingly transmit the plague to others.** He ponders how long a person might unknowingly carry the disease in this way, and therefore tries to estimate the time that would be needed to isolate an apparently-healthy person who can come in contact with the plague in order to ensure they were not carrying the pathogen. He asks whether two weeks, or a full "quarantine" (originally defined as 40 days, hence the name), or even longer stretches might be needed. All of which seems remarkably reminiscent of the learned guess-work our own public health officials had to engage in during the early days of COVID-19, before more about the virus was known. 

There were also of course plenty of quack and superstitious remedies being hawked in sixteenth century London, which partook of none of Defoe's empirical and proto-scientific spirit; but the author is no more persuaded by most of these than we would be. His narrator denounces at length the "astrologers, cunning-men, wizards," and the like who bamboozled London's poor out of what little money they had in exchange for woefully ineffectual remedies—amulets, talismans, tinctures, etc. In some cases, Defoe observes, these pseudo-cures not only failed to prevent the plague, but dealt active harm to those who subscribed to them.

He warns for instance those "storeing themselves with such Multitudes of Pills, Potions, and Preservatives [...] that they not only spent their money, but even poison'd themselves before-hand, for fear of the Poison of the Infection, and prepar'd their Bodies for the Plague, instead of preserving them against it." 

And before we look down our noses at the "ignorance" that informed such behavior, let us reflect that our own previous president—the ostensible leader, at the time, of our nation's entire coronavirus response—publicly recommended that people ingest household disinfectants in order to cure the virus. Nor was this the mere non-sequitur or "joke" the president later tried to pass it off as—the idea that drinking bleach is a "miracle cure" has been making the rounds in certain New Age and conspiracist circles for years, with people mistaking what are actually the early signs of poisoning for the supposed purgative benefits of the toxic brew. 

Plainly, we are not so distant from Defoe's people now as we would like to believe. 

Time and again, indeed, the problems that Defoe's London confronts in the face of epidemic seem strikingly reminiscent of our own. Defoe discusses the principal public health strategy that the officials of his time employed—namely, that of "shutting up houses" where any member of the family was known to be taken ill—and he weighs the pros-and-cons of the approach in light of sound principles of contagion. He observes how this method of isolating the sick had the downside of confining otherwise healthy members of the household with the ill person and thereby virtually ensuring they would catch the plague themselves. He notes the endless "stratagems" that the people so confined used to elude their captors and escape, spreading the illness still further abroad. He therefore decides that this method did not "answer the end" it sought, and he explores other possible means of social distancing that might have had better effect. 

Defoe recommends, for instance, that instead of confining the well with the sick against their will, that healthy members of an afflicted household should be removed to some temporary abode where they could isolate and be checked regularly for signs of the illness until a set period had passed. (A proposal we have had to consider in our own times, when the recommendation to lock down and isolate within a household has exposed family members to potential infection from COVID-19). 

He also recommends mass-evacuation from afflicted areas in the earliest possible stages of an epidemic, so as to ensure no one was living in too great proximity to anyone else during a visitation of the plague. This proposal clearly grasps the fundamentals of "social distancing," and while it is not without its flaws as an idea, its author immediately spots the chiefest among them: namely, that asymptomatic carriers might actually spread the disease unwittingly in the process of evacuation; which would thus have "confounded the Thing, and made that be a Propagation of the Distemper, which was the best means to prevent it." 

If Defoe wrestled with more or less the same kinds of public health questions we have lately been forced to address in our contemporary society, before more effective antiviral therapeutics and vaccines for the coronavirus became available, he also writes in detail about the same kinds of downstream social consequences of the pandemic that we too face. He is clear-eyed about the fact the disease not only wrought havoc in itself, but that it also had devastating indirect effects on the economy and the labor market. He offers an extended list of all the trades and professions that were cast out of work and made penniless by the loss of foreign trade, concomitant shrinking of demand for manufactures, and other consequences of the epidemic. He therefore commends the public "Charity" that, in his telling, was all that stood between the poor and outright starvation. 

One can only be reminded of the mass unemployment that followed the COVID-19 lockdowns in our own country, and the poverty and economic contraction that has viscously impacted the developing world since March 2020, due to the drying up of global tourism and other major effects of the pandemic. Let Defoe's words be a warning to us not to resent the expense to public coffers that follows from supplying the survival needs of people affected by the consequences. After all, the alternative is either destitution or people being forced to reopen industries before it is actually safe to do so (as, of course, actually happened in this country). 

