Link to my review on Goodreads (same text as below).
The book, free on Gutenberg.org.
This
was pretty entertaining reading in the grip of a pandemic. Just to be
clear, Defoe himself was a small kid at the time of the Great Plague of
London. This first-person account may be based on the journals of his
uncle Henry Foe.
Three hundred and fifty-five years seems like a very
long time ago. But the ideas and experiences in this book seem
surprisingly contemporary, not just because of our circumstances. You
can see why historians already call this time the “Early MODERN Era.” He
keeps quoting bits of the weekly bills of mortality just like how we’re
all pasting screenshots of the latest case numbers on social media.
Despite
acknowledging that he is a layman, the narrator has a lot of insights
based on observation about disease control. He criticises the shutting
up of houses with sick and healthy household members together. This
conflates isolation of the sick with quarantine, which properly applies
to exposed but healthy people. The narrator notes that rich men who
owned 2 houses and were able to send the sick family member away before
the authorities shut up their house were often able to save the rest of
the family. Chinese epidemiologists who studied the Wuhan outbreak came
to the same conclusion – lockdown only slowed the spread, what stopped
it was centralised quarantine.
Another epidemiological concept that’s
been confirmed in modern studies is a “second wave” when people think
it’s over and relax their precautions and rush back to urban centres.
There
is also a heartwrenching conversation with a poor boatman who makes a
living selling groceries to ship owners or merchants who are living
aboard their ships to keep away from the city. Meanwhile he can’t go
near his family because his wife and one of his children have the
plague, and the child is probably dying. He has to keep himself healthy
because they will starve otherwise. It reminded me of the plight of Uber
drivers and workers in the “gig economy” or older informal economies
who are struggling to make a living right now.
Not all is grim; there
is also an entertaining account of two poor men who decide to leave the
city, end up meeting up with a small group of other vagrants, and
somehow end up convincing villagers that they are an entire gang of
armed bandits.
By the way if you are not from London I highly recommend having Google Maps at hand while reading this.