A Journal of the plague Year

Defoe's descriptions are very grotesquely realistic, he engrosses the the reader in the plague London. I was disappointed on reading that the account was fictional and Defoe did not actually witness these events first hand. He communicates the immense and suffocating fear of the plague, which was literally everywhere, and also the despair, as halting its spread was like trying net a patch of air in a disintegrating butterfly net. It seems it would have been nearly impossible not to have contracted the plague, as the city was drowning in it. "There was a strict order to prevent people coming to those (burial) pits, and that was only to prevent infection. But after some time that order was more necessary, for people that were infected and near their end, and delirious also, would run to those pits , wrapped in blankets or rugs, and throw themselves in, and, as they said, bury themselves." The stories of resistance to the death and madness, against the sheer breadth, were encouraging if melancholy. Particularly the story of the man who kept himself alive by swimming across the Thames and ceaselessly running through the city until the exertion of his body forced the plague spots to break down and ingest, and the joy of the diary keeper on finding himself alive after the passing of the plague.

"A dreadful plague in lond was
In the year sixty-five,
Which swept a hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!"