Although frequently lambasted for its being a “thorny shrub” of miscreant journalism, Daniel Defoe’s semi-fictional account of the great plague of 1665 also offers telling insight into English social and political customs. A Journal of the Plague Year is now framed more as novel than as historiography, but is equal parts both, making it akin to ancient narratives like the epic of Gilgamesh. Defoe does do a deft job at pastiche, weaving facts with fluffy embellishments that add life to what would otherwise be a dull and dry accounting for the inventory of dead and the litany of loss that occurred as a result of the plague. The reader of A Journal of the Plague runs the risk of losing sight of the forest for focusing too much on the trees, for those minute details contained in the text, whether true or false, offer far less of the real story than the gestalt: the fact that the public’s reaction to the plague is what really matters. Not just the public’s reaction, but the reaction and methods used by the authorities in London are what makes Daniel Defoe’s narrative so important to understand. These methods, which include the rule of law, the use of quarantine as a means of promoting public safety and preventing the spread of the plague, and the function of watchmen too, lend insight into English governance during the 17th century. Moreover, the despair, desolation, and dread that permeate the account shows how the plague evoked an existential crisis of apocalyptic proportions. The use of strong top-down organizational tactics like quarantine, watchmen, and rule of law parallel the technological, social, and political changes taking place in pre-modern English society. Defoe’s book shows that the plague inspired one of the first organized, rational, and collaborative public responses to a health epidemic, even though some of the methods used failed. The public response also reveals the impetus for populist reforms and a more self-empowering form of democratic government. Many magistrates and other city officials who could have come up with a cohesive response to the epidemic fled the city at first signs of outbreak. Defoe is particularly critical of the magistrates and watchmen who reacted selfishly, while celebrating those who elected to stay in the interests of promoting the public welfare. While some of them do their jobs, others “were absent, sometimes drunk, sometimes asleep when the people wanted them, and such never failed to be punished severely, as indeed they deserve.” The fact that the public did...

“But after all that was or could be done in these cases, the shutting up of houses, so as to confine those that were well with those that were sick, had very great inconveniences in it.” As tragic is it was to confine people, “it was authorised by a law, it had the public good in view as the end chiefly aimed at, and all the private injuries that were done by the putting it in execution must be put to the account of the public benefit.” This statement by the narrator shows how rule of law was being increasingly conceptualized as a matter of public good. Public good triumphed over all other considerations when creating laws for society. In fact, Defoe lauds the magistrates for their work in enforcing the sensible laws: “the magistrates wisely caused the people to be encouraged, made very good bye-laws for the regulating the citizens, keeping good order in the streets, and making everything as eligible as possible to all sorts of people.” While some magistrates and watchmen did flee, most did not: “they would not quit the city themselves, but that they would be always at hand for the preserving good order in every place and for the doing justice on all occasions.”
Defoe shows how the law, meted out by magistrates and watchmen, helped protect not just the interests of the wealthy and powerful but of the poor too. The magistrates were responsible “also for the distributing the public charity to the poor; and, in a word, for the doing the duty and discharging the trust reposed in them by the citizens to the utmost of their power.” Defoe shows how London’s demographics were changing given the rise in middle class power. As Richetti points out, London during the late seventeenth century as Defoe describes it in the Journal is “where a substantial urban bourgeoisie and professional/bureaucratic class” intermingled (71). The way the government and the people responded collectively to an epidemic that affected rich and poor alike inspired Defoe to activate his already astute “political consciousness,” (Richetti 71). The Church is a primary target for Defoe’s political consciousness.…