A Journal of the Plague Year Study Guide

Sometime around 1660, Daniel Defoe was born “Daniel Foe” to a chandler named James Foe and his wife Alice Foe, both Presbyterian dissenters during a period when the England was legally persecuting non-Anglicans. Scholars believe that the Foe family fled London during the Great Plague of London (1665–1666), which occurred in Defoe’s early childhood. In Defoe’s early 20s, he worked as a merchant and, in 1684, he married a merchant’s daughter named Mary Tuffley. In 1865, he supported an attempted dissident coup (known as the Monmouth Rebellion) intended to overthrow King James II (1633–1701). After the coup failed, he managed to avoid execution. In 1690, he began writing for a biweekly London periodical, The Athenian Mercury (1690–1697). Later in the 1690s, he began publishing only under the name “Defoe.” After years of writing policy essays, political satires, journalism, and history, he published his first novel, The Consolidator, in 1705. Then, in 1719, he published his most famous novel, Robinson Crusoe, which was tremendously popular with its contemporary audience, going through four editions in its first year of publication. Defoe wrote a Crusoe sequel and seven additional novels prior to his death in 1731.

A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is a fictionalized memoir of a real historical event, the Great Plague of London (1665–1666), a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague believed to have killed approximately 100,000 Londoners. Additionally, the novel makes repeated reference to several other events in English history that occurred before, after, or during the Plague. For example, it makes frequent reference to the Stuart Restoration: the end of the republican Commonwealth of England (1649–1660) and return of the United Kingdom to monarchical government under King Charles II (who reigned 1660–1685), which led to a reinstatement of Anglicanism as England’s official religion and legal persecution of “dissenters” (non-Anglican Protestants such as Presbyterians like Daniel Defoe’s family). The novel also makes several references to the Great Fire of London, a massive fire burning from September 2 to 6, 1666 that destroyed large portions of central and western London. Finally, it alludes in a few places to the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667), a trade-related military conflict between the United Kingdom and the Dutch Republic (1579–1795) during which the plague occurred.

Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is a fictionalized memoir of the Great Plague of London, a devastating 1665–1666 outbreak of bubonic plague that occurred in Defoe’s early childhood. Nonfiction accounts of the Great Plague include the Diary of Samuel Pepys (c. 1660–1669), the private journal of English politician Samuel Pepys (1633–1703); God’s Terrible Voice in the City by Plague and Fire (1677), a retelling of the Plague and subsequent 1666 Great Fire of London by Puritan minister Thomas Vincent (1634–1678); and Loimologia (1672), a Latin-language account of the plague by an English doctor, Nathaniel Hodges (1629–1688), who treated plague-stricken Londoners and whom Defoe alludes to in A Journal of the Plague Year. Early 18th-century readers of A Journal of the Plague Year often assumed the work to be nonfiction. Similarly, early readers mistook several other Defoe novels for nonfiction, assuming that his novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) was a travel diary and that his novel Moll Flanders (1722) was an autobiography. A Journal of the Plague Year heavily influenced the novel Old Saint Paul’s: A Tale of the Plague and the Fire (1841) by William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–1882), a historical novel representing the plague. Ainsworth’s novel may also have influenced a more much more recent fictionalization, Plague!: The Musical (2008) by David Massingham and Matthew Townend.