This is the work better known as A Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe’s account of 1665 as remembered by a saddler who chose to remain in the city. He records the bills of mortality, shut-up houses, dead-carts and burial pits, quack remedies and street prophets, and the wanderings of three poor men who flee into the countryside. This school edition adds a biographical introduction and notes.
Part chronicle and part fiction, it remains one of the most vivid portraits of a city living through an epidemic. Download the free EPUB.