Illustrated Journal of the Plague Year - Daniel Defoe

A nice illustrated edition of this classic to commemorate the 300th anniversary of its publication. This book is very relavant in the face of the 2020 world-wide pandemic. Our version has all the original text and 18 illustrations and maps.

Do the following edicts sound familiar in this day of coronavirus and instructions from the CDC? Well -- these are verbatim from orders posted in 1665 during the plague in London as contained in this journal. We should have heeded these rules a long time ago.

• "As soon as any man shall be found to be sick of the plague, he shall the same night be sequestered in the same house."
• "If any person shall have visited any man known to be infected of the plague, or entered willingly into any known infected house, being not allowed, the house wherein he inhabiteth shall be shut up for certain days by the examiner's direction."
• "All public assemblies at burials are to be foreborne during the continuance of this visitation."
• "That where several inmates are in one and the same house, and any person in that house happens to be infected, no other person or family of such house shall be suffered to remove him or themselves."
• "That all plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads, buckler-play, or such-like causes of assemblies of people be utterly prohibited."
• "That all public feasting, and particularly by the companies of this city, and dinners at taverns, ale-houses, and other places of common entertainment, be forborne."

A Journal of the Plague Year was published in 1722 as an account of one man's experiences during 1665 when the bubonic plague struck the city of London. Known as the Great Plague of London, it was the last such major epidemic in that city. The book is told somewhat chronologically, though without sections or chapter headings. Defoe was only five years old in 1665 when the Great Plague took place, and the book itself was published under the initials H. F. and is probably based on the journals of Defoe's uncle, Henry Foe. The book goes into great detail, providing tables of casualty figures. The book is often compared to the actual, contemporary accounts of the plague in the diary of Samuel Pepys.