Plagues ancient and modern

Like many other people, I have read Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year during lockdown. It is a fictionalised account of what for Defoe was a recent historical event, the London plague of 1665, which Brits may remember was followed in 1666 by the Great Fire of London.

Though the book is compelling, I wasn’t able to focus on it in March so I returned to it in the last couple of weeks, having then been through lockdown, and the parallels are astonishing. From the start, the daily tally of cases and deaths by still recognisable streets and quarters of London; the stockpiling; the quarantines (much more severe than Covid-19: if there was a case in a house, the entire household was locked in and guarded – most died); the anxiety about hackney carriages as a source of infection; the desperate flight from the city and the hostility towards plague refugees by other communities; the fact that it was impossible to tell infected people from the healthy until it was too late, ‘for none knows when or where or how they may have received the infection, or from whom’; displays of human ingenuity, often criminal; urban myths (‘If you heard of it in the city, why then, it happened in Southwark; and if you heard of it in Southwark, then it was done in the city...’); the profound silence in the streets and the relatively greater suffering of the poor. My favourite discovery is that this plague was the source of burial at 6’ under, which was first introduced at this time.

As cases of Bubonic plague are currently reported in China, it seems even more relevant, though that is treatable today if you move fast enough. What may be astonishing to us in our hyper-connected world is that in 1665 the plague had spent 2 years raging in the Netherlands before reaching London, perhaps because we were in the middle of a war with the Dutch over trade.

I know we have our own chaos but it struck me that what I did not see in the book were many parallels for the innumerable acts of kindness that we have seen during Covid-19 and which has characterised so much of the human response. Either the journalist in Defoe was sensationalising or we have made some progress over the centuries.