While these public dilemmas are all too familiar to our own recent experiences, meanwhile, perhaps the most achingly on-point parts of Defoe's account are those that concern private responses to the disease and the social distancing measures it occasioned—both his own responses and those of the individuals around him. 

Defoe condemns, for instance, the same kinds of sloppy heuristics and mental fallacies in his neighbors that we still see causing damage among us today. He notes, for instance, that in parts of the city of London not visited by the plague in its early stages, many people developed a false sense of their own invincibility to the disease. Thus, they were left wholly unprepared and made even more vulnerable when the plague finally spread to those quarters. "[F]or a long time," he writes, "the People of those Parts had flattered themselves that they should escape; and how they were surprized, when it came upon them as it did[.]"

One is reminded of the way in which many parts of the South and West of the United States regarded COVID-19 as an essentially Northeast problem, in its early months, and were therefore far too hasty to reopen for business. As a result, the pandemic swept through the rest of the country in an even more devastating second wave—one that put the early March-April spike of COVID-19 in the shade. 

Likewise, Defoe observes that people were dangerously "precipitate," as soon as the worst of the plague began to recede, in reverting to open conversation and shedding all of the methods and habits of distancing they had learnt over the past year. (Sound familiar?) 

But Defoe's narrator does not just attack the ignorance and poor decision-making of his neighbors. More disconcertingly (to me at least), he also notes the ways in which his own resolutions to maintain social distance continually faltered and failed. He recounts, for instance, how a particularly ghastly encounter with the plague would convince him to retreat into his house and isolate for a time, to take enough provisions so that he would not have to leave again until the "visitation" was passed—only to find he lacked the patience in the end to perfectly keep this commitment. "I cou'd not hold it," he confesses. 

This is the part of the book in which I see—most uncomfortably—not only a mirror of the society in which I live, but of the failings in myself as well. As much as I tried to follow the rules of social distancing, after all, I took risks over the past year I probably shouldn't have. I know people who more rigorously confined themselves for the past fourteen months or so than I was ever willing to do, and they probably did right. More than that, though, the "precipitate" and sloppy thinking that Defoe condemns in his neighbors is something I have myself been guilty of. 

At the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, after all, I was not wholly persuaded that this really was the Big One. Intellectually, I didn't doubt the science of infection and exponential spread, or the warnings of public health officials. But at a gut level, my starting assumption was that this would probably pass and turn out to be less of a problem than many supposed. I questioned in my heart whether we were not all somewhat overreacting, and whether the strict methods we were trying to apply to contain the coronavirus were not excessive. 

Plainly, from the perspective of May 2021, I had it ass-backwards. We didn't do nearly enough, in those early stages, to contain the virus. 

Why did I have a starting presumption and narrative in my head that was so at odds with the real scale of the disaster? Mike Davis's book, mentioned above, sheds some light on this. He notes, writing in 2005, that many in the U.S. drew the wrong lessons from previous pandemics that were warned against but never fully materialized. He notes that because the U.S. government spent a lot of time and money on vaccine stockpiling in preparation for a late-'70s flu pandemic, for instance, only to find that it did not ultimately prove necessary, many wrongly concluded that the threat of pandemic disease had been exaggerated. 

More broadly than that, however, many of us in our society have become somewhat inured to threats of global catastrophe. As Susan Sontag put it in a 1988 essay: "With the inflation of apocalyptic rhetoric has come the increasing unreality of the apocalypse [...] A permanent modern scenario: apocalypse looms... and it doesn't occur." We are used to being told to dread something, only to discover that it never arrives, or that it comes in an attenuated form that does not actually annihilate us or alter the fundamentals of our own private existence. Perhaps the problem is that we are very poor at conceiving of problems that are large in scale, destructive, and truly grave, but that do not in fact spell the doom of society. The idea that something is a big problem, but not the ultimate problem, and that it should nonetheless demand our attention and action, is unfamiliar to us.

After all: COVID-19 has become a bigger killer and bigger source of poverty and displacement and horror than I had foreseen—but it also has not been an apocalypse. Society is still here, albeit altered. We plainly need a language for human catastrophe that does not frame everything in terms of all-or-nothing existential threats. Certainly the COVID-19 crisis has made us more aware of the scale and reality of such mass-scale but not entirely world-ending threats. 

Likewise—and much like the political problems in this country that so closely mirrored its progress, and were so directly implicated in exacerbating it—it has proved a salutary reminder that the mere fact a catastrophe is inconceivable in scope is no guarantee it will never happen. The old narrative that the experts have to keep dreaming up apocalyptic scenarios that never come to pass, in order to keep themselves entertained, has hopefully been put to rest. I confess that, had I read Mike Davis's book on the avian flu before COVID-19, for instance, I might not have intellectually doubted it, but it would have failed to register on an emotional level. I would have said, "that sounds bad, but somehow—for some reason I can't name, it probably won't happen. It would just be too big, too at odds with what I know to be the circumstances of modern society, for it to happen in that way."

