Defoe's Journal and the English plague writing tradition

Literature and Medicine

Volumn 22, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 25-44

  Healy, Margaret ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; EPIDEMIC; HISTORY; HUMAN; LITERATURE; PLAGUE; PUBLIC FIGURE; UNITED KINGDOM;

DISEASE OUTBREAKS; ENGLAND; FAMOUS PERSONS; HISTORY, 16TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 17TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 18TH CENTURY; HUMANS; LITERATURE, MODERN; MEDICINE IN LITERATURE; PLAGUE;

EID: 0037871949     PISSN: 02789671     EISSN: 10806571     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/lm.2003.0006     Document Type: Review

References (69)

1. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa, with a new introduction by David Roberts, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 16. Subsequent references are to this edition and cited parenthetically in the text
2. On the plague panic of the early 1720s and the controversial Quarantine Acts, see Paul Slack's unsurpassed account in The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (1985; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 326-37
3. See, for example, E. Massey, The Signs of the Times (London, 1722), 28
4. In Applebee's Journal, 29 July 1721, Defoe wrote: "The Damage of obliging Ships to Quarantine, is ... very considerable to the Merchants; ... Yet all this we cheerfully submit to for the Reason of it; 'tis allow'd to be just, to be necessary ... But if one Villain can pass the Barriers set, - if one Man can escape out of these Ships ... he may lodge the Plague among us ... and we are all undone"
5. (cited in Landa, "Explanatory Notes," Defoe, 282)
6. In a series of ten journal articles, Defoe argued in favor of the 1722 Act. See David Roberts, "Introduction," Defoe, viii-ix
7. Frank Lay, "The Exploitation of Subjectivity: Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year," in Rachel Langford and Russell West, eds., Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 37
8. Thomas Dekker, Newes from Graves-end: sent to Nobody (London, 1604), sig. C3v
9. See, for example, Herbert G. Wright, "Some Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Writers on the Plague," Essays and Studies 6 (1953): 41-55
10. Sandra Clark, The Elizabethan Pamphleteers (London: The Athlone Press, 1983), 112
11. Mary Leland Hunt, Thomas Dekker: A Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), 124-25
12. E. D. Pendry, Thomas Dekker (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), 21
13. Cited in Landa, "Explanatory Notes," Defoe, 260
14. Barbara Fass Leavy, To Blight With Plague: Studies in a Literary Theme (New York: New York University Press, 1992), places undue emphasis on Boccaccio's influence on Defoe so that the native tradition is effectively occluded
15. David Steel jumps from Boccaccio to 1665, as if there were no English plague writings in the interim; see "Plague Writing: From Boccaccio to Camus," Journal of European Studies, XI.2, no. 42 (1981): 91
16. Paula R. Backscheider's edition of A Journal of the Plague Year (New York: Norton, 1992) does contain short extracts from Dekker's The Wonderfull yeare after passages from Thucydides and Boccaccio, implicitly suggesting Dekker's significance (see pp. 237-41)
17. For a detailed analysis of English plague writings prior to Defoe, see Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). As my book demonstrates, Bullein, Nashe, and Dekker all made polemical use of the sexual "plague" of this period, the Pox or syphilis, but its social and political constructions were interestingly distinct from those of bubonic plague. It is important not to confuse and compound these two very differently understood diseases
18. On sixteenth-century representations of syphilis in poetry, see Margaret Healy, "Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch," in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 22-38
19. I am thinking particularly of the following pamphlets: William Bullein, A Dialogue both pleasaunt and pietifull, wherin is a godly regiment against the Fever Pestilence (London, 1564)
20. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Devil (London, 1592)
21. and Christes Teares over Jerusalem (London, 1594)
22. Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull yeare (London, 1603)
23. Newes from Graves-end (London, 1604)
24. The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie (London, 1604)
25. Worke for Armorours: Or, The Peace is Broken (London, 1609)
26. A Rod for Run-awayes (London, 1625)
27. London Looke Backe (London, 1630)
28. The Blacke and White Rod (London, 1630). All references are to these editions and will be cited parenthetically in the text
29. For a detailed discussion of these debates, see Robert Mayer, History and the Early English Novels: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe, Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 207-23
30. Watson Nicholson, The Historical Sources of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (1920; Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1966), 3
31. F. Bastion, "Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year Reconsidered," Review of English Studies 16 (1965): 172
32. On the relation between literature and fact, see Hayden White, "The Fictions of Factual Representation," in The Literature of Fact, ed. Angus Fletcher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976)
