A Lloyd Moote and Dorothy C Moote, The great plague: the story of London's most deadly year, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, pp. xxi, 357, illus., £19.95 (hardback 0-8018-7783-0), £12.50 (paperback 0-8018-8493-4).

Abstract

The London plague epidemic of 1665 occupies an unusually prominent place in disease history, and for that reason alone the revisiting of its sources undertaken by A Lloyd Moote and Dorothy C Moote is welcome. The authors hope to recreate a narrative picture of individual experiences and responses to a cataclysm that may have taken 100,000 lives, and they have produced a readable and reasonable account that should now be the first choice of readers who want to know the story. The narrative is structured around several individuals who left extensive accounts of their own experiences: the apothecary William Boghurst, the physician Nathaniel Hodges, the clergyman Symon Patrick, the bureaucrat Samuel Pepys, and the merchant William Turner. Also contributing are the gentleman John Evelyn, the Southwark medical practitioner and preacher John Allin, the Essex clergyman Ralph Josselin, Lucy Hastings (Lady Huntingdon), and her London agent Gervase Jacques. The authors, well aware that such testimony represents only the successful minority, must allow poorer London to speak collectively, relying particularly on records from such stricken parishes as St Giles’ Cripplegate, St Margaret's Westminster, and St Botolph's Bishopsgate. Vivid details from the sources bring home the realities of the epidemic: powdered unicorn horns as a cure-all, church bell ropes breaking under the strain of constant tolls for the dead, the treasure chest of the abandoned College of Physicians looted by thieves, the main London post office “thick with smoke from constant fumigation” (p. 162), the emergency expenses incurred by parishes building new walls around extended burial grounds. An important thesis of the book grows out of such narrative details: the efforts of individuals (many nameless) should be celebrated, for in the face of staggering mortality many of the essential functions of life were carried on. “[E]conomic survival outweighed the risk of death,” as the authors say (p. 168). The phrase “London's most deadly year” in the sub-title may raise some eyebrows, since other writers have argued that the plague epidemics of 1563, 1603, and 1625 exacted higher mortality rates than that of 1665. The Mootes argue not only that the total mortality of 1665 was higher and so more “deadly,” but that the official 1665 toll was seriously undercounted, and the large numbers of people who fled (perhaps as many as 200,000) should be taken into account when calculating the mortality rate. They estimate that the mortality rate (“officially” about 19 per cent) might have in fact been upwards of 30 per cent of those who remained. Some responses were widely agreed on. Flight was perhaps the surest, especially for those who could afford it. Many people in both Londons persisted in denial of the presence of plague, a fact that certainly skews contemporary mortality statistics. Isolation and its applications, especially the shutting-up of infected houses, remained a major official response, in addition to religious services and succour. Fumigation, fires, and smoke all combated the fatal “miasma.” Dogs and cats, thought likely contagious agents, were massively slaughtered. But many uncertainties remained as well: the causal roles of miasma and contagion, the efficacy of Galenic, chemical, or mechanical theories and remedies, the uneasy coexistence of beliefs in divine providence and “scientific” explanations, and (perhaps most painful) the doctrine of individual responsibility versus the practical difficulties of life faced by the poor. The authors deliberately choose narration over analysis, but they at least notice some larger underlying issues. They mediate sensibly between optimistic (largely demographic) and pessimistic views of the epidemic's effects: their concentration on individuals’ experiences certainly reinforces a pessimistic view of a catastrophe, but that is tempered by their celebration of individual and collective heroism. Similarly sensible is their discussion, in the epilogue, of the now-contentious identity of the disease itself; they hold with Yersinia pestis as the probable causative organism, but present some of the current objections raised against it. Some other large questions would benefit from further discussion. How—for example—are the higher mortality rates suffered by women to be explained, apart from reference to pregnancy? Why did no further plague epidemics occur in London? (This point is discussed, but rather cursorily.) And what accounts for the 1665 epidemic's persistent hold on the folk memories and literary traditions of England? Lloyd and Dorothy Moote, by refocusing our attention on the everyday lives and deaths of Londoners in 1665, have, however, provided at least a partial answer to “why did it matter?”