![]() ![]() F., could be based on Defoe’s uncle, Henry Foe. We don’t know whether he remained in London as a boy in 1665. The book is a fictionalised account of events that occurred when Defoe was five years old. Reports of an outbreak at Marseille had reached Britain, and Londoners feared that the plague itself would follow. When Daniel Defoe wrote Plague Year in 1722, he feared that history was about to repeat itself. ![]() Is the plague a purely natural phenomenon that can be explained through science? Or is it also a sign of God’s displeasure, a punishment for the excesses of the Restoration and the end of the Puritan experiment with republicanism? If the latter, how is it that King Charles II’s court, which holed up in Oxford, was unaffected, whereas the capital’s poor, especially those with little choice but to work and expose themselves to infection, died in droves? THE narrator of A Journal of the Plague Year is an ordinary man, a saddler, in London in 1665, who struggles to make sense of the last significant visitation of the bubonic plague in England. ![]()
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