33. See also Isle N. Bulhof, "Imagination and Interpretation in History," in Literature and History, Leonard Schulze and Walter Wetzels, eds. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983)
34. and Richard Rambuss, "'A Complicated Distress': Narrativizing the Plague in Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year" in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 12, no. 2 (Sep. 1989): 115-31
35. For example, The Wonderfull yeare, sigs. D1v, D3v, D4r; Defoe, Journal, 76
36. Meyer Fortes, "Foreword" in Social Anthropology and Medicine, ed. J. B. Loudon, A.S.A. Monograph 13 (London: Academic Press, 1979), xix
37. Anon., Dives and Pauper, Part II, ed. Priscilla Heath Barnum, The Early English Text Society, no. 280 (London: Oxford University Press, 1980); see Commandment IX.ix, ll. 12-21
38. Anon., "A Warning to be ware," in The Minor Poems of the Vernon MS, Part II, ed. F. J. Furnivall, The Early English Text Society, vol. 2 (2 vols.; London: Kegan Paul, 1901), verse 8, 719
39. John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. S. R. Cattley, vol. VI (8 vols.; London, 1841), 57
40. See John King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 277
41. David Norbrook deftly concludes on this point: "If the reformers politicised aesthetics, the major Elizabethan poets would appear to have aestheticised politics," Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984), 14
42. John Foxe also harbored misgivings about the rising Puritan element causing disharmony in the True Church. See Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, 63
43. and Healy, Fictions of Disease, 84-85
44. See Thomas Nashe, "Address to the Reader," Have With you to Saffron Walden (London, 1596)
45. On the Marprelate pamphlet wars and Nashe's anti-Puritan (anti-Martinist) stance, see Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 524-37
46. See Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe's Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship and Robinson Crusoe, Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought, 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 9-20
47. Cited by Landa, "Explanatory Notes," Defoe, Journal, 255
48. Defoe, 235
49. Schonhorn, Defoe's Politics, 10
50. Thomas Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague (London, 1603), sig. C3r
51. On various signs and symptoms of the plague in 1665 according to H.F., see Defoe, 200. On the modern microbiology of plague see Charles T. Gregg, Plague: An Ancient Disease in the Twentieth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), 113-28
52. William Bullein, A newe booke Entituled the Governement of Healthe (London, 1558), f. xliir.-v
53. On Helmontian medicine and the plague see Ole Peter Grell, "Plague, Prayer and Physic: Helmontian Medicine in Restoration England," in Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, eds. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 204-27
54. See Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 370
55. On the mysterious operations of the Archeus and disease as "seminal beings," see John Baptista Van Helmont, Oriatrike or Physick Refined, trans. J. C. of Oxon (London, 1662), especially 500-501
56. For a detailed discussion of the "Helmontian Revolution" in medicine, see Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 353-433
57. See Slack, Impact, 329-31
58. On the poor and Defoe's Journal, see V. L. Wainwright, "Lending to the Lord: Defoe's Rhetorical Design in A Journal of the Plague Year," British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 59-72. Maximillian Novak sees Defoe's sympathetic narrator, who embraces "the swarming poor of the city," as path-breaking: "In the process, [H.F.] set a pattern for fictional narrators that has been central to the development of the novel," 250
59. see "Defoe and the Disordered City," PMLA 92 (1977): 241-52
60. On personification and cognition see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 33
61. For the contrary argument, that the metaphorization of disease is harmful and should be avoided, see Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (London: Penguin, 1989)
62. See Deborah Lupton, Moral Threats and Dangerous Desires: AIDS in the News Media (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), 51-90
63. Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 1, 2, 3
64. Defoe, 61. On Defoe's depiction of the plague pit, see Raymond Stephanson, "'Tis A speaking Sight': Imagery as Narrative Technique in Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year," Dalhousie Review 62, no. 4 (1982): 680-92
65. See also Everett Zimmerman, "H.F.'s Meditations: A Journal of the Plague Year," PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 87 (1972): 417-23
66. On the typological significance of this episode, see Alan Rosen, "Plague, Fire and Typology in Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year," Connotations 1, no. 3 (1991): 258-82
67. See also Rosen, Dislocating the End: Climate, Closure and the Invention of Genre (New York: Peter Lang, 2001) on Defoe's theological stance in relation to his narrative strategy, 27-50
68. On H.F.'s psychological turmoil, see Zimmerman, "H.F.'s Meditations," 422
69. Paula Backscheider argues that the Journal's "historical imagination" was to become a crucial part of the "deep structure" of the novel (Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation [Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986], 142)