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Pages 3-80
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Journal of the Plague Year, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Public Health vs. The Individual
Poverty
Providence
Religion vs. Superstition and Quackery
Foresight vs. Hysteria and Complacency
Summary
Analysis
The narrator hears rumors of nurses and watchmen killing infected people but doubts such murders occur often, since infected people are so likely to die anyway. Nurses do steal from their charges—but mostly just portable items from recent corpses. There’s a regular rumor about a nurse smothering or starving her charge, but the narrator disbelieves it because the person who tells it always claims it happened “at the farther End of Town” from them.
While the narrator relies on rumor and hearsay to supplement his personal narrative of the plague, he does not accept all rumors uncritically. Here, for example, he scorns a rumor because the people who repeat it, regardless of where they live, always claim it happened “at the farther End of Town.” Such lurid and probably false rumors emphasize the atmosphere of hysteria and terror circulating in London during the plague.
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The narrator believes that women are the worst thieves. One day, he goes to check on his brother’s warehouses, one of which—unbeknownst to him—contains women’s hats. As he approaches, he passes women wearing or carrying hats. Near his brother’s gate, he meets another woman carrying hats and asks her what she’s doing there. She tells him that there are more people within. He rushes to the gate, sees another pair of women, and demands to know what’s going on. One guiltily says that they heard the warehouse contained “Goods that had no Owner.”
The narrator’s repeated confrontations with strange women during a deadly plague show his own occasional lack of wisdom or foresight—it would probably be safer for him personally to let them steal the hats. Meanwhile, the blatant daytime theft from the narrator’s brother’s warehouse both indicates the social disorder in the city during the plague and implies Londoners’ economic desperation.
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The narrator finds a half-dozen women in the warehouse and threatens them with police. When they tell him that they too had heard no one owned the goods and that the lock was already broken, however, he goes back on his threat—both in the interests of mercy and of avoiding too much human contact during the plague while finding police. He does ask the women how they could do such a thing during a plague “in the Face of Gods most dreadful Judgments”—but they don’t seem moved.
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Two of the narrator’s brother’s neighbors come to see what’s going on. One, John Hayward, is a “Grave-digger and Bearer of the Dead” who survives the plague despite taking no medicine. (The narrator observes that poor people, though most affected by the plague, are also most “Fearless” of it, seeking “Employment” from it.) From Hayward, the narrator hears of a vagrant piper who fell asleep in the street. Hayward mistook the piper for a corpse, put him in a Dead-Cart, and nearly dumped him in a mass grave—the man woke up just in time.
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The narrator argues that London is caught off guard by the plague. The government hasn’t pre-prepared plague regulations or “Relief for the Poor,” nor have private citizens stored up charity for the poor. (The narrator assumes that London’s government is rich, given how it rebuilt after the Great Fire.) Granted, people all over England send money to aid the poor in London during the plague, and the narrator hears that the king has ordered money distributed. Yet many in London can no longer work during the plague, which means they must rely on charity.
The narrator reviews how the plague affects the poor. When most business is suspended, the suspension seriously harms workmen in manufacturing, employees of merchants, construction workers, sailors, ship-builders, and so on. It also impacts servants whose employers flee London. Unable to earn, many workers starve. Without charity, it’s likely that riots would break out—which would scare off country people who bring food to London, causing “Famine.”
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In addition to charity, the narrator notes other reasons the immiserated poor didn’t riot and plunder the city. First, the rich had foolishly failed to stockpile food in their homes, so the poor lacked a motive to rob them. Also, the government hired unemployed poor people as quarantine watchmen and plague nurses. Finally, sadly, the plague killed so many of the poor that there were fewer of them to starve and potentially riot.
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According to the Bills of Mortality, almost 50,000 people in London die of plague from early August to early October 1655. However, the narrator suspects that this count is inaccurate, as social conditions during the plague aren’t conducive to accurate records. Whereas the Bills claim that almost 70,000 people die of plague over a year, he believes that at least 100,000 died. Many plague-stricken people die outside in the environs around London. Merciful villagers dig graves and drag the bodies into them with hooked poles. At least, this is what the narrator hears—he doesn’t travel there.
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By now, the streets are largely deserted. The men charged with clearing out houses where everyone has died worry about the danger and sometimes do a poor job—which leads to a “Stench” that eventually infects surrounding families. The narrator believes that were it not for general poverty, the government wouldn’t have been able to hire anyone to clean out plague houses, as the job is so dangerous. Yet, as it stands, the government can always hire more poor men, and the city is “able to Bury the Dead.”
At the plague’s height, when the narrator is self-quarantining, he hears through his window people calling to God for forgiveness and confessing their sins, which he finds moving. After two weeks of quarantine, the narrator becomes so agitated that he decides to go mail a letter to his brother. In a yard near the post office, he sees a man take money someone else has abandoned—but only after burning up the purse and using tongs to dump the coins in water without touching them.
