
The Journal of the Plague Year
London, 1665
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Narrated by:
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Nelson Runger
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By:
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Daniel Defoe
London's Great Plague of 1665 devastated the city, as Europe's final bubonic outbreak killed thousands of helpless citizens. Daniel Defoe, author of the classic Robinson Crusoe, was five years old when the Plague swept through London, and grew up hearing many stories - some truthful, others exaggerated - of its deadly effects. Blending those anecdotes with his childhood recollections and factual data from government registers, Defoe wrote this comprehensive account of what happened to London in 1665. Both a harrowing historical novel and a reliable journalistic record, Defoe recreates a living, suffering city trying to cope with an incurable, rapidly spreading disease.
©1988 Daniel Defoe (P)1988 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...




















Editorial reviews
Writer, merchant, and spy Daniel Defoe, now best known for Robinson Crusoe, presents a fictionalized first-person account of the Great Plague that afflicted London in 1665.
The Journal of the Plague Year: London, 1665 offers detailed, journalistic scenes of shuttered London homes and storefronts and dead bodies on the streets. In some parts of the city, infected families were quarantined as the death toll climbed toward 100,000 and a sense of paranoia and terror pervaded the city.
In an American accent, Nelson Runger serves up a crisp, steady performance of Defoe’s chronicle of a historical disaster.
Critic reviews
"...the work stands as the most reliable and comprehensive account of the Great Plague that we possess." (Anthony Burgess)
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history repeats itself
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Great read
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Written when?!
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history fact or fiction
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Great book
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Defoe uses the framing device of fictional characters living in London throughout the epidemic as a means through which to discuss factual events while also protecting himself from criticism in case he got certain particulars incorrect. I quite enjoyed "The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston, so I was drawn to how Defoe describes this great plague. It is a bit long for something that is much more descriptive than being extremely character or plot driven, but the plague vs. the city of London herself are more characters than individual people are, so I give this book a lot of slack for that.
As such, I am not an historian for this period, so I took a lot of what Defoe describes at face value. I could not help but compare and contrast how the transmission and spread of the plague, as well as how people responded to mass graves and forced shut downs, to what the United States of America has been facing since March 2020. Data suggests that nearly 100,000 out of over 700,000 (or ~15%) of the London population died from the 1665 bubonic plague, while only over 700,000 out of nearly 331 million (or ~0.15%) of the U.S. population has died thus far from COVID-19. This is not to diminish how horrible COVID has been, for we are still going through our pandemic, and with all of our medical advancements and understandings of how disease transmission and prevention works, my biggest takeaway from "A Journal of the Plague Year" is that human behavior has not changed that much in the past 350+ years.
For any infectious disease historian or researcher of this period in London's history, this is an essential read. Quite eery at times, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic I'm living through at the moment, this was a fitting October/Halloween Time read. In 10-20 years, I will be looking to read what docu-dramas have been written about 2020-2022 U.S. history. I recommend this to anyone willing to reflect on how other people across time have suffered similarly nation-stopping and panic-inducing diseases.
How History Repeats Itself...
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Not compelling
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A Book for the Times We're Living in Today
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Compare to COVID
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Thank you Audible for including it in your book list!
An eye-opening education
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