JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR, A

The shocking immediacy of Daniel Defoe's description of a plague-racked city makes it one of the most convincing accounts of the Great Plague of 1665 ever written. Both fiction and history, it takes the facts and the figures, breathes life into them and bestows on them a literary form that is astonishing for its ingenuity. Defoe's art is a concealed one. The deceptive simplicity of his Journal leads the reader not only to a minute understanding of the plague itself but also to an extraordinarily heightened sense of London in 1665 as a living, suffering entity. This is realism at its best, and it is no surprise that Defoe's 'Journal of the Plague Year' has become the prototype of all accounts of great cities in times of epidemic, siege or occupation. It has, as Anthony Burgess says, 'the truth of the conscientious and scrupulous historian, but its deeper truth belongs to the creative imagination'.