The Disappointing, Parenthetical Providence of God in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year

Abstract

Abstract Daniel Defoe’s fictional narrators talk often about God’s providence but not usually to appeal to an overarching social or natural order, to solve problems of theodicy, or to claim special divine attention. In the Bible scene near the beginning of Defoe’s novel Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a passage of scripture opened to by chance convinces the narrator, H.F., to stay in London and protect his business during the plague. This scene primes Defoe’s readers to recognise later in the novel divine providence acting not through so much as with creaturely agents, human and nonhuman.