A Journal of the Plague Year
Daniel Defoe • 1722
Devastation Rating
historical loss survival literary fiction
Our Take
Defoe invents documentary fiction to narrate the 1665 London plague, and his unnamed narrator watches the city die with the precision of an accountant and the grief of a survivor. Bills of mortality become poetry. The horror is in the accumulation of weekly numbers, each one a neighbourhood. Defoe writes fiction as witness — insisting on the ordinary life inside the catastrophe.
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