A Journal of the Plague year

The beginning of this reading assignment was really hard to stay attentive to. The beginning was boring because all he talked about was how the plague was starting and everybody was scared. Later he goes on about how his super religious brother was trying to tell him to flee to London away from the plague. He was going to do that but his servant who was going to assist him deceived him and left without him. His brother continued to persuade him to come to London. In the end, he decides to stay in town and says that "as my times were in His hands, He was as able to keep me in a time of the infection as in a time of health; and if He did not think fit to deliver me, still I was in His hands, and it was meet He should do with me as should seem good to Him." So basically, he says that his life is in God's hands and if God wants to take him he will and if not that is the will of God.

Later, he explains measures that were ordered by the parliament to get rid of the sickness. Some were that if you were infected or in the house of someone who was infected you were to be shut up in your own home for twenty eight days to keep it from spreading. They also ordered that all dogs and cats be killed and "That no hogs, dogs, or cats, or tame pigeons, or conies, be suffered to be kept within any part of the city," because it could spread the disease. Then later the man goes on and on about how London is infected and how death rates drop and increase and some people come back to their homes and sometimes die of the plague themselves. After talking about the measures that were taken to prevent and try to get rid of the plague, Defoe explains how the town got better and relieved from the plague. There was apparently a fire that was in London. Then the plague deaths decreased and people actually started recovering from it. At the end, people are coming back to town and cleaning their houses to live there again.

The Journal was a lot of talking and hard reading but it is an interesting account of the things that happened in those times. It made me think about what we would do different nowadays if there were a terrible deadly plague to break out. I wonder what would be done differently and if it would spread as quickly as it did in 1664.