DEFOE'S JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR TOPOGRAPHY AND INTENTION

Abstract

UNTIL very recently Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year received little commendable scholarly attention. Critics felt disposed to argue single-mindedly either the Journal's absolute faithfulness to the historical record or its inventiveness; and in so doing concluded by minimizing its artistry or its reliability.' Mr. Frank Bastian, in his reconsideration of the work, has rectified the generalizations about the book's historical worth and the picture of Defoe as an unreliable recorder of the plague year.z He has dismissed the possibility that 'a large part of Defoe's information was actually derived from some diary, or manuscript observations, communicated to him by a member of his very family'3; he has shown that the Journal's facts, 'when they can be tested, prove to be neither recklessly invented, nor simply borrowed from previously published works';4 and he has revealed the historical reality of the characters appearing in the Journal. The full extent of Defoe's indebtedness, of course, can never be completely known. The plague, as a catastrophic event reshaping the lives of the society and recurring with deadly frequency, came down to Defoe's time with a body of anecdotal appendages and carried within itself the seeds of a mythology.s In 1835 E. W. Brayley prepared a text from the very rare first edition and provided a useful introduction and notes which showed Defoe's sources and his obvious indebtedness to contemporary publications, but he gave little attention to critical evaluation. Watson Nicholson, The Historical Sources of Defoe's 'Journal of the Plague Year' (Boston, 1919), went over the same ground, insisted that the Journal was a faithful record of historical fact, and concluded that Defoe was a shoddy stylist and an execrable artist (pp. 48, 76, 90). Five years later, Arthur Secord, Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe (Urbana, 1924), pointed out Nicholson's faulty evaluation of both Defoe's sources and his manipulation of them and remarked that 'Dr. Nicholson's contention [that is, the Journal's historicity] may be dismissed as valueless' (p. 232). Also in 1924 Walter G. Bell (The Great Plague in London in z665 (London)) reaffirmed Defoe's dependence upon published sources but insisted that the Journal be accepted as an historical fiction (p. v). A decade later Professor Secord, making the most of Bell's historical researches, gladly recalled the discrepancies from fact in Defoe's narrative and, equating unreliability with inventiveness, concluded that 'a large part of the Journal is, therefore, proved imaginative' (Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year and Other Pieces (New York, 1935), p. xxvii). 2 'Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year Reconsidered', R.E.S., N.S., xiv (1965), 151-73. 3 Brayley, Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (London, 1835), p. x. 4 Bastian, loc. cit., p. 156. s There is, for example, Defoe's account of the sleeping piper, told also in Sir John Reresby's Memoirs, published in 1734. But this nightmarish anecdote of mistaken identity goes as far back as Thomas Dekker's The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie,