What can we learn from the ‘Plague Year’ of 355 years ago?

The pestilence came from across the sea. Planning for it was fitful, based on incomplete information. People by the thousands fled the city, which went on lockdown but still sustained a horrifying number of deaths.

I’m speaking, naturally, of London in 1665, as described in the semi-journalistic novel “A Journal of the Plague Year,” by Daniel Defoe. He also wrote “Robinson Crusoe.”

“Plague Year” has been bedtime reading for me lately. An odd choice, perhaps, but I’ve been fascinated by previous dips into the wealth of pestilence literature, from Albert Camus to Barbara Tuchman’s recounting of the Black Death in “A Distant Mirror,” to Samuel Pepys writing about the same London outbreak in his diary.

Defoe’s plague account was published in 1722 as another epidemic loomed over England. A young boy when the plague hit London more than 50 years earlier, Defoe mined available archives and his own experiences to make the work both historically accurate and for it to stand as a warning to his readers.

The book also has enough parallels to our time to launch a fistful of Ph.D. theses and to show what we’re living through now isn’t so much unprecedented as a rerun we haven’t watched in a while.

Early stages

Defoe’s narrator tells us as the book opens that letters from merchants in Europe advised the plague had taken hold in Holland in 1663 and ‘64.

The narrator also says, “it seems that the Government had a true account of it, and several councils were held about ways to prevent its coming over; but all was kept very private. Hence it was that this rumour (sic) died off again, and people began to forget it as a thing we were very little concerned in.”

By the spring of 1665, the plague had crossed the North Sea and was devastating parishes in and around London. People of means were fleeing the city – note that New York’s population is now down about 400,000 – with the poor left behind to take the brunt of the contagion’s fury.

Lockdown

As London emptied out, new rules and regulations came into play. Their echoes can still be heard today.

No large gatherings were allowed, including “all plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads … or such-like causes of assemblies of people.”

Two watchmen were posted at homes where people were known to be infected with the disease, “one for every day, and the other for the night; and these watchmen have a special care that no person go in or out of such infected houses.” Defoe also describes how people inside those homes bribed and even attacked the watchmen. Everybody, it seemed, had a reason to be an exception.

Burials were handled after dusk or before dawn, and often in pits dug to handle the overflow of bodies. No family allowed.

Quacks

There are no medicines or vaccines for COVID-19, yet. So says a page on the FDA’s website – a page posted last month to warn consumers about a load of fake cures.

Defoe remarks that it was “scarce to be imagined, how the posts of houses and corners of streets were plastered over with doctors’ bills and papers of ignorant fellows, quacking and tampering in physic, and inviting the people to come to them for remedies (such as) ‘Infallible preventive pills against the plague.’ ‘Neverfailing preservatives against the infection.’ … ‘The only true plague water.’”

Second wave

It’s real. Or, it was real anyway.

By October 1665, the weekly death toll from the disease had declined noticeably, and Londoners were ready to get out and about, despite warnings from doctors that “the people to continue reserved,” the narrator laments.

“But it was all to no purpose; the audacious creatures were so possessed with the first joy and so surprised with the satisfaction of seeing a vast decrease in the weekly bills (the lists of total deaths by parish), that they were impenetrable.”

The National Archives of Britain estimates that more than 100,000 people perished by the time the outbreak finally ended.

Final word

OK, so this well-researched historical novel about the 17th century sounds kind of like today.

Who cares? Is it my point to say that plagues have been around forever, so stop whining?

No, that’s not it. Trivializing misfortune, especially with historical comparisons, doesn’t make anyone feel much better.

It’s more about a couple of realizations.

One is that, in the face of a pandemic, whether it arises in the 14th, 17th or 21st century, there really are only a limited set of human responses. We have range, but not that much range. What we see may be new to us, may be unprecedented to us, but not to our species.

And that gives us a chance to make a rare connection to our ancestors, and to each other. It gives us a chance to recognize our common human experience. Because, in the end, we were and are just trying to survive on a planet that presents us with fantastic danger.

Or, as Defoe put it, “A plague is a formidable enemy, and is armed with terrors that every man is not sufficiently fortified to resist or prepared to stand the shock against.”