A Film Canon

This extraordinary work presents a fictionalised account of the 1665 plague, in order to elucidate a series of lessons and recommendations for the resurgence that was anticipated throughout the 1720s. Like The Storm,it construes reportage as the common denominator between the pleasures of narrative and the virtues of empiricism, defending the proliferation of newspapers, magazines and periodicals that arose between the two outbreaks, and offering itself as an exemplary piece of journalism, as much as a straightforward, eyewitness account. Narratively, Defoe presents the plague as protagonist, replete with infernal agency, intentionality and intelligence, thereby supplementing the dramatic, breathless trajectory of its dissemination, and culminating with the extended discussion of its most virulent characteristic; namely, its ability to infect people, and render them contagious, before producing symptoms. Similarly, he centres the book on an extended, instructive parable, in which the various provisions made in the course of a retreat from London conjure up the same affirmation of ingenious self-determination as Robinson Crusoe. Yet these fictive trappings are contained by the constant recourse to statistics and topography, the pervasive scepticism, or at least caution, in dealing with anecdotal sources, and, above all, that descriptive sensibility that distinguishes Defoe from his picaresque successors. From this perspective, the book ultimately feels like a collation of scrupulously researched and selected observations, and its ostensible narrator ("H.W.") little more than the personification of a methodology that encourages "that everything is set down with moderation, and rather within compass, than beyond it." It also ensures that the horror and surrealism of the plague is allowed to speak for itself, instead of being deflected into melodramatic, apocalyptic or enthusiastic flourish; or, alternatively, that its inherent inexpressibility is acknowledged in the simplest - and most honest - terms conceivable: "it is quite impossible to give a true idea of it to those who did not see it, other than this; that is was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such as no tongue can express"