I try to stay clear of fads of all kind if I can. It is a bit easier for me than the general populace because I do not have any social media accounts to be bombarded by trends from friends' feeds, tweets or stories. The only place I might be ambushed by fads are the streaming platforms (Netflix, are you a verb yet?) and books. All I have to do is turn a blind eye to all the pandemic movies, books and documentaries in 2020 or not take a peek at any of the 9/11 documentaries/movies in 2021. I made my first Dalgona coffee yesterday after making sure the Dalgona fad was dead beyond resuscitation. A year after a fad has passed seems a reasonable time frame to check back up on it and not be branded a blind follower if you want to try it out.
Now that the one year self-imposed steer-clear date has passed for catching upon pandemic literature and media, on a mission to elevate my literIQ, I started browsing the classics catalog at our public library's online offerings. Half of which I had to dismiss because I had read the abridged illustrated versions of these in my youth and had marked these off as read. That was when I chanced upon Daniel Defoe's lesser known non-fictional fiction, or historical non-fiction/biography as we call it these days, "A Journal of the Plague Year" published in 1722.
A note about Defoe before we move on. Introducing the Penguin edition of the Plague Year in 1966, Anthony Burgess wrote: “Defoe was our first great novelist because he was our first great journalist...because he was born not into literature but into life.”
Defoe was born into a non-aristocratic family with anti-establishments roots and had a liberal upbringing. He was a trader, a journalist, a pamphleteer, a spy and a writer who preferred modern languages rather than the classic languages that the ' true' writers were expected to write in those days.
He produced an array of various forms of literature from pamphlets to novels under two hundred different pseudonyms. Robinson Crusoe is often considered the first English novel, the work that defined the literary device we call a novel now. It was marketed as the strange and surprising adventures of a sailor marooned on a lonely uninhabited island for eight and twenty years, written by 'himself'. Defoe was the father of the line of writing which we now categorize as historical non-fiction, crime, pop science and travel non-fiction - the kind Eric Larson, Laura Hillenbrand, Bill Bryson, Jared Diamond, Jon Krakauer and Yuval Noah Hariri excel in these days.
A Journal of the Year of the Plague is in the form of an eye-witness account of the plague outbreak in 1665 London. Defoe must have been 5 years old at the time and had not yet added "De" to his last name to make it more classy. The novel was published in the form of a journal of a person with initials H.F and is presumed to be that of Henry Foe, Daniel Defoe's uncle who had lived and worked in London at the time of the infamous bubonic plague outbreak. Defoe also drew on historical records (broadsides), medical pamphlets and Bills of Mortality published by local parish authorities for counts and tables of plague deaths by parish and by chronology, that appear through out the book.
350+ years - light years in terms of technological advancement, vaccines, Instagram and Ivermectin separate the 1665 London Bubonic plague event from the global Covid19 pandemic of 2020. But as I read Defoe's uncle's journal it feels like our responses as a species have not changed even an iota.
Here are some of the recurring patterns of human behavior and our predictable reactions, as witnessed during the plague of 1665:
Asymptomatic and symptomatic people bolting to new places to escape the plague, not knowing they were already infected and thus infecting whole new communities : "...this Frenchman who died in Bearbinder Lane was one who, having lived in Long Acre, near the infected houses, had removed for fear of the distemper, not knowing that he was already infected."
Everyone and their dog baking bread and hoarding groceries: "I went and bought two sacks of meal, and for several weeks, having an oven, we baked all our own bread; also I bought malt, and brewed as much beer as all the casks I had would hold, and which seemed enough to serve my house for 5-6 weeks; also I laid in a quantity of salt butter and Cheshire cheese.."
The plague raged violently among butchers as meat was one of the modes of transmission. So they were using touchless transaction and hand sanitizers even back then: "When anyone bought a joint of meat in the market they would not take it off the butcher's hand, but took it off the hooks themselves. On the other hand, the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose. The buyer carried always small money to make up and odd sum, that they might take no change. They carried bottles of scents and perfumes in their hand, and all the means that could be used were used.."
True nature of death concealed, fudging the numbers or under-reporting death toll: "and at the Lord Mayor's request, it was found there were twenty more who were really dead of the plague in that parish, but had been set down of the spotted-fever or other distempers, besides others concealed."
Travel restrictions and negative test results required for traveling which first started as a rumor: "..an order of the Government was to be issued out to place turnpikes and barriers on the road to prevent people travelling, and that the town on the road would not suffer people from London to pass for fear of bringing infection along with them.....the hurry of the people was such for some weeks there was no getting at the Lord Mayor's door without exceeding difficulty; there were such pressing and crowding there to get passes and certificates of health for such as travelled abroad, for without these there was no being admitted to pass through the towns upon the road, or to lodge in any inn"
Broadway and movie theaters shut down: "..that all plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads, buckler-play or such-like cause of assemblies of people be utterly prohibited.."
Restaurants and pubs shut down: That all public feasting...be forborne till further order and allowance....that disorderly tippling in taverns, ale-houses, coffee-houses and cellars be severely looked unto, as the common sin of this time and greatest occasion of dispersing the plague..."
Lock down at home: "as for my little family, having thus, as I have said, laid in a store of bread, butter, cheese and beer, I took my friend and physician's advice and locked myself up and my family and resolved to suffer the hardship of living a few months without flesh-meat, rather than to purchase it and hazard our lives."
Trade comes to a halt: "..the trading nation of Europe were all afraid of us; no port of France, or Holland, or Spain, or Italy would admit our (English) ships or correspond with us...the inconveniences in Spain and Portugal were still greater, for they would by no means suffer our ships,....to come into their ports, much less to unlade."
A decrease in the weekly death counts and people throw caution to the wind, ignoring the warnings of 17th century Dr. Faucis: "....people's running so rashly into danger, giving up all their former cautions and care, and all the shyness which they used to practise, depending that the sickness would not reach them - or that if it did, they should not die. The physicians opposed this thoughtless humor the people with all their might and gave out printed directions, spreading them all over the city and suburbs, advising the people to continue reserved and to use still the utmost caution in their ordinary conduct, notwithstanding the decrease of distemper, terrifying them with the danger of bringing a relapse upon the whole city, and telling them how such a relapse might be more fatal dangerous than the whole visitation that had been already;"
A Journal of the Plague Year is an amazingly clear and modern work of literature from three centuries ago, by a man who gave no f**ks what people thought. He was probably the only man who was sentenced to the pillory where everyone who is sent to public humiliation at the pillory is usually pelted with rotten eggs, people threw flowers at him. The Plague journal, supposedly a fictional work, has been analyzed by researchers and scholars for historical accuracy and they have concluded that it is an honest, factual and realistic portrayal of the 1665 Plague epidemic. They did this by comparing the Journal to the weekly bills of mortality published by the parishes and real eye-witness accounts like Samuel Pepys' diary which was not discovered or decoded at the time Defoe was alive. Color me a Defoe fan.
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