Chaostheorie reviewed A journal of the plague year by Daniel Defoe (Penguin classics)
Review of 'A journal of the plague year' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
This was a fascinating semi-fictional account of the London plague epidemic of 1665 - semi-fictional because the narrator, a saddler, is Defoe's invention (Defoe himself having only been a child at the time of the events narrated here), but the historical events described are real.
Of course, the ideas of how plague spread and what to do to prevent infection from the time are largely incorrect, but many of the behaviours around a frightening infectious disease - including the premature relaxation of all caution once the disease recedes even slightly, prolonging the overall epidemic - are eerily familiar to those living through the COVID-19 pandemic today.
Defoe's narrator also clearly describes the different types of plague (most clearly bubonic and septicemic, although he potentially exaggerates the prevalence of the latter) now known to arise from Yersinia pestis.
From a modern perspective, the text itself is not exactly engaging: True to …
This was a fascinating semi-fictional account of the London plague epidemic of 1665 - semi-fictional because the narrator, a saddler, is Defoe's invention (Defoe himself having only been a child at the time of the events narrated here), but the historical events described are real.
Of course, the ideas of how plague spread and what to do to prevent infection from the time are largely incorrect, but many of the behaviours around a frightening infectious disease - including the premature relaxation of all caution once the disease recedes even slightly, prolonging the overall epidemic - are eerily familiar to those living through the COVID-19 pandemic today.
Defoe's narrator also clearly describes the different types of plague (most clearly bubonic and septicemic, although he potentially exaggerates the prevalence of the latter) now known to arise from Yersinia pestis.
From a modern perspective, the text itself is not exactly engaging: True to a character who is not a literary man, the narrative is rambling, repetitive and frequently repetitive, jumping from subject to subject before returning to the same. The sentence structure is often convoluted.
Nonetheless, I recommend this as a still fairly readable original historical document that is after all more than 300 years old.
