Episode 42: Journal of the Plague Year

Not sure why we wanted to talk about Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722) in the middle of a global pandemic -- let’s just say we needed some light reading. Sorry folks, we’re commies, and historicists, and literature helps us think about f*cked up structures of the past, and of the present, and that’s what we’re doing today. We get into the Puritan/Dissenting theology behind Defoe’s historical novel about the 1665 Great Plague of London. But we also discover that he got a lot of things right about epidemiology and quarantine protocols, even if he did think “smells” and “little dragons” might make you sick, and we discuss what pre-Victorian representations of poverty looked like (somewhat less sociopathic!). Also, learned 17th-century Drs Megan and Tristan prescribe remedies for your ills which may involve, er, interesting uses of tobacco smoke.

We read the Penguin Classics edition edited by Cynthia Wall. Helen Thompson’s essay “‘It was impossible to know these People’: Secondary Qualities and the Form of Character in A Journal of the Plague Year” in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation is a terrific exploration of 17th-century epistemology and Defoe’s novel-thing. For a modern history of the Great Plague, see A. Lloyd Moote and Dorothy C. Moote’s The Great Plague: The Story of London’s Most Deadly Year.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.