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For all its power, Defoe’s account of the great plague was not firsthand, and there’s much to be learned from genuine witnesses
If reading Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year has made you want to hear more from the people who witnessed the events of 1665 and 1666, you’re in luck. There are plenty of genuine accounts from that remarkable time.
Some are strange and confusing to read now. Take Thomas Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City. (There’s no denying the power of that title.) Vincent was deeply immersed in the horrors of the plague, having lost seven family members – which makes it all the stranger that he doesn’t seem to care about the disease. Vincent was a dissenting minister, and far more interested in citing biblical precedent over what was actually happening on the ground, linking the 1665 and 1666 events to London’s sinning “drunkards and swearers”. But the book is as all the more striking for those omissions and a useful counterpoint to Defoe. Where the latter describes much that we can recognise now, Vincent reminds us that the past is also a foreign country. Continue reading...