London itself becomes the central character of the novel, with its endless streets and districts winding through the narrative, fires burning in the alleyways to keep the plague at bay, and its shuttered houses occasionally thrown open to disgorge fearful people or dead bodies. Further, the arc of his story does not match the record, as the Great Fire of London in 1666 did not end the plague completely, as Defoe suggests. Defoe’s narrator is unreliable, in that his colourful anecdotes of people fleeing the city, outwitting the watchmen or raving in the streets with the plague, are deliberately presented as hearsay, and he states plainly that he cannot remember all the details. What he produced was not a history but a novel: an imaginative recreation of the past, given verisimilitude by its documentary detail and also, counter-intuitively, by its use of literary devices. When he wrote his book in 1722, he drew on historical records such as broadsides, medical pamphlets and the ‘Bills of Mortality’ published by local parish authorities, as well as the memories of his uncle Henry Foe, who remained in London during the plague, and whose initials ‘H.F.’ are given to Defoe’s narrator. Yet in reality, as Burgess correctly identifies, it is ‘a cunning work of art, a confidence trick of the imagination.’ĭefoe was only five years old when the plague broke out. Defoe presents his novel as a genuine book of memoirs, a detailed and intimate if sometimes rambling and digressive account of one man’s experience living in London throughout the ‘visitation’ that swept away an estimated 100,000 people - a fifth of the population of the city. One of the questions that Burgess grapples with is the relationship the Journal has with historical accuracy.
His introduction is still available in the current Penguin Classics edition, and it remains a lively and thoughtful preparation for Defoe’s haunting description of the outbreak of plague that ravaged London in 1665. One of Anthony Burgess’s first commissions from Penguin Books was to write an introduction to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1966 as part of the Penguin English Library.
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