Backlisted - A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

Episode Date: April 29, 2019

Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is the subject of this episode of Backlisted, recorded in the week of the 300th anniversary of the publication of Robinson Crusoe. Joining John and Andy to discuss the book - and Defoe's extraordinary life and careers - are novelist James Hannah and Dr Jo Waugh, senior lecturer at York St John University and an expert on literature and disease. Plus Andy talks about Jane Gardam's Defoe-inspired novel Crusoe's Daughter and John has been reading Small Days and Nights by Tishani Doshi.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)8'50 - Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam15'03 Small Days and Nights by Tishani Doshi19'05 A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness and July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. hello and welcome to backlisted the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in the City of London.

It is September 1665 and we are locked in a small tradesman's house in the east of the city. A watchman stands guard at the locked door and outside the piteous screams of the afflicted echo through the empty streets. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. Joining us today are the writer and backlisted listener, James Hanna. Hello. Who has listened to 90 hours of this podcast in a week.

No, over the space of several years. Hello, James. Hello. James' first novel, The A to Z of You and Me, was published by Doubleday in 2015 and was listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize for Debut Fiction. He's currently at work on a second novel. He has a Master's in Samuel Beckett Studies

from the University of Reading, home of the Beckett International Foundation. Do you get a sort of fail better diploma? You failed, but you failed. I failed to fail better, which is double Beckett. I'm off to Dublin next week, and in a very on-the-nose reading choice, I have selected Murphy.

Oh, now, this is what I've been trying to persuade you to bring onto Backlisted, Murphy. Very close to my favourite novel. Have you not read not read it before any i've not read it before and the reason i'm reading is i'm reading half a dozen of penelope fitzgerald's favorite books and that was one of them very very revealingly beckett was one of her favorite writers wouldn't think that would you i read a great beckett quote this week from someone on twitter so whoever it is claim it was beckett was asked you don't have any children and he said luckily for them do you know who tweeted that who was it that was me that was from beckett remembering remembering beckett by james nolson

and brilliant i know nobody's read that book because, you know, it's just a niche Beckett book. Sorry, James. Beckett was my absolute thing when I was a student, and I'd never heard that quote before, but it's brilliant. Yes, it's just straight for us. Well, James doesn't just know a heck of a lot about Samuel Beckett. He also discovered and popularized the Tobleringe. Thank you.

That is true. That's absolutely correct. What is the Toblerange for any listeners who are not familiar with it? Well, I mean, obviously I'm just telling them what they already know when it is a large Toblerone with Terry's chocolate orange segments slotted perfectly, as was pre-Brexit. They slotted perfectly in between the gaps and i tweeted this and it became a phenomenon it made news around the world and that's not an exaggeration actually that's the

quite aside from anything i've done professionally it got me into private eye because the toblerone defoe would have been very pleased the manufacturers of toblerone entered themselves into a advertising competition because of what I did with the Toblerone, which is remarkable. And you're now rich. Do you know, they did contact me and offer me a little reward for doing this. And I turned them down, much to the chagrin of everybody I know.

But I stand by that punk decision. Well done. Yeah. Admirable. However, if we're looking for a podcast sponsor. I'll just throw you a few quid from what I earn. Thank you very much. No worries.

We're also joined today by Dr. Jo Waugh. Hello, Jo. Hello. Jo is a senior lecturer in 19th century literature at York St. John University. Is it St. John or is it St John? It is St John. I remember I went to a conference a few years ago and I knew I was like, I was with my people because instead of being asked how my surname

is pronounced, the chair of the panel said, is it St John or St John? And I was like, that is the right question to ask. It used to be, I think, Theological College. Yes, it did, yeah. So it was St John's Theological College at York. Yeah. Jo directs a module there called Sick Novels, Literature and Disease.

I'm about to read a sentence which I think is the greatest bit of autobiography we've ever featured on this podcast, and that's not hype. She directs a module there called Sick Novels, Literature and Disease on which student this year read Daniel Defoe's The Journal of the Plague Year. She's interested in contagion narratives generally and has written about rabies in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley. That rivals the inventor of the Toblery. It's brilliant. For a bit of bio. How many words have you written about rabies in charlotte bronte

how many words uh i guess it must be about 8 000 there's a lot to say about rabies in charlotte bronte surely did you have to genuinely i'm sure there is i'm going to ask you about some of the other books that you teach on this module some of the other books that you've written about because i've found that this is just totally fascinating and also John and I are so excited to have a bona fide expert here yeah to talk about you know elements of not just literature with literature we've got covered disease we don't quite so often so um they'll be like proper doctors listening to this you're a doctor it's a fabulous Venn diagram though isn't it literature and disease I think we're very, very pleased to have you here. And Jo also co-hosts a podcast, Smith and War Talk About Satire,

in which she and Dr Adam Smith discuss the history, form, function and future of satire. And when I go and listen to that, what platforms is it available on for me to listen to? Right, if you Google satire deaths, births and legacies, you will get to our blog and links to our podcast james and joe are here to talk to us today about a journal of the plague year by daniel dufaux first published in 1722 three years after his uh his most famous novel robinson crusoe and we should say that you are listening to this if you've downloaded it the day or a few first few days we put it out you are listening to this 300 years to the week that robinson crusoe was

