Samuel Pepys and the Plague

From the Conversation, “Diary of Samuel Pepys shows how life under the bubonic plague mirrored today’s pandemic” (hat tip: William Campbell):

In early April, writer Jen Miller urged New York Times readers to start a coronavirus diary.

“Who knows,” she wrote, “maybe one day your diary will provide a valuable window into this period.”

During a different pandemic, one 17th-century British naval administrator named Samuel Pepys did just that. He fastidiously kept a diary from 1660 to 1669 – a period of time that included a severe outbreak of the bubonic plague in London. Epidemics have always haunted humans, but rarely do we get such a detailed glimpse into one person’s life during a crisis from so long ago.

There were no Zoom meetings, drive-through testing or ventilators in 17th-century London. But Pepys’ diary reveals that there were some striking resemblances in how people responded to the pandemic.

For Pepys and the inhabitants of London, there was no way of knowing whether an outbreak of the plague that occurred in the parish of St. Giles, a poor area outside the city walls, in late 1664 and early 1665 would become an epidemic.

The plague first entered Pepys’ consciousness enough to warrant a diary entry on April 30, 1665: “Great fears of the Sickenesse here in the City,” he wrote, “it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.”

Pepys continued to live his life normally until the beginning of June, when, for the first time, he saw houses “shut up” – the term his contemporaries used for quarantine – with his own eyes, “marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there.” After this, Pepys became increasingly troubled by the outbreak.

He soon observed corpses being taken to their burial in the streets, and a number of his acquaintances died, including his own physician.

By mid-August, he had drawn up his will, writing, “that I shall be in much better state of soul, I hope, if it should please the Lord to call me away this sickly time.” Later that month, he wrote of deserted streets; the pedestrians he encountered were “walking like people that had taken leave of the world.”

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Defoe’s Plague Year

Heather Mallick in the Toronto Star (hat tip: Ron Good):

Defoe’s 1722 followup [to Robinson Crusoe] was A Journal of the Plague Year, an autofiction look-back to the plague that had struck England and elsewhere 50 years before. From our standpoint, it’s remarkable how Londoners in 1665 behaved very much as we are behaving now. It takes more than 355 years for people to change habits.

Reading A Journal this week, I was struck by the parallels between Defoe’s plague notes as he walked about the city and our own tales of the coronavirus lockdown.

Daniel Defoe adds up the daily numbers. “There died near 400 of the plague in the two parishes of St. Martin and St. Giles-in-the-Fields only, three died in the parish of Aldgate but four, in the parish of Whitechapel three.”

Defoe sees mad Twitter-like theories abound. “Some endeavours were used to suppress the printing of such books as terrified the people but the Government being unwilling to exasperate the people, who were, as I may say, all out of their wits already.”

Defoe frets over job losses, excoriates Big Landlord. “Maidservants especially, and menservants [asked] ‘Oh sir I for the Lord’s sake, what will become of me? Will my mistress keep me, or will she turn me off? Will she stay here, or will she go into the country … or leave me here to be starved and undone?’”

Defoe meets some bros. “There was a dreadful set of fellows that used their [tavern], and who, in the middle of all this horror, met there every night … so when the dead-cart came, they would make their impudent mocks and jeers at them, especially if they heard the poor people call upon God to have mercy upon them.”

Defoe encounters thoughtless Vancouver-type people. “They were not quite sick, had yet the distemper upon them, and who, by having an uninterrupted liberty to go about … gave the distemper to others, and spread the infection in a dreadful manner.”

More at the link