A Journal of the Plague Year

The shocking immediacy of Daniel Defoe's description of a plague-wracked city makes it one of the most convincing accounts of the Great Plague of 1665 ever written. Defoe's art is a concealed one. The deceptive simplicity of his Journal leads the reader not only to a minute understanding of the plague itself, but also to an extraordinarily heightened sense of London in 1665 as a living, suffering, entity. This is realism at its best, and it is no surprise that it has become the prototype of all accounts of great cities in times of epidemic, siege, or occupation.