published amazing still in print but the book itself journal of the plague is set obviously in 1665 the year of the great Plague. But before we sink into the metropolitan miasma, Andy, what have you been reading? Before I tell you what I've been reading, we need to just mention, if you are in either Guernsey or London listening to this, we have a couple of live podcast recordings coming up. We are at the Guernsey Literary Festival on Sunday, May the 5th, where we will be talking to the actor, writer, and comedian Will Smith about the book of Ebenezer Lepage by G.B. Edwards,

which is the most famous novel to ever come out of the Channel Islands. There you go. A novel much loved by people like William Golding and John Fowles. And we'll have tickets for that are available. They're through the Guernsey Literary Festival website. You can buy tickets for that. That's on Sunday, may the 5th and then on friday may the 17th we will be at second home in spittle fields the first unbound literary festival in collaboration

with second home we will be talking about beloved by tony morrison with pretty tennasia and paddy butler and paddy butler who runs the bookshop Liberia. Come and see us. And tickets? Tickets are available from the Unbound website. They're also available on the backlisted.fm. We'll have a link on that as well. So that is Friday, May the 17th at 7pm. And I'm absolutely thrilled that we're doing Beloved by Toni Morrison

because although there are other great lesser-known Toni Morrison novels, Beloved is, let's be honest, one of the masterpieces of the late 20th century. So slightly feeling the pressure to be able to communicate meaningfully about it, but it's such a fantastic book. And we don't shy away from doing good books, as you know. So what have I been reading?

What have you been reading? I've been reading a novel by a writer that we featured before on Backlisted whose name is Jane Gardham. We did an episode a couple of years ago about A Long Way from Verona, which was her first book, which I really, really loved. And I've been reading through Jane Gardham's backlist in the last few years. I've probably read about half a dozen of her books now. I really love her writing and I'm totally open about saying I probably wouldn't have read her were it not for Backlisted.

But the book of hers I've been reading is called Crusoe's Daughter. This was published in 1985 and I confess that I read it because I knew we were going to be doing Daniel Defoe on this episode and I thought oh well that would be nice and read a Jane Gardner maybe talk about it but I was totally blown away by it I felt the only sadness I felt while reading it is that we'd already done Jane Gardham and that we couldn't probably do Jane Gardham again. And I think Crusoe's Daughter is within, of the novels of hers that I've read, short stories of hers that I've read, is the most fascinatingly literary, expressly literary. One of the ideas of the novel,

incredibly ambitious, is to feed into the history of the ideas of the novel, incredibly ambitious, is to feed into the history of the development of the novel from Robinson Crusoe through to the present day, or at least the mid-1980s. Jo, you've read this, haven't you? Yeah, I love this. The main character and narrator, Polly Flint, reads Robinson Crusoe obsessively and kind of almost to a point that becomes really quite problematic for her at some stages in her life.

And I think I've maybe not quite as obsessively as her, but I've probably read this book almost as regularly as Polly Flint's read Robinson Crusoe. And I don't know if Jane Garza is kind of where she comes down on Daniel Defoe. Is she saying this is a dangerous obsession? She absolutely loves Crusoe. She's got on the record as saying it's her favourite novel.

One of the things I love about this book is it seems to be quite a simple story about a girl who is orphaned, who grows up surrounded by women from about 1900 through to 1985. from about 1900 through to 1985. But she lives her life and is at her most alive via reading and books, which is, of course, a very backlisted idea. And one of the things that Jane Gardner does so brilliantly is create a kind of backdrop of characters who represent different literary trends.

And that sounds terrible that could be awful but it's a mark of what a brilliant writer she is and what a great storyteller she is that it never creaks it feels totally natural and here is an example of that so the heroine who is a young girl called polly flint whose name incidentally polly like the parrot on long john silver's shoulder so she's staying in a country house with a character called lady celia who is clearly based on the lady otterline morel who was a patron of the literary arts. And they are having a conversation about what constitutes great literature. Maitland, she said, shall we have Polly read us some Tennyson? Yes, my lady.

Some Tennyson, Polly. An edition was produced. I read them Tennyson. Maud. I went on for about half an hour. Then Maitland started clanking the water jug. Lady Celia had shut her eyes. The Lady of Shalott, she said. So I started that. She left the web. She left the loom. She made three paces. Lady Celia said, Stop! and took a little greyish glass bottle and sniffed at it.

Lady Celia said, stop, and took a little greyish glass bottle and sniffed at it. The end, she said. So I read the end. The lovely man looking down over the bridge on the poor dead face. All of her so lovely and never even been for a walk. She must have had an awfully pasty complexion when you come to think about it. Wonderful, said Lady Celia. Is it not? I said that it was wonderful. Do you love Tennyson? Oh yes. She lifted a necklace out of the Persian box. Better than anybody. I watched the necklace. It swung. It was seed pearls, like a little diamond clasp, like a diamond daisy. It was small, made for a girl. But I had to say, no, not better. And the necklace swung. Not best of all. Well, I don't think he's quite as good as Daniel Defoe. Daniel Defoe, she said, as if other Daniels

might have got by. The one in the lion's den, or the one George Eliot wrote about, or Daniel, the upright and discerning judge. Daniel Defoe? You mean Robinson Crusoe? Mol Flanders? Yes, but my child, no trace, no trace of poetry, no trace of poetic truth. But then I grew terribly angry and said in a fury, Robinson Crusoe is full of poetic truth and it is an attempt at a universal truth very differently expressed. No form, she cried, no form. I said it is wonderfully written. It is true to his chosen form. Because of this very similitude it reads like reality. I have read it 23 times. In a novel, form is not always apparent at a first or second

reading. Form is determined by hard, secret work, in a notebook and in the subconscious and in the head. You speak of journalism, she said. Yes, why not, I replied, with glory added. That's brilliant. And the thing about that book is that, and about that conversation about Defoe, we'll come on to this, but there is a British intellectual tradition of looking down on Defoe as being a mere journalist, a mere hack. And one of the things we're going to talk about, I think,

is how, in fact, he transcends that. John, what have you been reading this week? I have been reading a second novel by Tishani Doshi. Her first book, The Pleasure Seeker, has got tremendous reviews. She's better known, I think, here as a poet and a dancer than as a novelist. But this is wonderful. It's called Small Days and Nights.

