Daniel Defoe: Diary of a Plague Year

The Journal of the Plague Year is the fictional accounts of a participant in the terrifying plague epidemic that wiped out one hundred thousand Londoners in 1665. Daniel Defoe, then five years old, survived the terrifying plague epidemic that killed 100,000 people in London in 1665, safe in the countryside. But his uncle remained in the town. And perhaps it is through his eyes, the eyes of a simple, wise man who is equally concerned about his own fate and about sharing in the suffering of his fellow man, that the author lets us see the streets and houses of that time. We witness the growing panic that grips London and drives people out of the city or into the arms of greasers and charlatans; tragic scenes alternate with stories that have a touch of the grotesque. The reckless desperation of some is balanced by the admirable discipline and discretion of others. And so, although the book has all the features of a reportage and its documentary value is great (it contains a number of contemporary statistics), the author has not only created an extremely successful literary fiction, but a realistic work of human courage in the face of an unknown terrifying enemy. Daniel Defoe thus became the forerunner of the non-fiction genre. The writer Walter Scott remarked, about a century after the publication of the Diary, that the book was "one of those curious works which oscillate between fact and fiction".