John Rachal's Blog

While hanging around the house in quasi-house arrest, I thought perhaps it was finally time to storm the castle and read Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe’s other, less well known historical novel A Journal of the Plague Year—you know, for comparison purposes. It’s his grim (reader beware) account of the bubonic plague—aka the distemper, the infection, or the visitation—that consumed London in 1665. There was a lot of social distancing going on, which was good, since you could catch it via airborne transmission, including the “breath” or “fumes” or “stench” of an infected person, or, as the physicians called it, “effluvia.” But also, unknown to Londoners or the rest of the world, you could catch it by a flea bite if that flea had bitten a rat carrying the virus. And there were a lot of rats.

During the worst weeks “these objects [dead bodies] were so frequent in the streets that when the plague came to be raging on one side, there was scarce any passing by the streets but that several dead bodies would be lying here and there upon the ground. . . . At first the people would stop as they went along and call to the neighbors to come out on such an occasion, yet afterward no notice was taken of them,” and people would simply “go across the way and not come near” the corpse. London, “I say, was much altered; sorrow and sadness sat upon every face. . . . All looked deeply concerned; and, as we saw it apparently coming on, so every one looked on himself and his family in the utmost danger. . . .Tears and lamentations were seen almost in every house, especially in the first part of the visitation; for towards the latter end men’s hearts were hardened, and death was so always before their eyes, that they did not so much concern themselves for the loss of their friends, expecting that themselves should be summoned the next hour.”

And summoned they were. As the plague spread, house arrest became literal. If anyone in a house were known to have the plague or have died, the entire household was imprisoned, with a watchman day and night to prevent escape of the rest of the household, who themselves often thus became infected. House doors were painted with a red cross; doors were padlocked from the outside. Defoe records escapes, bribery, even murder of watchmen. “Nor, indeed, could less be expected, for here were so many prisons in the town as there were houses shut up; and as the people shut up or imprisoned so were guilty of no crime, only shut up because miserable, it was really the more intolerable to them. . . .They blew up a watchman with gunpowder, and burned the poor fellow dreadfully; and while he made hideous cries, and nobody would venture to come near to help him, the whole family that were able to stir got out at the windows one storey high, two that were left sick calling out for help.”

“Idle assemblies” were prohibited, as were plays, feasting, and “tippling houses.” “Disorderly tippling in taverns, ale houses, coffee-houses, and cellars [will] be severely looked unto, as the common sin of this time and greatest occasion of dispersing the plague,” in the language of the multi-page “Orders Conceived And Published By The Lord Mayor And Aldermen Of The City Of London Concerning The Infection Of The Plague, 1665.” But social distancing wasn’t enough.

The dead-carts trundled through the streets and alleys every night, collecting the dead, the collectors throwing them in piles in the carts. How desperate would one have to be to take that job? Huge pits were dug, sometimes in churchyards. The cart would approach the pit under the light of lanterns, turn around, lean backward, and “the bodies shot into the pit promiscuously,” with dirt thrown over them as quickly as possible. Young Daniel was a venturesome soul, or a foolish one:

“A terrible pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it. As near as I may judge, it was about forty feet in length, and about fifteen or sixteen feet broad, and at the time I first looked at it, about nine feet deep, but it was said they dug it near twenty feet deep afterwards in one part of it. . . . Then they made larger holes wherein they buried all that the cart brought in a week, which, by the middle to the end of August, came to from 200 to 400 a week [in his parish alone]. . . . People that were infected and near their end, and delirious also, would run to those pits, wrapt in blankets or rugs, and throw themselves in, and, as they said, bury themselves.”

By late October, the contagion began to recede. Sixty-eight thousand, five hundred and ninety deaths in London and immediate environs were documented: “for about nine weeks together there died near a thousand a day.” Defoe estimated the real number to be closer to 100,000. Londoners, at least the ones who by good fortune or escape to the country were not infected, along with the few who managed to survive infection, breathed a little easier. But their woes were not at an end. The next year, 1666, would bring the greatest fire, before or since, in London’s long history.