The title comes from a line of James Salter's In a Sport and a Pastime, a book that we did on the podcast year before last. It's in the little towns that one discovers a country in the kind of knowledge that comes from small days and nights, is the line. So the book is first-person narrative. The narrator is Grace.

She's half Indian, half Italian. She has left her husband, who's an American, and she's gone back to India to Madras and has moved out to a small town on the coast of Tamil Nadu where she is living with her sister who she's discovered she's gone back to bury her mother and she's discovered the family secret her sister who has Down syndrome she's taken a sister they're living alone with a woman from the village who comes and helps look after them and a load of wild dogs that they look after.

So they've created a kind of feminist utopia on the coast of... It's being encroached, of course, like all utopias, by developers wanting to buy the land. And I guess the book is best thought of as a meditation on being between two cultures. It reminded me in some ways, a very different

style of book to Preeti Taneja's We That Are Young, about someone returning to Indian culture and trying to find a place there. But it's beautifully, beautifully written. The relationship between Grace and her sister is wonderfully done. Exploring, I suppose, as I say, the movement between cultures of somebody who doesn't feel quite at home, and also about a woman, I suppose, as I say, the movement between cultures of somebody who doesn't feel quite at home. And also about a woman, I'll read you a little bit about a woman who's decided that she doesn't need to live with men to validate her existence. She manages to do that thing, which is difficult. Grace isn't an entirely likable character, but the quality of the language means that you never lose sympathy with her, even when there are times when you might be frustrated with her.

It's a lovely book. I'll just read it. This is from towards the end of the book, and she's in Madras talking to two of her friends, her Indian friends, and she's remembering her time in America. I had this maths professor in Charlotte, Dr. Shah. He used to invite all the Indian students to his house for a meal once a semester. There were only ever five or six of us,

and we'd sit around his kitchen table, eating pakoras and roti and dal and sabji. He had young children, but he seemed so old then. One summer, his wife had taken the kids back to India. The food wasn't as good. I said to him, Dr. Shah, you must be glad to have the house to yourself. He was a sweet man, really. He said, you know, once you have kids, you'll understand. There's never any peace. When they're there, when they're not there. Men are always telling me what I don't understand because I don't have kids. I think he may have been right, though. The house isn't the same without her. It's as though I'm either too big for it or too small. It seems no sense to be living out there with the sea and those trees,

all those pretty china plates in the crockery cupboard. For what? It's like some fight against obscurity, Samir says. The whole thing, everything we do. We try to fill it with purpose, we try to find tasks. For some people it's their kids, for others their jobs, their art, whatever. Why worry? It's impossible not to think

of time passing even in the city we're all of the age where we turn our hands over repeatedly examine our faces in mirrors watch the past recede we sit on the balcony listening to lou reed we have not said anything of survival for people, the point is to live. Ah, that's great. Yeah. Also, I love that detail about sitting and listening to Lou Reed. I was thinking, which, what Lou Reed? They're listening to Sally Can't Dance. I don't think they are. They're listening to

Metal Machine Music. I don't think they are. Hey, it can't all be book chat. Smoke Chesterfields. Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! Bring out Jidded! Bring out Jidded!

So, well, everybody knows what that is, don't they? We're talking about Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. And I'm going to cut straight to it and read the blurb on the back of this excellent American Signet Classic Edition from the 60s or 70s. It looks like, John, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And it starts, sure enough, with the words,

Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead. The ceaseless chant of doom echoed through a city of emptied streets and filled grave pits. For this was London in the year. It's hard not to make this sound like Python now, coming off the back of that. For this was London in the year. Actually, no, it's not the king.

This was London in the year 1665, the year of the Great Plague. In 1721, when the Black Death again threatened the European continent, Daniel Defoe wrote a journal of the Plague Year to alert an indifferent populace to the horror that was almost upon them.

Through the eyes of a saddler who had chosen to remain while multitudes fled, the master realist vividly depicted a plague-stricken city. He re-enacted the terror of a helpless people caught in a tragedy they could not comprehend, the weak preying on the dying, the strong administering to the sick, the weak preying on the dying, the strong administering to the sick, the sinful orgies of the cynical, the quiet faith of the pious. With dramatic insight, he captured for all time the death throes of a great city. Now, that's terrific.

I started reading that with my tongue in my cheek. I should have done that. It's really good. It's a brilliant blurb, I think. And it sort of captures the, it captures two things, doesn't it? It captures the excitement of the story, but also the excitement that you have. It's that nobody had really done anything like this with the English language before. I mean, it's that kind of narrative nonfiction, or is it? Indeed. Well, we'll come on to that.