"We don't have epidemics anymore!" I would have said. "We have modern science and modern medicine." Susan Sontag finds characters expressing a similar attitude, in Albert Camus' The Plague: "how unthinkable it is to have a plague in the twentieth century..." she writes, paraphrasing the novel, before adding: "as if the belief that such a calamity could not happen, could not happen anymore, means that it must."

Indeed. COVID has taught us that we have not in fact banished the ancient problems of public health to the dustbin of history. We are not in fact vastly better armed in a contest with a novel epidemic disease than were the people of Defoe's day. We are guilty of all the same kinds of short-term thinking, the same inability to reckon with exponential spread at an intuitive level, the same resorts to superstitious remedies and quack hypotheses and to following the lead of lying mountebanks as were the people of the London Defoe describes. 

Moreover, the fact that COVID has taken place and wrought so much damage is no guarantee that other and even deadlier pandemics will not soon follow behind it. One catastrophe is not a down payment on the next. Indeed, the underlying conditions that made COVID-19 and its predecessor, SARS, possible are still in place. 

All the conditions for the birth of a new pandemic that Mike Davis lays out in his 2005 book are still with us. The wet markets and the trade in wild animals; the human intrusion into and destruction of wild habitats through cattle grazing that leads to increased contact between people and unfamiliar wild animals, as well as the growing trade in bush-meat, are still with us; the vast reservoirs of domesticated livestock all clustered in the same small areas that the modern meat industry requires—nothing about any of this has been altered or reformed in response to the pandemic threat. There could be yet another novel coronavirus. Or the new strain of influenza, that Davis was specifically warning against in 2005, could break out in a poultry farm at any moment and mutate to the point of allowing human-to-human transmission. 

Indeed, for the last several decades we have had new strains of pandemic illness erupt from these same conditions every few years; and yet the very fact that they were effectively contained by public health strategies—or proved to have features that made them more amenable to containment—perversely led us to downplay the threat, or even to conclude that investment in public health protections was less necessary than we had thought. 

A virus that can be stopped does not mean we don't need to fear the next virus that can't be prevented so easily. The preventative strategies that worked in slowing prior pandemics should make us all the more cognizant of the value of such strategies, not lead us to forget their importance. 

In the case of the 2002-3 SARS outbreak, the only reason we were able to contain and monitor it with such success was likely due to the fact that it had almost no asymptomatic spread. A SARS-like virus that did allow for people to transmit it without knowing they were ill or manifesting any signs of disease—which is essentially what COVID-19 is—therefore was able to spread much further and faster. If a novel flu virus with considerable asymptomatic spread were to emerge, do we have any reason to think we would be in a better position to resist or slow its rate of destruction that the people of seventeenth-century London were able to stop bubonic plague? Do we not need to start preparing for such an eventuality right now, so that we are not again caught "surprized" and unawares like the people in Defoe's book? 

Defoe's narrative therefore still greatly repays rereading in this moment, not only for what it tells us about the experience we have just passed through, but also for the warning it portends for our future. And this, indeed, is precisely the spirit in which its author intended it, if we take his narrator at his word. As Defoe writes: 

I often reflected upon the unprovided Condition, that the whole Body of the people were in at the first coming of this Calamity upon them, and how it was for Want of timely entring into Measures, and Managements, as well publick as private, that all the Confusions that followed were brought upon us; and that such a prodigious Number of People sunk in that Disaster, which if proper Steps had been taken, might, Providence concurring, have been avoided, and which, if Posterity think fit, they may take a Caution, and Warning from.

We do well to heed these words, before it is again too late!

————

*Davis even slightly underestimated the extent to which we would be caught disarmed by the next pandemic, because he was assuming the it would come in the form of a novel strain of influenza, and therefore that we could ward off the danger in part by stockpiling Tamiflu. Since the next great pandemic turned out to be the fault of a coronavirus instead, we at first had no effective antivirals or other therapeutics that could make much of a dent in it.

**"[T]he Sick cou'd infect none but those that came within reach of the sick Person; but that one Man, who may have really receiv'd the Infection, and knows it not, but goes Abroad, and about as a sound Person, may give the plague to a thousand People [...] and neither the Person giving the Infection, or the Persons receiving it, know any thing of it, and perhaps not feel the Effects of it for several Days after."