A Journal of the Plague Year
Editor/introduction - Cynthia Wall
Notes by - Cynthia Wall
Penguin Classics
Paperback
: 29 May 2003
£9.99
Synopsis
‘It was a most surprising thing, to see those Streets, which were usually so thronged, now grown desolate’
In 1665 the Great Plague swept through London, claiming nearly 100,000 lives. In A Journal, written nearly sixty years later, Defoe vividly chronicled the progress of the epidemic. We follow his fictional narrator through a city transformed: the streets and alleyways deserted; the houses of death with crosses daubed on their doors; the dead-carts on their way to the pits. And he recounts the horrifying stories of the citizens he encounters, as fear, isolation and hysteria take hold. A Journal is both a fascinating historical document and a supreme work of imaginative reconstruction.
This edition contains a new introduction, an appendix on the Plague, a topographical index and maps of contemporary London, and reproduces Anthony Burgess’s original introduction.
Reviews
» Submit a reviewCritic Review:
‘The most reliable and comprehensive account of the Great Plague that we possess’
Anthony Burgess
‘Within the texture of Defoe’s prose London becomes a living and suffering being’
Peter Ackroyd
Critic Review:
"Within the texture of Defoe's prose, London becomes a living and suffering being." (Peter Ackroyd)
Table of contents
Introduction
Notes
Further Reading
A Note on the Text
A Journal of the Plague Year
Appendix I: The Plague
Appendix II: Topographical Index
Appendix III: London Maps
Appendix IV: Introduction by Anthony Burgess to the 1966 Penguin English Library Edition
Glossary
Notes