Yes. So, James, how did we come to be doing this on Backlisted? Well, this book has stayed with me throughout 20, 25 years. It's interesting. We have Jo here who's teaching the Journal of the Plague Year on her university course. Because I first encountered it at university and i read it but it may give you an insight into your students that i read it because there was going to be lots of gratuitous plague references and it was going to be all plenty of buboes you need to know

about me i'm beckett but i'm also tobe laureorange you know i'm very i was drawn to this by the the low art of it okay but it stays with you and i think i ended reading it thinking i i don't know what i've just read i don't know did did that really happen is it right okay is it a journal is it a real journal i mean clearly it's written by what's supposed to be written by uh hf um who is the narrator of the whole thing so who's he or you know is it a completely fictional account or it seems to be pretty straightforward journalism effectively and but and yet it's it's not it's so it has these many various registers in it of it's slightly gossipy which is what i was there for you know it's like reading chat

magazine or something and and um and very gratuitous it's a fantastically interesting mixture of the lurid and the pedantic yes absolutely it's got it's got the buboes you were looking for yeah yeah but it's also got this incredibly laborious is the right word listing of registers of the dead and bits of paper that the narrator has he's keen to impress upon you that he can prove what he's saying joe when you teach it how do you present it to your students i think first of all you have to make it really clear that it that it isn't exactly james what what you kind of said you were sort of expecting from it that it that it's kind of a real life account and and also that you know that it's somebody's first person perspective

if you encounter this on a university syllabus possibly that's as part of a trajectory that goes from peeps and the great fire of london and so on and then now we move on to the next chapter which is all about the plague and daniel defoe writing about it and then it is kind of surprising isn't that moment when when you realize or when you explain that this is this isn't somebody um recounting their their first-hand experience of the plague. And also that I think the blurb, as hilarious as that blurb is, I think that attributes Defoe with too much kind of morality, that he's just desperately worried everyone's going to get a plague,

so he's just writing about how bad a plague would be. It's not just that. It is a bit that. Tell us about, because he'll come on to Defoe, the extraordinarily fecund writer, Daniel Defoe. He didn't write just one book about plague at a time, did he? He simultaneously wrote another book called? Due Preparations for the Plague, which is... And that is the book that you would say he's writing that as a warning.

You know, that's more as far as we can tell. Yeah, yeah. I think that that is more about kind of you need to prepare your soul in case the plague does come here again and it probably is going to. But Journal of the Plague, yeah, I think there's an element of that, but it's also, well, maybe this is just me coming at it from my interest, but I suspect he also knows that people like reading about diseases and that diseases are quite fun to write about

and epidemics have a huge set of narrative affordances and people like reading about epidemics well journal of the plague year is one of um over 50 texts that were published after plague broke out in europe in marseille in 1720 or whenever it was the belief that plague was coming yeah to england and other books were more successful than a journal of the plague year and one of the reasons for that might be for the same reason that we find it perhaps more challenging to read now than we might have expected to which is that it's actually quite an odd book right yeah yeah I mean and he'll he'll tell you that he's going to tell you something

and then not tell you it for ages. The three men. There's an anecdote about three men, which I'll confess to you now, everyone, I didn't quite follow when it finally came up, but he really sets it up. It's like 50 pages earlier he said, now I must get to this story of the three men. But while I'm here, let me just tell you about something else quickly

before I get on to that. And that exact story, which occurs, what, three quarters of the way through the book maybe, that if this was a novel, is what your modern 21st century editor would be saying, start with those. Start with these three guys. Open with that. And then, yeah, because it's perfect for that.

But this book is not that. Actually, their story does have to be not exactly dull. But they leave town, you know, as you'd imagine. Everywhere they go, all the small places they go aren't very keen on them. But then they find people who are quite nice to them and they look after them and help them. And they end up going back to town again. There isn't a massive battle or nobody dies so but also what's so fascinating about any anecdote

that appears in this book and this is the thing this thing to me that seemed incredibly sophisticated any anecdote that is told to you by the narrator is there to do at least two things. One is to entertain you with the anecdote, but the other is to reveal character, to reveal, tell you something about the narrator of the book and why he thinks this is an anecdote worth telling you. And that seemed to me really sophisticated. Defoe never does anything without having some political reason for doing it. He's one of the great political writers of the English language,

kind of invented political journalism, I think, in a way, sort of middle-class political journalism. It wasn't sort of defending the high Tory ideals. He was an investigative reporter, you know, before there was such a thing as an investigative reporter. And this book, it's a sort of seminal text as well as history of fiction, but it's also the history of in-depth journalism, I think. James, could you read us a bit? Yes, I've got this bit. It ties in a little bit with what you're saying about the not boring narrative of the three men. If you

look at the narrative of what happens to the narrator you could sum that up by saying he goes to a see a plague pit and then he doesn't like it very much and that's the end of that so it's the narrative he survives yeah it's the narrative you don't have and that i think it may be a narrative is what dates a book yeah and so so i've got a section which is the narrator who's wrestling with his own conscience about what he's going to go and see he's compelled to go to see a plague pit and he says it was about the 10th of september that my curiosity led or rather drove me to go and see this pit again when there had been near 400 people buried in it, and I was not content to see it at daytime as I had done before, for then there would have been

nothing to have seen but the loose earth, for all the bodies that were thrown in were immediately covered with earth by those they called the buriers, but I resolved to go in at the night and see some of them thrown in. There was a strict order to prevent people coming to these 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. I cannot say that the officers suffered any willingly to lie there, but I have heard that in a great pit in Finsbury, in the parish of Cripplegate, it lying open then to the fields, for it was not then walled about, came and threw themselves in, and expired there, before they threw any earth upon them. And that was when they came to bury others, and found them there. They were quite dead, though not cold. This may serve a little to describe the dreadful condition of that day, though it is impossible to say anything that is able to give a true idea of it