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The narrator, curious about people sheltering on boats, walks to the water. He starts a long-distance conversation with a waterman. The waterman sleeps in his boat, separated from his plague-stricken family, but leaves what money he earns outside his family’s house. When the narrator asks how the waterman earns money, the waterman explains that he brings food to people sheltering from the plague in ships anchored on the river. He has recently earned four shillings and some food, which he plans to give to his wife. His wife’s swelling has burst, and she may survive, but he’s scared his child will die. He mentions God and starts crying. When the narrator suggests submission to God’s will, the waterman humbly agrees. The narrator, touched, cries too.
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The waterman’s wife exits a nearby house and calls the waterman’s name. He leaves his earnings and the food on a stone and retreats; she comes to take it but has to make multiple trips because she’s so weak. The narrator, emotionally affected, gives the waterman—whom he has decided is healthy—four more shillings to share with his family. Both the waterman and his wife express deep gratitude.
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The narrator asks the waterman how far the plague has spread from London and how the people on ships are faring. Then, emboldened, he asks to boat with the waterman to Greenwich because he’s curious to see the ships. The waterman agrees on the condition that the narrator swears “on the Word of a Christian” that he’s plague-free. After the narrator swears, they go. The narrator, surprised to see several hundred ships anchored between London and Greenwich, admires the foresight of the people who thought to evade the plague this way. He does hear of some ships infected by plague, but he believes that occurred either because people fled too late and came aboard infected or because they didn’t stockpile enough provisions.
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Reflecting on the plague’s course, the narrator believes that Londoners’ behavior contributes to the death toll. As the plague is coming on, people in as-yet-uninfected neighborhoods assume that the plague won’t reach them and so don’t flee the city in time. Eventually, people in the country outside London won’t deal with anyone they don’t know, and fleeing Londoners die of starvation in the countryside.
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The narrator also notes that the plague wears away people’s “Compassion,” leaving only “self Preservation.” For example, midwives largely stop visiting women in labor. Poor women can’t afford midwives or can only afford incompetent midwives, leading to a spike in maternal and infant deaths. Breastfeeding infants also often die of starvation or of plague contracted from the women who nurse them.
The narrator’s criticisms of Londoners’ early complacency remind him of a story he heard about three poor men who escaped the plague. He believes that this story has a “Moral” and “a Patern for all poor Men to follow.” In this story, a former soldier named John, now a biscuit-maker, discusses with his brother Thomas, an ex-sailor and current sail-maker, how to react to the plague. Both fear losing their jobs and lodgings in London. Yet they also suspect that if they flee, frightened villagers will try to force them to turn back on the public road.
About two weeks later, when the plague is surging, Thomas is given a week’s notice to leave his lodging house, while John has been fired. They decide to leave London and get work 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 and, rather than sleeping in inns, to sleep in a tent that Thomas will fashion for them. With the tent, they have too much baggage to carry, so Thomas’s former employer gives them a horse he no longer has use for. The men set out with their tent, their horse, and John the ex-soldier’s gun.
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John, Thomas, and the Joiner intend to travel northwest, but they take a circuitous route out of London to avoid plague hotspots. Once they escape London, people assume that they are country men rather than Londoners—and, as this makes people more helpful toward them, the three men decide to use the cover story that they are from Essex. They end up finagling a Certificate of Passage from a constable and a Certificate of Health from a justice of the peace.
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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 can’t sleep, he takes the gun and keeps watch. Soon he hears people approaching the barn. John, hearing the noise, exits the tent too. When the group—about 13 people—sees John and the Joiner, they are disappointed that others have already occupied the barn. Learning that this group is fleeing the plague too, the Joiner offers to move the tent farther off and let the group have the barn.
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The Joiner, whose name is Richard, starts a conversation with a man from the other group named Ford. They assure each other that their respective groups are plague-free and decide that they will all sleep in the barn. John, Thomas, and Richard notice that before the other group goes to sleep, a very old man of their number prays over and blesses them.
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The following morning, the other group shares that they have enough provisions to survive in the countryside for two or three 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 tent must travel on the road, whereas the 13-person group can travel off-road and climb over fences. Yet the two groups decide to travel together into Essex. They take a boat across the river: the ferryman, standing far off, lets them take it across, saying he’ll fetch it later in his other boat. (The horse, meanwhile, swims.)
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On the river’s far side, the travelers are stopped at Walthamstow, where the constable refuses to 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, but the constable won’t listen.
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After the travelers confer, John asks Richard to carve branches to look like rifles while the others set several campfires. Then John and a few others, carrying the group’s one real gun, pitch a tent close to the town. The townspeople, seeing the fires and (mostly fake) guns, suppose the traveling group is large and generally armed. After conferring, they send the constable to find out what the travelers mean to do. John suggests that since the town has prevented the travelers from moving on, they had better give the travelers food—and if they try to starve the travelers, the travelers will take food by force. Though the constable blusters, he eventually agrees to give the travelers food and open some gates for them to pass.
