Just over a week later, he records: “This day, much against my Will, I did in Drury-lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there – which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind to that to my remembrance I ever saw.”įrom then on, references to the plague come thick and fast. A month later, on 28 May, he briefly brings up the topic of “sickness”, only to break off because he’s far more interested in something he saw that day - “a fine rarity: of fishes kept in a glass of water that will love so for ever and finely marked as they are, being foreign.” God didn’t preserve them, although it took a while before Pepys started to really worry. “Great fears of the Sicknesse here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. This is the calamity played out in real time, from 30 April 1665 where a long diary entry on other matters ends with the words:

More compelling is a book that Defoe himself could never have seen: the diary of Samuel Pepys. It is the definition of stark reading, although probably only of interest to historians or anyone curious about where Defoe got his figures. The best measure of just how grievous comes in London’s Dreadful Visitation, a book of the “bills of mortality” and all the burials in the city compiled by Ellen Cotes in 1665. The Pestilence is a disease arriving from an Aura that is poisonous, very subtle, deadly and contagious, affecting many Persons at the same Time together in one Country chiefly arriving from a Corruption of the nitrous Spirit in the Air, attended with a Fever and other grievous symptoms. For example, he writes “it is clear as Light at Noon-Day” that He is wonderfully damning of the latter, even if his own science may sometimes seem questionable. Defoe borrowed liberally from such passages, as well as the details Hodges provides about where and when the plague was prevalent, the public health measures taken to protect the “trembling inhabitants” from calamity, and the “quacks” who tried to profit from it. He gives a remarkable firsthand account of seeing the “black hue” of the buboes on a “young man in fever”, of the crosses on people’s doors, and the “shutting up of houses”. Hodges opens with head-spinning descriptions of how the “predictions of astrologers” spread fear among the “meaner sort” of people and so “rendered their constitutions less able to resist the Contagion”.īut there’s also more down-to-earth material. There’s a similar fascination to Loimologia, a book written by a physician called Nathanial Hodges, first published in Latin in 1672 and translated in 1720.

Daniel defoe diary of a plague year