to those who did not see it other than this, that it was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such as no tongue can express. I got admittance into the churchyard by being acquainted with a sexton who attended, who, though he did not refuse me at all, yet earnestly persuaded me not to go, telling me very seriously, for he was a good and religious and sensible man, that it was indeed their business and duty to venture and to run all hazards, and that in it they might hope to be preserved, but that I had no apparent call to it but my own

curiosity, which he said he believed I would not pretend was sufficient to justify my running that hazard. I told him I had been pressed in my mind to go, and that perhaps it might be an instructing sight that might not be without its uses. Nay, says the good man, if you will venture upon that school, name of God go in, for depend upon it, it will be a sermon to you. It may be the best that you ever heard in your life. It is a speaking sight, says he, and has a voice with it, and a loud one, to call us all to repentance. And with that, he opened the door and said, go, if you will. God, that is good.

And that compulsion to go. Yeah. But no, he's going to be shocked by what he sees. That's a very modern compulsion. Don't look behind the door. Don't go and look in there. You will be shocked. And I think at the heart of this book,

one of the things I think I can see is somebody wrestling with their conscience, wrestling with God and their religion. And all of the evidence before them tells them that what they feel about God and why this pestilence is upon them, it's pointing in the other direction. It's not a godly pestilence. It's being thrown down upon them it's it's an infection that encapsulates the wrestling nature within their soul they're wrestling against what they know but what they're compelled to do and what they feel they know it's also reflected i think that what james in the structure of the book or the weird labyrinthine structure of the book and also that labyrinthine structure of the book and also that labyrinthine nature this is an incredible book about london i don't just mean as a historical resource but you see this in defoe a lot that just he's a product of london and the structure of the book sort of

reflects that pre-great fire warren of streets and courts and and overhanging buildings and places and he's always moving around i'm interested to know joe what what in terms of disease and the movement of disease he keeps trying to overturn the myths that the streets were full of unburied dead i mean in some ways the book is a bit of a bit of a sort of snow job for the authorities he's always saying how well run the whole thing was and weren't we lucky that it start it starts 1665 in a shop in long acre there's some dutch cloth that's unwrapped and that's the first case of plague and it moves gradually quite slowly through the city and gathers kind of momentum until in september there's like 10 000 people dying a week and he's continually trying to work out what's true and what isn't. Were the authorities overwhelmed? Were corpses

left unburied which he thinks they weren't. At the same time he's telling these compelling bits of narrative at the same time he's acting like a sort of a modern kind of investigative journalist saying well hang on are these claims substantiated? Did it, just as a record of a disease, it's very different from Pete's, isn't it? Yes, and he quite often does that, doesn't he? He'll say, well, lots of people were saying this at the time and lots of people were saying that. For myself, I inclined to the view that it was something different.

And that's all part of establishing realism, isn't it? That he'll say, well, you know, there was this thing and there was that thing, and I'm not sure which one had the most veracity to it. And also the way that the narrative works and the way that we don't know what's going to turn out to be consequential and what isn't, what's going to be important, what story is going to get followed up,

is also kind of like the disease itself. And he talks about people who you don't know that they're healthy, you don't know that they're carrying the plague, you don't know if they might be massively infectious, but look perfectly healthy. And the way that it moves through the streets, as the narrative moves through the streets, it is a kind of disease path, isn't it? Yeah. I don't know if in your portfolio of disease narratives you have covered the 1970s BBC TV series Secret Army. I haven't no. Okay so Secret Army you have to be a certain age to remember this series but this was very very popular in the 1970s and has fallen out of public

recognition partly because it's the series on which the comedy series Allo Allo was based. Set during the Second World War the Belgian resistance fighting the occupying forces, the Germans. It's a magnificent series, and they made three seasons of it, the third of which contains an episode called Ring of Roses. And every episode of Secret Army was based on things that actually happened during the Second World War. And in Belgium in the second world war a pilot was brought down who had been in africa and contracted bubonic plague in 1944 and had to be quarantined in just the way that houses have to be quarantined in Journal of the Plague year. So we've got a clip here from the episode Ring of Roses and what you're listening to is

Monique, who is the head of the Belgian resistance, locked up with a series of coughing airmen and they are about a week into their confinement. I feel so dirty. If I ever get out of this place, I'm going to scrub myself till I'm raw, wash 20 times a day. I've not been much help to you, have I? No good around sickness, never have I. Not everybody is, my dear.

Unfortunately, there's another new case. Who is it? Me. You can't be sick. Doctors are not immune, my dear. That's a myth fostered by the American cinema. Oh, yes, I've got a bubo in my groin and all the

other symptoms are coming up like in a textbook. I never thought I'd see plague let alone experience it at first hand. God help us now. besides there's something else. there can't be anything else Pascal. the idea of plague is so unlikely that should it ever get outside one side or the other is fully capable of convincing itself that the epidemic was no accident. You mean that either the Allies

or the Germans would think it was the result of deliberate Joe Wolfe? Yes. And that's why no one must leave this place unless they are without infection. Well, what do I do with the ones who've died? Burn them. Clothing, everything. Everything must be destroyed. Now, I saw that episode in 1979 at the age of 11.

Jo, we were just saying that the issues that they're talking about there, about quarantine and burning, those are exactly what happens in Daniel Defoe's book. Yeah, yeah. And often in this narrative, he will often kind of talk about sometimes what seems to be a kind of trumped-up fear about the sick, that they have a kind of malign determination to infect the healthy. That's right.

