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Thomas
Richard is a working-class joiner (a kind of woodworker) who survives the plague with his acquaintances, brothers John and Thomas, by fleeing London and camping in the countryside for many months, first in a tent and then in a remote, abandoned house. The narrator retells the adventures of John, Thomas, and Richard in the countryside both as an example of foresight in avoiding the plague and to help explain where working-class plague refugees went when they fled London.
Richard Quotes in A Journal of the Plague Year
The A Journal of the Plague Year quotes below are all either spoken by Richard or refer to Richard. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Pages 80-161 Quotes
Their Story has a Moral in every Part of it, and their whole Conduct, and that of some who they join’d with, is a Patern for all poor Men to follow, or Women either, if ever such a Time comes again; and if there was no other End in recording it, I think this a very just one, whether my Account be exactly according to Fact or no.
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Explanation and Analysis:
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Richard Character Timeline in A Journal of the Plague Year
The timeline below shows where the character Richard appears in A Journal of the Plague Year. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Pages 80-161
...elsewhere if they can. While they are devising a plan, a friend of Thomas’s, a joiner by trade, asks to come too. The three men decide to travel north by foot...
(full context)
John, Thomas, and the Joiner intend to travel northwest, but they take a circuitous route out of London to avoid...
(full context)
Their first night out of London, John, Thomas, and the Joiner pitch their tent near an apparently abandoned barn on a back road. As the Joiner...
(full context)
The Joiner, whose name is Richard, starts a conversation with a man from the other group named...
(full context)
...months, by which time they hope the plague will have died out. John, Thomas, and Richard want to join the other group, but there’s a hitch: the horse that carries the...
(full context)
...let them use the road because previous travelers have given people in other towns plague. Richard points out that the party doesn’t want to interact with the villagers, only pass through,...
(full context)
After the travelers confer, John asks Richard to carve branches to look like rifles while the others set several campfires. Then John...
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...simply move their old camp farther from the road into an “old decay’d House,” which Richard the Joiner fixes up and where they live until they are able to return to...
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