Daniel Defoe

According to Sir Edmund Gout and other distinguished critics, Samuel Richardson (1689 - 1761) wrote the first English work of fiction that can be truly called a novel. This was Pamela : or Vertue Rewarded, a sentimental story told in a series of fictitious letters and published in 1740. But there are those who hold that the English novel is much older than this going back to the Euphues of John Lyly (about 1553 - 1606) which appeared in 1579, Lodge's Rosalynde, from which Shakespare fashioned As You Like It, and Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller, published about the same time. Others would trace the genesis of the novel from the fifteenth-century Morte d'Arthur, of Sir Thomas Malory.

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) was an English novelist and journalist, who after a varied career of political journalism and secret service work, wrote The Shortest Way with Dissenters (1702), a sarcastic attack on the narrow-mindedness of the Church of England. for which he was fined, sentenced to indefinite imprisonment and to stand three times in the pillory at Temple Bar and in Cheapside As it turned out this last was no punishment, the citizens of London took his side, and instead of pelting him with rotten eggs and other filth as they were expected to do, they garlanded him with roses and pelted him with sweet-smelling flowers. He was so pleased that he wrote a Hymn to the Pillory. Defoe was not kept long in prison, but a flourishing brick business he had built up was completely ruined.

When he was nearly 60 he wrote Robinson Crusoe (1719) the true story loosely based on the sailor Alexander Selkirk, it has a claim to being the first English novel. Its a tale of the shipwrecked Crusoe battling for survival in virtual solitude is one of the most familiar and resonant myths of modern literature. Other major works include the novel Moll Flanders (1722) and the historical fiction A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).

Journal of the Plague

It is scarce credible what dreadful cases happened in, particular families every day. People in the rage of the distemper, or in the torment of their swellings, which was indeed intolerable, running out of their own government, raving and distracted, and oftentimes laying violent hands upon themselves out of their windows, shooting themselves. &c. Mothers murdering their own children in their lunacy some dying of mere grief, as a passion some of ,mere fright and surprise without any infection at all others frightened into idiotism and foolish distractions some into despair and lunacy others into melancholy madness.

The pain of the swelling was in particular very violent and to some intolerable. The physicians and Surgeons may be said to have tortured many poor creatures even to death; the swellings in some glow hard, and they applied violent drawing plasters, or poultices, to break them and if these did not do, they cut and scarified them in a terrible manner. In some, these swellings were made hard, partly by the force of the distemper, partly by their being too violently drawn, and were so hard that no instrument could cut them, and then they burnt them with caustics, so that many died raving mad with the torment, and some in the very operation. In these distresses, some, for want of help to hold then, down in their beds, or to look to them, laid hands upon themselves, as above some broke out into the streets, perhaps naked, and would run directly down to the river, if they were not stopped by the watchman or other officers, and plunged themselves into the water, wherever they found it.

It often pierced my very soul to hear the groans and cries of those who were thus tormented : but of the two, this was counted the most promising particular in the whole infection ; for, if those swellings could be brought to a head, and break and run or as the surgeons call it. to digest, the patient generally recovered whereas those who were struck with death at the beginning had the tokens come out upon them often went about indifferently easy, till a little before they died, and some till the moment they dropt down , as in apoplexy's and epilepsy's is often the case. Such would be taken suddenly very sick, and would run, to a bench or bulk, or my convenient place that offered itself, or to their own houses if possible, as I mentioned before. and there sit down, grow faint, and die. This kind if dying was much the same as it was with those die of common mortification's ,who die swooning. and, as it were, go away in a dream such as died thus had very little notice of their being infected at all, till the gangrene was spread through their whole body nor could physicians themselves know certainly how it was with them till they opened their breasts, or other parts of their body and saw the tokens.

One of the worst days we haul in the whole time, as I thought, was in the beginning of September ; when indeed, good people were beginning to think that God was resolved to make a full end of the people in this miser-able city. This was at that time when the plague was fully come into the eastern, parishes. The parish of Aldgate, if I may give my opinion, buried above one thousand a week for two weeks, though the bills did not say so many but it surrounded me at so dismal a rate that there was not a house in twenty unaffected. In the Minories, in Houndsditch, and in those parts of Aldgate parish about the Butcher-row, and the alleys over-against me, I say in those places death reigned in every corner. Whitechapel parish was in the same condition, and, though much less than the parish I lived in, yet buried near 600 a week, by bills, and in my opinion, near twice as many ; whole families, and indeed, whole streets of families, were swept away together insomuch, that it was frequent for neighbours to call the bellman to go to such and such a house and fetch out the people, for that they were all dead.

And, indeed, the work of removing the dead bodies by carts was now grown so very odious and dangerous, that it was complained of that the bearers did not take care to clear such houses where all the inhabitants were dead, but that some of the bodies lay unburied till the neighbouring families were offended by the stench, and consequently infected. And this neglect of the officers was such that the churchwardens and constables were summoned to look after it and even the justices of the hamlets were obliged to venture their lives among them, to quicken and encourage them ; for innumerable of the bearers died of the distemper. infected by the bodies they were obliged to come so near and had it not been that the number of people who wanted employment, and wanted bread, as I have said before, was so great, that necessity drove them to undertake anything, and venture anything, they would never have found people to be employed ; and then the bodies of the dead would have lain above ground and perished and rotted in a dreadful manner .

But the magistrates cannot be enough commended in this, that they kept such good order for the burying of the dead, that as fast as any of those they employed to carry off and bury the dead fell sick or died, as was many times the case, they immediately supplied the places with others, which, by reason of the great number of poor that was left out of business. as above, was not hard to do. This occasioned that notwithstanding the infinite number of people who died and were sick, almost all together, yet they were always cleared away, and carried off every night so that it was never to be said of London that the living were not able to bury the dead.

As the desolation was greater during those terrible times, so the amazement of the people increased and a thousand unaccountable things they would do in the violence of their fright, as others did the same in the agonies of their distemper and this part was very affecting. Some went roaring, and crying, and wringing their hands along the street some would go praying and lifting up their hands to heaven, calling upon God for mercy. I cannot say, indeed, whether this was not in their distraction but, be it so. it was still an indica-tion of a more serious mind when they had the use of their senses and was much better, even as it was, than the frightful yellings and cryings that every day, and especially in the evenings, were heard in some streets. I suppose the world has heard of the famous Solomon Eagle, an enthusiast ; he, though not infected at all, but in, his head, went about denouncing of judgment upon the city in a frightful manner , sometimes quite naked and with a pan of burning charcoal on his head. What he said or pretended, indeed, I could not learn.

There were some people who, notwithstanding the danger, did not omit publicly to attend the worship of God, even in the most dangerous times. And though it is true that a great many of the clergy did shut up their churches and fled, as other people did, for the safety of their lives, yet all did not do so some ventured to officiate, and to keep up the assemblies of the people by constant prayers, and sometimes sermons or brief exhortations to repentance and reformation and this as long as they would hear them.

And Dissenters did the like also, and even in the very churches where the parish ministers were either dead or fled nor was there any room for making any difference at such a time as this