A Journal of the Plague Year, Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London

by Daniel Defoe

that had friends or estates in the country retired with their families; and when, indeed, one would have thought the very city itself was running out of the gates, and that there would be nobody left behind; you may be sure from that hour all trade, except such as related to immediate subsistence, was, as it were, at a full stop.

I say, the master-workmen in such stopped their work, dismissed their journeymen and workmen, and all their dependents.

very few ships ventured to come up the river

the tradesmen usually employed in building or repairing of houses were at a full stop,

seamen were all out of employment,

innumerable multitude of footmen, serving-men, shopkeepers, journeymen, merchants' bookkeepers, and such sort of people, and especially poor maid-servants, were turned off, and left friendless and helpless, without employment and without habitation,

These might be said to perish not by the infection itself but by the consequence of it; indeed, namely, by hunger and distress and the want of all things: being without lodging, without money, without friends, without means to get their bread, or without anyone to give it them;

particularly by relieving the most desperate with money, and putting others into business, and particularly that employment of watching houses

The women and servants that were turned off from their places were likewise employed as nurses to tend the sick

namely, the plague, which raged in a dreadful manner from the middle of August to the middle of October, carried off in that time thirty or forty thousand of these very people

for about nine weeks together there died near a thousand a day, one day with another,

in some places no account at all was kept, but they worked on,

whole number which was brought in to die of the plague was but 68,590, here is 50,000 of them, within a trifle, in two months;

that there died at least 100,000 of the plague only, besides other distempers and besides those which died in the fields and highways

Wherefore were we ordered to kill all the dogs and cats, but because as they were domestic animals, and are apt to run from house to house and from street to street, so they are capable of carrying the effluvia or infectious streams of bodies infected even in their furs and hair?

that all the dogs and cats should be immediately killed, and an officer was appointed for the execution.

forty thousand dogs, and five times as many cats;

All possible endeavours were used also to destroy the mice and rats,

namely, that the infection was propagated insensibly, and by such persons as were not visibly infected, who neither knew whom they infected or who they were infected by.

this way of shutting up of houses was perfectly insufficient for that end.

we were no way capable of coming at the knowledge of the true state of any family but by inquiring at the door or of the neighbours.

Some were for fires, but that they must be made of wood and not coal, and of particular sorts of wood too, such as fir in particular, or cedar, because of the strong effluvia of turpentine; others were for coal and not wood, because of the sulphur and bitumen; and others were for neither one or other. Upon the whole, the Lord Mayor ordered no more fires, and especially on this account, namely, that the plague was so fierce that they saw evidently it defied all means, and rather seemed to increase than decrease upon any application to check and abate it;

but this was the time when it was reported that above 3000 people died in one night;

they thought every day they attended at the church that it would be their last.

that one man, being tied in his bed, and finding no other way to deliver himself, set the bed on fire with his candle, which unhappily stood within his reach, and burnt himself in his bed; and how another, by the insufferable torment he bore, danced and sung naked in the streets, not knowing one ecstasy from another; I say, after I have mentioned these things, what can be added more? What can be said to represent the misery of these times more lively to the reader, or to give him a more perfect idea of a complicated distress?

that all the predictors, astrologers, fortune-tellers, and what they called cunning-men, conjurers, and the like: calculators of nativities and dreamers of dream, and such people, were gone and vanished; not one of them was to be found.

the month of September, which was the most dreadful of its kind, I believe, that ever London saw;

number in the weekly bill amounting to almost 40,000 from the 22nd of August to the 26th of September,

there died above ten thousand a week for all those weeks,

Another cart was, it seems, found in the great pit in Finsbury Fields, the driver being dead, or having been gone and abandoned it, and the horses running too near it, the cart fell in and drew the horses in also. It was suggested that the driver was thrown in with it and that the cart fell upon him, by reason his whip was seen to be in the pit among the bodies;

I am sure that there were no dead bodies remained unburied; that is to say, none that the proper officers knew of; none for want of people to carry them off, and buriers to put them into the ground and cover them; and this is sufficient to the argument; for what might lie in houses and holes, as in Moses and Aaron Alley, is nothing; for it is most certain they were buried as soon as they were found.

In all this dreadful visitation there were, as I have said before, but two pest-houses made use of, viz., one in the fields beyond Old Street and one in Westminster;

seeing nobody was here allowed to be brought to the pest-house but where money was given, or security for money, either at their introducing or upon their being cured and sent out—for

having more pest-houses I am far from meaning a forcing all people into such places. Had the shutting up of houses been omitted and the sick hurried out of their dwellings to pest-houses, as some proposed, it seems, at that time as well as since, it would certainly have been much worse than it was. The very removing the sick would have been a spreading of the infection,

the prodigious numbers which would have been sick at a time would have exceeded all the capacity of public pest-houses to receive them, or of public officers to discover and remove them.

By the well I mean such as had received the contagion, and had it really upon them, and in their blood, yet did not show the consequences of it in their countenances: nay, even were not sensible of it themselves, as many were not for several days. These breathed death in every place, and upon everybody who came near them; nay, their very clothes retained the infection, their hands would infect the things they touched, especially if they were warm and sweaty, and they were generally apt to sweat too.

These were the dangerous people; these were the people of whom the well people ought to have been afraid;

it is impossible to know the infected people from the sound,

and people have it when they know it not, and that they likewise give it to others when they know not that they have it themselves; and in this case shutting up the well or removing the sick will not do it, unless they can go back and shut up all those that the sick had conversed with, even before they knew themselves to be sick, and none knows how far to carry that back, or where to stop; for none knows when or where or how they may have received the infection, or from whom.

am sure I am struck from Heaven',

have come near no infection or any infected person; I am sure it is the air. We draw in death when we breathe, and therefore 'tis the hand of God; there is no withstanding it.'

this of the secret conveyance of infection, imperceptible and unavoidable,

The opinion of physicians abroad seems to be that it may lie dormant in the spirits or in the blood-vessels a very considerable time.

that the best physic against the plague is to run away from it.

who knew not how to discover the sick from the sound;

might be known by the smell of their breath;

breathing upon a piece of glass, where, the breath condensing, there might living creatures be seen by a microscope, of strange, monstrous, and frightful shapes, such as dragons, snakes, serpents, and devils, horrible to behold.

yet living, a very cold winter and a long frost which continued three months; and this, the doctors say, might check the infection;

would like a frozen river have returned to its usual force and current when it thawed—whereas the principal recess of this infection, which was from February to April, was after the frost was broken and the weather mild and warm.

they gave money to procure, or otherwise procured, the dead persons to be returned as dying of other distempers;