If you let them out, they will run around and infect people in quite sort of upsetting ways. But there is, as much as sometimes this sympathy for people who are locked up with the sick and who are therefore utterly damned because they will definitely get the plague and they're imprisoned unto death with the sick. So there's a couple of points actually where Defoe compares the sick to mad dogs, as if they're kind of rabid, running around London and actively wanting to infect people. And he twice describes them as mad dogs. And he talks about how it's cruel to shut people up and it's cruel to quarantine them, but also you kind of have to.

Yeah. So there's a fairly brief passage passage here which is one of the ones where he describes them as mad dogs but he says it is most certain that if by the shutting up of houses the sick had not been confined multitudes who in the height of their fever were delirious and distracted would have been continually running up and down the streets and even as it was a very great number did so and offered all sorts of violence to those they met, even just as a mad dog runs on and bites at everyone he meets. Nor can I doubt but that should one of those infected diseased creatures have bitten any man or woman while the frenzy of the distemper was upon them, they, I mean the person so wounded, would certainly have

been incurably infected as one that was sick before and had the tokens upon him. So it's really interesting that his assumption is that if you weren't shut up, if you weren't quarantined, you would just go out and run up and down the streets and bite people. And he relates later a kind of an anecdote that's more disturbing than that about the man who allegedly goes and kind of, well, Defoe says kisses, but I think we understand that's more disturbing than that about the the man who allegedly goes and kind of what defoe says kisses but i think we understand it's more than that and then says well if i've got the plague why shouldn't you chase as a woman and falls over and sort of kick yeah it's really sinister scene yeah that idea of the of a kind of proto zombie narrative right the idea of they're

ill but what what the illness renders them aggressive and brainless so that all they want to do is eat other people's brains. That's really here in what you've been saying. Yes, yeah, and the whole kind of the deserted streets of London, nobody was walking up this street and nobody was walking down there and the businesses were closed. It is, I don't know if it's so much that this is a precursor of the zombie narrative or that zombie narratives implicitly,

unconsciously draw on plague narratives and contagion narratives, but the two have a lot in common. Yes, there's a bit where he says that the plague at last came to such violence that the people sat still looking at one another and seemed quite abandoned to despair. Whole streets seemed to be desolated and not to be shut up only but to be emptied of their inhabitants doors were left open windows stood shattering with the wind in empty houses for want of people to shut them

james joyce loved journal of the plague year and he said the prose was uh masterful and orchestral he took it as a novel. He thinks it's a kind of a great novel. You know, Journal of the Plague Year was not recognised as the work of Daniel Defoe until 1750. Interesting. And that is typical of the quantity of work that he produced, that even now there is debate about how many publications he made the minimum is 250 the maximum is 550 you know they've got people still argue about

dmb goes for mid mid table uh dictionary national library so 318 attested works but there is no standard edition of his collected works and less than a quarter of the books that we know he has written are not in print well i found a piece in the tls from the 1950s by julian mclaren ross but otherwise known in fictional terms as extrapnal from a dance to the music of time and this is from a review of a 1950s republication of the journal of the plague year and this will allow us to say a little bit about Daniel Defoe and what is it about Defoe's writing that spoke to people then and placed him apart from other writers and still speaks to us now and this is what julian mclaren ross wrote he's speaking

about robinson crusoe which was a huge success when it was published 300 years ago so much for success that in fact he wrote a sequel the same year and then another sequel the following year julian mclaren ross says crusoe was looked down upon by the literateur of the time swift who displaced defoe in harley's favor dismissed the author as quote an illiterate fellow whose name i forget and though pope did in fact praise the first part of the book its appeal was primarily supposed to be to kitchen maids and serving men, an error of judgment which should be remembered when we attempted to assess some contemporary work by purely highbrow standards.

Whether any parallel in fact exists between Defoe's life and the adventures of the shipwrecked mariner on his desert island is extremely dubious. Brackets, the misfortunes of the author might be said allowing for the difference in sex more closely to resemble those of mole flanders close brackets but the value of the book as literature is unquestionable and the opinion of the public which devoured it voraciously in spite of the disapproval of literary cliques in 1719 and successive years has been triumphantly vindicated defoe had not only a keen eye for popular taste sharpened by

financial necessity something that julian mccrown and ross knew all about everybody since changing political trends and deliberate meanness of his employers kept him in almost permanent need of ready cash. He had also an unerring instinct, and this is the thing, amounting to genius for the universal situation. The sailor building with his slender resources a new life upon the lonely shore. The Londoners immured in the plague-ridden city. the londoners immured in the plague-ridden city the juvenile delinquent the thief the soldier of fortune the woman living by her wits this instinct was his main strength and to back it he brought his simple graphic colloquial style now that i think is a brilliant appraisal of what is unique about defoe.

And James, I was thinking just in the section that you were reading earlier, it was very, very, very dreadful. A more self-regarding writer would not have used that phrase, but he wants to sell the colloquial thought of the narrator. Yeah. One of the things that really strikes me about this book, now, I don't know if I've got this right, but the Peeps diaries were not known at this time. Is that correct? Because they weren't, they were written in code.