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A few days later, the travelers encounter horsemen hunting large groups of armed men from London who have been “plundering the Country.” Realizing that they are in danger, the travelers almost split into two groups again. However, John becomes their de facto leader: he advises them to avoid country people lest the country people give them plague, to avoid any violence, and to travel as far as they can from London. And, ultimately, the group decides to stay together.
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The group camps in the forest near Epping. The next day, they go into Epping to buy food. A few days later, Epping parish officers come to interrogate the travelers from a distance. When John tells the officers the truth—that the travelers are refugees from London—the officers insist that the travelers might have plague and must leave. John retorts that Epping’s farms are economically dependent on London consumers, so it’s “very hard” for the Epping people to be so “unhospitable” now.
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The officers claim that a huge, armed traveling group extorted Walthamstow and then spread plague in Rumford and Brent-Wood—and that, if the travelers belong to that larger group, they deserve jail. John says that his traveling group was never larger than it is now and that all they want is to stay in the forest. When the officers worry aloud about having to provide for or bury the travelers, John replies that they will repay any charity they receive and bury their own dead.
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After a few days, the encamped travelers get a reputation for quiet behavior and religious observance. Gentlemen in the area begin sending them supplies, like straw and furniture, which they use to build up their camp. In September, they hear that plague has reached the surrounding towns, and they become afraid to go buy provisions—but, to supply their want, gentlemen start sending them food too.
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Yet when people in the plague-stricken towns begin fleeing to forest huts, the fearful travelers decide to leave their own camp. One of the nearby charitable gentlemen, a justice of the peace, gives them Certificates of Health that allow them to travel freely. Yet the travelers hear so many rumors of plague and violence in surrounding towns that they 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 London in December.
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The narrator says that he has told this long story in part to explain why so many people show up in London once the plague was over: while rich people are able to flee far from the plague, poor people fleeing London end up subsisting in the countryside, suffering material deprivation and the suspicion of country villagers. Some of these plague refugees died alone. For example, one corpse was found beside a carving on a gate that predicted the death of the corpse and his companion.
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The narrator has heard that though the towns around London can be very cruel to plague refugees from the city, they engage in “Charity” when they can do so without endangering themselves. Yet all the towns within ten or 20 miles of London still eventually suffer plague. Some of the townspeople’s cruelty may be motivated by the rumor that the infected want to infect others—a rumor that the narrator does not credit but believes that townspeople themselves fan to justify their own cruel behavior.
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The narrator praises the order that London’s government manages to keep during the plague. He refers to stories he has told about violence against quarantine watchmen and escapes by quarantined Londoners, only to argue that London’s magistrates help many families by allowing them either to remove infected members to the pest-house or to flee to another property. The magistrates also have food and medicine sent to poor plague-stricken families, and they adjudicate between families and watchmen who complain about each other.
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The narrator suggests that the quarantining of whole families with the infected, though sometimes “very tragical,” is for “the publick Benefit”—but he questions whether the quarantine policy saves lives, since people so often spread the plague before they know they are infected. He tells a story of one family in Whitechapel quarantined because their maid had “only Spots, not the Tokens” (certain specific symptoms) of plague. The wife of the family is so negatively affected by the quarantine that she gets a (non-plague) fever, after which the quarantine begins again. Eventually, examiners bring plague into the quarantined house, and most of the family dies. The narrator believes that many people die because examiners bring plague into their houses.
At one point, the government appoints the narrator an examiner for his neighborhood. The narrator tries to avoid this dangerous responsibility by arguing that he is opposed to forcible quarantines in the first place, but the government will only relent in that they make him serve for three weeks rather than two months—and they require him to find his own replacement for the remaining time. Here the narrator acknowledges that quarantine was good for at least one thing: confining plague victims who would otherwise have roamed the streets in a delirium.
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The narrator tells anecdotes of delirious plague victims. One forcibly kissed a pregnant woman in the street. Another visited his friend’s home to announce his own impending death. A third escaped his nurse to swim naked back and forth across the Thames, causing his swellings to burst and thereby curing himself. The narrator admits that these anecdotes are rumors, not events of which he has first-hand knowledge, but he takes them as evidence that delirious plague victims need quarantining. He believes that, if not for quarantines, as many plague victims would die in London’s streets as at home.
The narrator reflects that it’s “a merciful Disposition of Providence” that the plague didn’t coincide with any large London fires, which would either have been ignored or would have brought crowds to fight them. He also ponders how it is that so many infected people end up in the street when houses are so strictly quarantined. He concludes that government efforts can’t keep track of every plague case due to London’s size. Sometimes, by the time the government knows a house is plague stricken, all its inhabitants have died. Given this, the narrator suggests that forcible quarantine is useless to bring about the “publick Good” it's supposed to serve.
For example, when the narrator is an examiner, nearly every plague-stricken house he examines has had some family members flee before the government learns of the infections—because the government can only learn of the infections by hearing it from the family or from the family’s neighbors (searching door to door during a plague is too obviously a bad idea). Though heads of household are required to notify the authorities within two hours of discovering an infection in their house, they mostly dodge this requirement.
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