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Intro
In September 1664, the narrator, a saddler living in London, hears that plague is afflicting Holland. In November or December 1664, two Frenchmen in London die of plague. These deaths seem like isolated events until another plague death occurs in the same London neighborhood in February 1665. From February to May, Londoners closely watch the Bills of Mortality coming out of that neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods. In May, it becomes apparent that the plague has spread widely and that the Bills of Mortality have likely been attributing to other causes deaths actually caused by plague.
The narrator observes rich families fleeing London for the countryside and wonders whether he should flee too: he fears the plague, but he also fears abandoning his saddler shop with no one to watch his goods. After his brother advises him to flee, the narrator makes arrangements—but he can’t find a horse to rent, and the servant who was supposed to accompany him abandons him. The narrator suggests to his brother that these mishaps mean God wants him to stay in London. The brother, despite his own religiosity, mocks this idea. Yet when the narrator falls ill of a non-plague illness that keeps him from traveling, he is convinced that God is telling him to stay put despite the plague. Meanwhile, the narrator’s brother flees the city.
In June 1655, London’s city government disseminates orders intended to stop the spread of plague. These orders allow the government to forcibly quarantine whole families inside their homes when one family member catches the plague, “locking up” the house and stationing a watchman outside to prevent the family from escaping. However, the narrator hears many stories of families inventively escaping quarantine—sometimes attacking and even killing watchmen in the process.
In September 1655, a giant pit is dug in the narrator’s neighborhood graveyard to hold plague victims’ corpses. Compelled by curiosity, the narrator goes to visit it. In the graveyard, the narrator encounters a grieving man whose entire family has died of plague. He follows the man to a nearby tavern, where a group of blasphemous drinkers mocks the man’s loss. The narrator chastises the drinkers in religious terms, but the drinkers only mock the narrator’s overt religiosity. The narrator is sure God will punish the drinkers, though he prays for their deliverance. Within two weeks, the whole drinking group has died of plague.
As the plague gets worse, the narrator buys a large stockpile of food and tries to self-quarantine with his servants. Yet, curious and stir-crazy, he makes excuses to leave the house, as when he checks on his brother’s empty house and warehouses. One time, he checks on the warehouses and finds women stealing a stock of imported hats. When he confronts them, the confused and guilty women tell him they had heard no one owned the hats anymore.
After several more weeks of quarantine, the restless narrator walks to the water, where he strikes up a conversation with a waterman. He learns that the uninfected waterman has been sleeping in his boat, apart from his plague-stricken wife and child, but has been leaving his wife food and money that he earns from rowing provisions to people self-quarantining on ships anchored in the Thames. The narrator, touched by the family’s situation, gives the waterman some money to share with his wife and boats with the waterman to see the quarantined ships. The narrator greatly admires the foresight of people who thought to stockpile food and self-isolate on anchored ships early in the plague.
On the subject of foresight, the narrator recalls a story he heard about three working-class Londoners—an ex-soldier named John, John’s brother Thomas, and their acquaintance Richard—who fled London for the countryside early in the plague and (despite the occasional hostility of the country people) survived first by camping and then by sheltering in a remote, abandoned house they retrofitted until they were finally able to return to London in December 1655. The narrator tells this story in part to account for the number of people who flooded back into London after the plague subsided: while the rich fled further, the cautious poor had to subsist in the nearby countryside—where the unlucky died of starvation.
The local government appoints the narrator an “examiner” for his neighborhood, meaning that he has to verify when households contain plague cases and need to be quarantined. The narrator doesn’t want the job. Not only is it dangerous, but he has serious doubts about forcible quarantine: he thinks it’s cruel to lock up healthy family members with plague-stricken ones, and since so many plague victims are infectious before they are symptomatic, he doubts quarantine is adequate to curb new infections. Three weeks into his two-month term as an examiner, he pays someone else to take over the job.
The narrator resumes his self-quarantine. At this point, the plague has become so destructive that many Londoners give in to fatalistic despair, assuming they will die no matter what they do. Yet toward the end of September 1655, the plague seems to become less fatal—many Londoners are still catching it, but fewer of them are dying. Between September and December 1655, plague deaths fluctuate, as the drop in plague deaths relative to infections makes people more reckless and more likely to expose themselves to the disease. Nevertheless, by the spring of 1666, London is almost back to normal. In conclusion, the narrator attributes the unexpected abatement of the plague to God’s intervention and mercy—and expresses his own desire to give thanks.