They were, they had not translated for several years. decrypted was that the person who was doing the decrypting only found out that on the shelf above peeps his diaries was a key to the decrypting and he got almost all the way through and then found out he could have just looked at this key but the fact is as far as i know defoe would not have known about peeps his diaries and yet it's intriguing to me that the work happened anyway um defoe knew that a journal some you know or or even a collection of plague's greatest hits you know needed to be there for what reason i don't know was he specific about his reasons why he why he produced this piece of work was it a warning was it an entertainment was it you know chat magazine i don't know but it needed to be there and it seems

like he was very sensitive to that fact the first writer i thought of when i was rereading this recently was george orwell because he he's like very sensitive to the needs of what people need to know about the everyday life that's going on around them. And just jotting down the realities of living when you are poor or when you are needy. You know, this is Robinson Crusoe in the urban world, isn't it effectively he also has there's a fantastic essay by virginia wolf about robinson crusoe which starts with her saying i am writing this um in the week that robinson crusoe was published 200 years ago it's like she was she wrote these words 100 years ago about now but she concludes with a fantastic phrase chim chiming in, James, with what you were just saying there. With Defoe, she says,

we are forced to drop our own preconceptions to the subject and accept what Defoe himself wishes to give us. We were a bit mean about Virginia Woolf's critical faculties on the previous episode of Backlist in relation to Dickens, but that seems to me spot on. faculties on the previous episode of backlist in relation to dickens but that seems to me spot on yeah but he'll use whatever method he can to tell you what he wants you to know right so when he wants narrative he resorts to narrative but at other times he feels he doesn't need it he can go off and talk about something else but he'll get you language he might use or he might use scripture and i love in this book and in robinson crusoe

and in we haven't even talked about what an incredible book that is i'd never read that before last week incredible book that magnificent feeling of somebody making it up as they go along in the best possible way. Coasting on genius is the phrase. They know they've got talent. They know that they can write in this vivid, grabbing way, and they say, okay, here we go. Buckle yourself in because we're off.

But you sort of know what he's doing with Marvel. I mean, I'm interested, Jay, what do you think he's doing with this book? What's compelling him to write this? Other than that, you know, the Donne is good, isn't it? A plague is a good, it's a great story. That's really difficult, isn't it? Because I think there is a sense that, you know,

we need to be thinking about the plague and we need to be thinking how awful it would be if it came back again. But I think, I wonder if there's a kind of a pleasure in pulling off that coup because this is found footage, right? This is HF's diary and, you know, there's that wonderful little reminder really near the end when he's talking about all the places that were given over to store the dead and then it's like square brackets,

by the way, the author of this journal is buried here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like FYI, I'm dead. And that's kind of really striking. But not at the plague, we don't think. Well done you, yeah. But I do think there's a kind of perhaps an element of joy and pleasure in pulling this off, that this is is found footage this is a genuine journal

of the plague year and that it you know as you were saying people don't work it out for really quite a long time also that disease is an inherently fascinating thing to read about and write about and there's a market for it and you know defoe is not immune to to the need to make money and to to have a readership there's those two things there's the element of warning as well and I suppose I just like to feel that it's something about about mastering the subject and mastering the the reader and and that and I think to an extent that also kind of explains or accounts for the mishmash of, you know, here's a table of facts and figures

and then here's an anecdote which may or may not be true and I personally think it probably isn't true and here's some things that I think. And then some serious moralising as well about the charlatans and the astrologers. That made me very suspicious at times because there's a story he tells about the piper who gets thrown into the pit. That's pure Monty Python, isn't it?

According to Dr. Watson Nicholson in his 1919 book, The Historical Sources of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, he says, oh, that story dates from 50 years before. That was first told then. So he's compiling a lot of stories. But the thing I find fascinating about this is what does it take to get people to remember something? And I'm going to throw in a biggie at this stage, right?

We are the generation who remembers about or have been told about the Holocaust. who remembers about or have been told about the holocaust what was prior to the holocaust that was the big bad thing and you know i i really don't know i'm not bringing knowledge to this but surely the plague was one of those things that the whole of society has to remember for longer than a generation yeah and how do you host really interesting that information across the generations even about the holocaust for example which has become a tremendous hot potato as to how is it remembered and and so on i don't need to go into that but it's being remembered is absolutely vital and it seems to me if it takes you doing the best of the plague and putting it into a single volume that people can read. With some actual evidence.

Yes. You know, I've gathered my, I've got my sources. I'm not just making this stuff up. So that seems to me a terrific reason to be doing it. Now, was that his reason to do it? I don't know. Yeah, because, I mean, that's making me think about the whole HF persona and that those were his uncle's initials.

And was he pretending to be that Henry Faux or his HF just a coincidence? probably sent out of London, missed all of everything, perhaps found something compelling about inhabiting the voice he thought that his uncle might have used to talk about the plague or that that gave him some kind of legitimacy to talk about the plague. Or, of course, it could be completely coincidental and there's 26 letters in an alphabet and he chose H and F. We should say a little bit about Daniel Defoe. Part of the pleasure of doing this episode has just been reading about

Daniel Defoe frequently slack-jawed in disbelief. He's got to be the best English writer's life ever. So he doesn't write these famous books we're talking about until he's in his 60s. He's 62 when he writes. And he's already lived a

lived a life in which he has been variously a bankrupt a bankrupt to the tune of 17 000 pounds which is which in 17 getting on for a lot of money yeah getting on for a million pounds he's been a spy he's been a pamphleteer he invents with the review in 1702 really the kind of modern political journalism he is put in the stocks. He is pilloried. Pilloried three times. And he makes that work for him by writing a pamphlet called A Hymn to the Pillory.

