Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

Penny Pritchard (University of Hertfordshire)
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A Journal of the Plague Year

is unique among Defoe’s fictional works, not least because its narrative and structure are arranged around the unfolding historical events of London’s 1665 Great Plague. It could indeed be argued that

Plague Year’s

protagonist is not ‘H.F.’, the Aldgate saddler and Dissenter [q.v] who narrates the text, but is in fact London itself, manifested in the myriad portraits of its suffering inhabitants as they do battle with the epidemic. What is certain is that H.F. is an avid, indeed compulsive, chronicler of the horrors of the disease; his story is related in a direct, visually detailed and journalistic style that is immediately reminiscent of Defoe’s best works of non-fiction (see, for example,

The Storm

[1704] and

A True Relation of the Apparition of

728 words

Citation: Pritchard, Penny. "A Journal of the Plague Year". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 October 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4282, accessed 19 March 2024.]

4282 A Journal of the Plague Year 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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