¹ Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), p. 86. All quotations from this work refer to this edition.

² See, e.g., Sir John Colbatch, A Scheme for Proper Methods to Be Taken Should It Please God to Visit Us with the Plague (London: J. Roberts, 1721), pp. vii-viii.

³ Short Discourse concerning Pestilential Contagion, 8th ed. (London: Sam Buckley, 1722), pp. xvii-xviii.

⁴ Applebee's Journal, 1 Oct. 1720, rpt. in William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings (London: John Hotten, 1869), ii, 285. All references to Applebee's Journal are to this edition.

⁵ Bradley, The Plague at Marseilles Consider'd (Dublin: Patrick Dugan, 1721 ), sig. a4; and The Late Dreadful Plague at Marseilles Considered (Dublin: Patrick Dugan, 1721), pp. 3, 13. This pamphlet has been ascribed to Dr. Joseph Browne.

⁶ See, e.g., Everett Zimmerman, “H. F.'s Meditations: A Journal of the Plague Year,” PMLA, 87 (1972), 417–22; and Frank Bastian, “Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year Reconsidered,” Review of English Studies, 16 (1965), 151–73.

⁷ Walter G. Bell, The Great Plague in London in 1665 (London: John Lane, 1924), p. v. Bell insists that Defoe's method was unhistorical, that the narrative, based on the Orders of London's Lord Mayor, a set of regulations never actually carried out, was essentially fictional. Thus what Watson Nicholson showed as long ago as 1919 in his study of Defoe's use of history, The Historical Sources of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, that Defoe drew heavily on contemporary reports of the plague, is not really important for Bell's argument. As a narrative, A Journal of the Plague Year is a work of fiction.

⁸ A New Method of Studying History, trans. Richard Rawlinson (London: W. Burton, 1728), I, 281.

⁹ See Hodges, Loimologia, 3rd ed. (London: E. Bell, 1721), p. 15. The connection between the conditions under which the poor lived and the plague was commonplace. Reports of the plague in Marseilles noted that “the Distemper having seized only the poorest sort of People” might pass as soon as the government sent in supplies of better food than the poor usually ate. The Present State of Europe, trans. John Phillips et al. (London: Henry Rhodes, 1720), xxi, 306.

¹⁰ The flight of the rich from the city at the onset of the plague was part of the ordinary pattern of life during the 17th century. In his A Rod for Run-awaies written in 1625, Thomas Dekker wrote, “I send this newes to you, the great Masters of Riches, who haue forsaken your Habitations, left your disconsolate Mother (the City) in the midst of her sorrowes, in the height of her distresse, in the heauinesse of her lamentations.” In The Plague Pamphlets, ed. Frank P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925), p. 145.

¹¹ Typical of Dekker's style is the following: “The World is our common Inne, in which wee haue no certaine abyding: It stands in the Road-way for all passengers. ... A sicke-mans bed is the gate or first yard to this Inne, where death at our first arriuall stands like the Chamberlaine to bid you welcome, and is so bold, as to aske if you will alight, and he will shew you a Lodging” (Plague Pamphlets, pp. 182–83). Defoe's rejection of images like the dance of death is reminiscent of Dickens' refusal to get emotional mileage from such easy ironies; see Alexander Welsh, The City of Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), p. 13.

¹² For a discussion of the use of sympathy in George Eliot's fiction, see Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 14–31.

¹³ Samuel Pepys, The Diary, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), vi, 226, 342.

¹⁴ Although Thucydides' account of the plague in Athens was justly admired as a distinguished piece of writing, the study of a single natural phenomenon, such as a storm, earthquake, or plague, was not regarded as a historical genre. The preface to The Storm (London: J. Nutt, 1704) clearly indicates that Defoe considered his work as entirely original. He remarked in his preface, “I have not undertaken this Work without the serious Consideration of what I owe to Truth, and to Posterity; nor without a Sence of the extraordinary Variety and Novelty of the Relation” (sig. A4). See also Thomas Sprat, The Plague of Athens (London: H. Hills, 1709), p. 2.

¹⁵ See particularly The Poor Man's Plea, in A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True Born English-man (London, 1703–05), I, 286–87.

¹⁶ A Brief Treatise of the Nature, Causes, Signes, Preservation from, and Cure of the Pestilence (London: D. Kemp, 1665), p. 35. See also The Libraries of Daniel Defoe and Phillips Farewell, ed. Helmut Heidenreich (Berlin, 1970). A general discussion of contemporary theories regarding the plague may be found in Charles F. Mullett, The Bubonic Plague and England (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1956).

¹⁷ The British Visions: Or, Isaac Bickerstaff, Sen. (London: J. Baker, 1711), p. 10. For other predictions of a coming plague, see The Second-Sighted Highlander (London: J. Baker, 1713), p. 13; and The Second-Sighted Highlander. Being Four Visions of the Eclypse (London: J. Baker, 1715), p. 17.

¹⁸ A Short Narrative of the Life and Actions of His Grace John, D. of Marlborough (London: J. Baker, 1711), pp. 42–43.

¹⁹ Some Considerations on the Reasonableness and Necessity of Encreasing and Encouraging the Seamen (London: J. Roberts, 1728), p. 44.

²⁰ George Eliot rightly suggests some of Young's failures of sympathy in her essay “Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young.” Thomson's depiction of the plague, like his other descriptions of human distress, tends to diminish human suffering in relation to the power of nature and its God.

²¹ The World Turned Upside Down (London: Temple Smith, 1972), p. 308.

