30 pages • 1 hour read
Daniel DefoeA Journal Of The Plague Year
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1722A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 145-185Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 145-165 Summary
The narrator writes that many “poor disconsolate” (145) people fled to the country or boated upstream to avoid illness. The narrator debates once again whether or not the sick had a “wicked Inclination” (148) to infect others but concludes they did not. He returns to the question of confinement’s effectiveness. Based on his brief tenure as an examiner, he relays stories of people who seemed perfectly fine until they collapsed, dead. He also notes that many of the sick became delirious and broke out of their houses, telling the story of one man who ran through the streets naked, swam across the Thames, and returned home cured of his illness. Surveying these stories, he suggests that keeping the mad out of the streets was the only positive effect of confinement. He goes on to say that examiners could do little to survey who had the infection without exposing themselves to it. He admits that, to avoid the plague, he paid someone else to take over his duty as examiner after three weeks.
Pages 166-185 Summary
The narrator discusses the height of the plague: during the final weeks of August and September, up to 3,000 might die in one night. During this period, people began to go out and converse with each other again, seemingly losing their caution in the face of near-certain death: “Another Plague Year would reconcile all [our] Differences” (169). Also during this period, the sick set themselves on fire, cries sounded through the streets, and the narrator shut himself up for twelve days. There were some bright spots, however: the price of bread was stable, and the streets were generally kept clear of dead bodies. The narrator thinks back to the beginning of the plague and praises the magistrates for preventing a public panic: had everyone but the poor left the city, it might have been ruined forever. As the city faced the worst of the plague, the western and northern areas began to improve first.
Pages 145-185 Analysis
As the narrator discusses the plague’s height, he returns again to several questions he presented earlier: whether the practice of shutting up houses is to blame, whether the sick truly want to spread their illness, and how well the government has addressed the plague. At this point, the narrator expresses greater ambivalence when it comes to shutting up houses. At the height of the plague, he hears more stories of delirium, fever, and madness, and he becomes grateful that the watchmen keep at least some of these individuals off the streets. He maintains that indifference to others is, however, not a feature of the plague: it is neither a symptom of the diseases, nor a symptom of the cruelty in human nature. People simply did not know they were infected.
In fact, in these pages, the narrator finds something to celebrate about mankind: as infection and death seem certain, hatred and conflict seem to melt away, and men greet each other on the street, accepting their death. (The narrator himself shirks his assignment as examiner, of course, and does not seem to note that he, at least, maintains not only fear of illness, but also a willingness to pay someone else to put himself in the line of illness.) During this period, government measures have kept some semblance of order in the city, which makes it possible for recovery to start in some parts of the city.
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By Daniel Defoe
