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Journal of the Plague Year

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Journal of the Plague Year

By: Daniel Defoe
Narrated by: Andrew Cullum
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About this listen

First published in March 1722, 57 years after the event that struck more than 100,000 people, Journal of the Plague Year is a compelling portrait of life during London's horrific bubonic plague. Through the eyes of H.F. (speculated to be Defoe's uncle, Henry Foe, from whose journals the book was supposedly adapted) we witness great grief, depravity and despair: crazed sufferers roam the streets, unearthly screams resound across the city, death carts dump their grisly loads into mass graves, and quackery and skulduggery feed on fear. But there is kindness and courage too, as mutual support and caring are upheld through the worst of days.

Defoe's Journal is considered one of the most accurate accounts of the plague, and includes many contemporary theories about the disease, along with rolls of the dead and a literary mapping of London, street by street, parish by parish. It is a fascinating and intimate account from one of the earliest proponents of the novel.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

Public Domain (P)2018 Naxos Audiobooks Classics Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction England Middle Ages
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This is on my Uni reading list and I honestly couldn't think of anything more depressing than reading a book about the plague, but I love this book! I feel like I lived through it all. Horrifying realism and brilliantly read.

Whoa!

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The Plague year in question is 1665, directly before the sequel tribulation of the great fire. Our narrator HF, whose journals were adapted by the writer, tells it as he sees it, and there unsettling echoes of our current Coronavirus pandemic: there is confusion and mixed messages as the plague spreads from abroad, failed containment measures, and then escalating notifications of cases and the dead, here reproduced in 'bills' where now we are notified by our breaking news app.
And there are the 'social isolation' measures of the time, perhaps one of the most painful controversial measures taken then; that of containing the infected household locked up and guarded in their houses. The chronicler argues that given, as now, that the plague was most efficaciously spread that those who were non-symptomatic, this measure had limited value.
There are chilling descriptions of plague pits, including horrible scenes of people throwing themselves into them alive, haunted by the bereaved, and of the symptoms, the 'tokens,' tumours, swellings and vomiting.
There are fascinating descriptions of the roles created to seek out those who were infected, diagnose, and eventually dispose of the dead. There are insights into the role of medical practice, both 'quackery' and the best guess science of the time, and of religion. There are fools, cowards and knaves as well as good people doing their best.
In one of the more gripping parts of the narrative, we follow the progress of a group escaping the city from the country, attempting settlements, and trying to overcome the hostility of suspicious and scared rural communities.
Its a shame then that given all this, I struggled to pay attention to a lot of this audio-book and kept tuning out. It is because that for me a lot of the real human interest stuff is buried in a lot of dry reporting. The narrator seems distanced from events, given that he is reporting first hand, and we don't get much of a measure of the impact of him and his own family and loved ones. He talks about his feelings and his faith, but he is hard person to get to know. The narrator, Andrew Cullum, reads clearly and does their best with a lot of this dry material.
Quite possibly, this is better to read than it is to listen to.

Ground zero of a pandemic

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A really eye opening listen that puts you in the mind of someone during epidemic. listening to someone who dosent understand germ theory theories about the disease is great, if a little dry in parts.

Amazing Insight into the Plague

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A journalist in the Guardian noted the similarities of the populaces behaviour in this book with some actions in the Covid Pandemic. I think the performance highlights the occasional naiveté of the narrator's trust in authority figures, contrasted with queries about the numbers succumbing to the plague. Tables summarised in audio form don't really work to maintain flow of the overall narrative, and this book has quite a few tables! I thin it remains an appropriate read, regardless whether readers think it a novel or a more accurate account of events.

Pandemic reading

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I listened to this during the current Coronavirus pandemic, it's great for putting things in perspective. On one hand, science and medicine have improved hugely since 1665, but human nature, for better or worse, is still largely the same.

The journal covers a wide variety of subjects: stories of individual people's experiences; the author's firsthand experiences from his neighbourhood and from walks around London; descriptions and criticism of the official response; theories about the cause and origins of the plague and discussion of how doctors (and quacks) tried to treat it. Sometimes amusing, sometimes heartbreaking, always interesting.

The journal is well written and well narrated. The only problem with this recording is the frequent bills of mortality - there's no easy way to narrate a table, but the information is important to the narrative and just hearing a list of statistics doesn't work for me. I found that after listening for a few hours I would look at the relevant tables online (on Project Gutenberg's copy of the journal) to get an overview of the bills I'd just heard.

Fascinating slice of history

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