²² Defoe's contemporaries always stressed the radical elements implied by works like The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England (London, 1702 [1701]). His stress on the importance of property as the basis of government was neither new nor excessive, but the suggestion of a chaotic brew at the bottom of all political action was suspect. See, e.g., Charles Leslie, The Rehearsal, 28 Sept. 1706, where Defoe's theories are attacked for laying “a Foundation for Perpetual Changes and Revolutions, without any Possible Rest or Settlement.”

²³ Legion's Memorial (1701), in The Shortest Way with the Dissenters and Other Pamphlets (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927), p. 112.

²⁴ The Letters, ed. George H. Healey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), p. 135.

²⁵ History of the Union of Great Britain (Edinburgh: Andrew Anderson, 1709), Pt. it, p. 34.

²⁶ A Complete History of England, 3rd ed. (London: James Rivington, 1759), x, 273.

²⁷ See John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (London: Cresset, 1961), pp. 223–24; and Smollett, A Complete History of England, pp. 273–74.

²⁸ God's Gracious Design in Inflicting National Judgments (Oxford: Stephen Fletcher, 1721), title page, pp. 11, 21.

²⁹ The Best Preservative against the Plague (London: J. Leminge, 1721), pp. iv-xi.

³⁰ A Compleat Collection of the Protests of the Lords (London: J. Jones, 1722), pp. 6–8. See also Abel Boyer, The Political State (London: A. Boyer, 1721), xxii, 640–44.

³¹ Printed in William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings (London: John Hot-ten, 1869), II, 378–79.

³² Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 320. See also Mullett, Bubonic Plague and England, p. 271.

³³ See The History and Proceedings of the House of Lords from the Restoration in 1660 to the Present Time (London: Ebenezer Timberland, 1742), iii, 198–200. A large number of those voting for repeal participated in the Jacobite plot in 1722.

³⁴ The government gave official approval to a pamphlet by Edmund Gibson, The Causes of the Discontents in Relation to the Plague (London: J. Roberts, 1721), and had it distributed around the country. Gibson scoffed at the idea that the liberties of Englishmen were being undermined by the Quarantine Act and accused the enemies of the Act of Jacobite leanings. See Norman Sykes, Edmund Gibson Bishop of London (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1926), p. 81.

³⁵ See The British Merchant, 24 Nov. 1719, 1 Dec. 1719; and Defoe's reply in The Manufacturer, 2 Dec. 1719.

³⁶ The Novel and Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 37–50.

³⁷ See Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (London: Dent, 1959), ii, 281, 442. Defoe attacked the “Impudence” of servants in The Great Law of Subordination Consider'd (1724), but a careful reading of that work next to Swift's Directions to Servants (1745) reveals how much Defoe places the blame for the misbehavior of servants and workers on their masters. In The Generous Projector (1731), he concluded that if the servants had the wit to get good wages, they probably deserved them and added, “However, if they are honest and diligent, I would have them encourag'd, and Handsome Wages allow'd 'em; because, by this Means, we provide for the Children of the inferior Class of People, who otherwise could not maintain themselves.”

³⁸ For a discussion of Defoe's attitude toward people according to their productivity, see my Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962), pp. 16–17, 74. For a typical qualification about the evil of mobs, see A Review of the Affairs of France, ed. Arthur W. Secord (New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1938), viii, 17–18.

³⁹ There is a probable connection between the idea of a “South Sea Face” and a “plague face,” a particular facial appearance which marked a person as a victim of the plague. See William Boghurst, Loimographia (1666), in Transactions of the Epidemiological Society, 13 (1894), 28; and The Late Dreadful Plague at Marseilles, p. 6.

⁴⁰ This was the so-called Bubble Act, which the Directors of the South Sea Co. approved, since by eliminating smaller bubbles, it also removed competition.

⁴¹ Commentator, 13 June 1720.

⁴² See, e.g., Colbatch, p. 13.

⁴³ Applebee's Journal, 22 Oct. 1720, in Lee, ii, 292–93.

⁴⁴ The Late Dreadful Plague, p. 13.

⁴⁵ See Sutherland, Daniel Defoe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 226–27; and Hardy, pp. 196–98.

⁴⁶ In Romances and Narratives by Daniel Defoe, ed. George A. Aitken (London: Dent, 1901), xv, 19.

⁴⁷ The plan to evacuate the children of London is reminiscent of a similar effort in World War ii.

⁴⁸ Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, Everyman Library Ed., introd. George D. H. Cole (London: Dent, n.d.), I, 168, 322, 323.

⁴⁹ See also A Brief Journal of What Passed in the City of Marseilles While It Was Afflicted with the Plague (London: J. Roberts, 1721), p. 36.

⁵⁰ For the influence of Josephus' account on A Journal of the Plague Year, see Watson Nicholson, The Historical Sources of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (Boston: Stratford, 1919), p. 166. A better passage than that suggested by Nicholson is from Bk. v, Sees. 27 and 33, in which Josephus speaks of how “The city being now on all sides beset by these battling conspirators and their rabble, between them the people, like some huge carcase, was torn in pieces,” The Jewish War, trans. H. St. J. Thackeray, Loeb Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 209, 211. The comparison between London in plague and Jerusalem under siege was a typological commonplace. See Dekker, pp. 31, 72.

⁵¹ Cf. Defoe's tone to that of the Quaker, Richard Ashby, in A Faithful Warning to the Inhabitants of Great-Britain (London, 1721), or even to that of Sir Richard Blackmore's Just Prejudices against the Arian Hypothesis (London: J. Peele, 1721), which threatens some terrible punishment for the avarice and irreligion of the time.

⁵² The History of Tom Jones A Foundling, ed. Martin Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Middletown: Wes-leyan Univ. Press, 1975), I, 495.