Daniel Defoe

The English author Daniel Defoe, who was four years old at the time of the London plague outbreak of 1665, documented the plague's effects in a book originally titled A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, As Well Public as Private, Which Happened in London During the Last Great Visitation in 1665. For the popularity of his work, Defoe was counting on a renewed public fear of the plague, which had recently reappeared in the French port of Marseille.

For this work Defoe drew on the reminiscences of his own family, as well as books on the 1665 outbreak which he kept in his own library. He creates a first-person narrator to realistically describe the events taking place in the London streets and neighborhoods where the plague was raging. As in...