![]() ![]() In Defoe’s dexterous hands, these texts become an intriguing mixture of historical facts and ingenious fiction, resulting in a powerful description of the debilitating effects of the deadly disease on the population. His previous experience as a reporter had led him to collect contemporary sources, including Bills of Mortality, the Orders of the Lord Mayor, and existing first-hand accounts. Finding himself in such a tense situation, the journalist turned novelist Daniel Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722, a first-person account supposedly ‘written by a citizen who continued all the while in London’ during the Great Plague of 1665. When persistent rumours that the plague in Marseilles was about to cross into England started to circulate in the early 1720s, the government implemented precautionary measures in the form of a Quarantine Act. Killing around 100,000 Londoners, this seventeenth-century episode left permanent scars on the mental landscape of the capital. ![]() Among the many outbreaks of the bubonic plague in London, the most well-known ones are the Black Death of 1348 and the Great Plague of 1665, one of the last major occurrences in Europe. ![]()
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