A Journal of
The Plague Year
Memorials of the Great Pestilence in London,
 in 1665
 
By Daniel Defoe, 1832
457 pages
Revised Edition with Historical Notes
 
Also, Some Account of the 
Great Fire In London
 in 1666
 
- Bonus Book -
The Historical Sources
Of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year
Illustrated by Extracts
From the Original Documents In the
Burney Collection and Manuscript Room
in the British Museum
 
By Watson Nicholson, 1919
182  pages
 
- Bonus Book -
The Betrothed
Memorials of the Great Pestilence in London,
 in 1665
 
By Alessandro Manzoni, 1909
582  pages, searchable
 
- Bonus Book -
Diary of Samuel Pepys
Volume II, 1665
 
By Samuel Pepys, 1665
1,244  pages
 
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The Great Plague (1665-1666) was a massive outbreak of disease in the Kingdom of England
 that killed an estimated 100,000 people, 20% of London's population. The disease is identified
 as bubonic plague, an infection by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, transmitted through a flea vector.
 The 1665-1666 epidemic was on a far smaller scale than the earlier "Black Death" pandemic, 
a virulent outbreak of disease in Europe between 1347 and 1353.[2] The plague of 1665 was 
only remembered afterwards as the "great" plague because it was one of the 
last widespread outbreaks in England.
 
King Charles II of England, his family and his court left the city for Oxfordshire. Among the people 
who chose to stay were Samuel Pepys, the diarist, and Henry Foe, a saddler who lived in East London.
 While Pepys provides an account of the Plague through his diary, Henry Foe's nephew Daniel Defoe
 published A Journal of the Plague Year, a fictional account of the plague in 
1722, possibly based on Foe's journals.
 
Defoe's novel is a fictionalized account of one man's experiences of the year 1665, in which the Great Plague 
struck the city of London. The book is told roughly chronologically, though without sections or chapter headings.
 
Although it purports to have been written several years after the event, it actually was written in the years just
 prior to the book's first publication in March 1722. Defoe was only five years old in 1665, and the book itself was
 published under the initials H. F. The novel probably was based on the journals of Defoe's uncle, Henry Foe.
 
In the book, Defoe goes to great pains to achieve an effect of verisimilitude, identifying specific neighborhoods,
 streets, and even houses in which events took place. Additionally, it provides tables of casualty figures and 
discusses the credibility of various accounts and anecdotes received by the narrator.
 
The novel often is compared to the actual, contemporary accounts of the plague in the diary of Samuel Pepys. 
Defoe's account, although fictionalized, is far more systematic and detailed than Pepys's first-person account.
 
Moreover, it may be compared to the description of the plague in the Italian Manzoni's The Betrothed 
(orig. Italian: I Promessi Sposi). In spite of some analogies (for example, both novels were written many years after
 the end of the plague), the two writers used different techniques: Defoe wrote a work full of details, but he used a 
detached tone, while Manzoni was not only able to reconstruct the general atmosphere of the pestilence-stricken 
Milan, but he also analysed the individual responses to the plague with a poetic sensitivity of his own. 
 
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