So he's in the stocks. He recites Hymn to the Pillory, and all the peasants go, this guy's terrific, and it becomes a mini bestseller. And then he's also… He fought at the Battle of Sedgemoor because he was in Monmouth's Rebellion. Amazing. So, I mean… He helps invent the Battle of Sedgemoor because he was in Monmouth's Rebellion. Amazing. He helps invent the English novel.

We can debate and people will always debate the extent to which these books are the first English novels. He's definitely reaching those. He is thought of as the author of the first modern ghost story, The Apparition of Mrs. Veal, which was published as a pamphlet anonymously in 1706. If you went to a bookshop, you would still find his work in about half a dozen different sections. He was a staggeringly unsuccessful entrepreneur. When he wasn't writing, he was, he was, I just love this. He expanded out of his core business, which was hosiery, Loveless. He expanded out of his core business, which was hosiery,

into trying to get into the difficult overseas markets. He was crazed. He was a madman for trade. And in fact, his writing on trade, the importance of trade to the English, it actually occurs in the narrative here, because there's a brilliant bit where he says, none of the Europeans will deal with us. So he bought tobacco from Maryland, lost out, sold wine and beer to Belfast, lost out. tobacco from Maryland, lost out, sold wine and beer to Belfast, lost out. And then he actually invests in a diving bell to rescue sunken treasures. And then he gets onto this, the perfume of the civet cat that's imported from the Far East, makes no money on that. And then of course goes banked up. And even though he makes quite a lot of money out of his writing, he gambles it and loses it and ends up in a in a terrible dying ridiculously of lethargy in sort of more or less in debtors prison lethargy being a stroke they

think rather than not doing anything james we're always talking about uh how we feel about plots on this podcast uh i'm against it as you know as a novelist, when you read this, do you feel get on with it? Do you feel I'm in the hands of somebody who knows what they're doing? This book is, it's so vexed. It really makes you come and find it and fillet it and see what's going on. And so in that sense, it draws you in through something other than plot. This is not a plotted book, is it? This would not be published now

with any great deal of success. You know, like all classics, it would not be picked up now. And I think that... Defoe would be an absolute shoo-in for crowdfunding. He would absolutely love it. I think they'd just tell him like... It's a genre buster.

You know that bit where that man attacks that woman in the street, just make it that. But what's, what's brilliant. I mean, I did bring some slightly modern eyes to this because I, I was, I was reading it and he,

he starts off entirely generally. And he doesn't even say I until I think page eight or ten or something like that he doesn't introduce the narrator until later on so the whole tone of the book is about a general public and and i don't know any other books that's that's a side project of mine how how many books have the public as a as a character effectively and know, that's what made me think of Orwell a little. Yeah. Well, I think he's like Orwell because he is, like I say, you feel that he is just, he's interested in politics and power

and power relationships and he's interested in what these things mean. He's always sort of looking to get meaning from the plague. I was going to ask you, Jo, this is the last major plague, isn't it? The 1665, it's the last big one. Yeah, pretty much. And does it haunt literature, I mean, other than Defoe? Does it come up much in other stuff in there? This plague?

Or just plague as a sort of the... Well, it's really interesting. When I read Plague Year through the lens of thinking about typhus epidemics in 1847, a lot of the stuff is really, really similar. The stigma around who's got it and that whole bit where Defoe talks about how afterwards all the doctors who'd run away and hadn't treated anyone,

their names were mud and nobody would have to deal with it. Doctors and the priests were given a really, really hard time, weren't they? Yeah. Cowards. Yeah. I suppose I would lean towards thinking that the narratives that surrounded the plague and the anxieties that surrounded the plague in the 17th century might well have been lurking anxieties and lurking narratives

as at other points in the 19th century where people were encountering typhus and cholera the big scary cholera epidemics that were never on the level of the plague that were never as as universal as as this plague but those same kind of anxieties and stigmas and ways of thinking about quarantine and containment, at some level, I think, are kind of lurking in the ways that people are thinking about disease as and when it crops up again. And cholera is terrifying and horrifying and a really serious fear at several points in the 19th century. It's never, ever anything like this bad. But I think the fact that we had at one point had this plague that virtually wiped out London must have been there

in the ways that people responded to those diseases. There's also parallels, aren't there, with the idea of plagues rather than bubonic plague, but diseases as plague coming out of the unknown, coming out of the darkness, the idea that when Defoe's writing about the Black Death, the idea that it's come out from somewhere unknown in Europe. Modern examples, you know, the idea that AIDS might have come out of Africa, the Asian bird

flu. People want to give it a personality. That's the thing that comes out in this book. The idea of plague as being foreign, unknowable. It reminded me of the groke in the Moomin books, this dark thing that freezes the ground she crosses and maybe that you're going back to your holocaust point he resists that largely doesn't he he says that there's a brilliant bit where he says but the case was this and i shall only touch it here namely that the infection was propagated insensibly and by such persons were not visibly infected who were neither knew whom they infected or who they were infected by so just saying it wasn't it you know it wasn't people actually actively going out there and behaving badly it was just it's just what how diseases like this work yeah and i think if anything he

resists exactly what you were talking about that that tendency to characterize disease as foreign as coming to our shores from elsewhere and hence being a way to think about immigration. He was the kind of the sword against the farrages of his day. Amazing. I'm afraid we've come to the end of our great tribulation. The distemper has been held at bay and we must extend our sincere thanks to James and Jo, to our all angel of deliverance, Alana Chance, and to our most highly esteemed patron uh milord unbound

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