When our plague years began, I thought less of H.F.—or even of Crusoe—than of Moll Flanders. Every time I’ve taught Moll Flanders, my students have asked, But where are her children? It’s a fair question, even if it tends toward moralizing. Where are Moll’s children? The Shakespeareans launched a whole literary theoretical subfield when they asked “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” and then debated whether this was even a question worth asking. For readers of Defoe, the question may be even more complex for the ways that the demands of child-rearing serve as the implicit inverse of Moll’s life as flâneuse. As is to be expected from the author of The Family Instructor and Conjugal Lewdness, Defoe is less content to allow the question of Moll’s children to remain abstract. Unlike Lady Macbeth’s, Moll’s children flit in and out of the narrative in ways that give the question more urgency. Then, in Roxana, we see a continuation of this concern: Roxana’s plot reaches its climax in the return and demise of her daughter, Susan. Roxana is forced to reckon with the presence of her daughter in her life, suggesting that her children (and perhaps Moll’s as well) have been more assertive in their impingement on the narrative even in their absence than we may have thought.

I kept thinking of Moll not only because I happened to be writing about her, but because, unlike Moll, I knew exactly where my children were in those days. One was a constant companion (his daycare closed from mid-March 2020), the other kept even closer, as I entered my third trimester with what would soon be called my “pandemic baby.” My classes, my deadlines, my committee meetings didn’t really accommodate the fact that my children were home; they kept chugging along their various tracks. On social media, some observers (as is their wont) criticized parents for their complaints. “If you don’t like being around your children,” they asked, “then why did you have them?” As one Twitter Cassandra pointed out, parents should have taken the possibility of a global pandemic into account when planning their families. For so many parents, and disproportionately for mothers, the pandemic revealed the fragility of our various compartmentalizations, our attempts to do…well, anything while secure in the knowledge that our children were safe and accounted for. The insistent domesticity of the first few months of the pandemic has now lessened—my classes meet in person, my children spend their days in school and not in my lap—but I still keep thinking about Defoe’s ambiguous provocation.

As I started editing this collection of essays, my children (inevitably, it seems from this vantage) caught Covid. They were and are fine. And now, as I send this collection to be posted, news of the Omicron variant has renewed concerns that grow familiar, if still urgent. Which is to say that the editors of Digital Defoe know that our issue’s theme of “recovery,” however qualified, was premature. Still, we have gathered with these reflections a snapshot of meditations on pandemic life as filtered through the prism of Defoe’s works. The writers gathered here shared their reflections on the pandemic in mid-summer 2021, some have chosen to update their thoughts to reflect the changes of the past few months. These brief, informal essays capture something of the flux Defoe also seemed drawn to—the way that extreme circumstances (plague, shipwreck, poverty) can sharpen psychological response. “A little recovered”? Maybe just a little. Let’s check back in again next year.

Baruch College, CUNY

Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.

—Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (2004)

In the thick of quarantine over the past eighteenth months, I never thought I would share the desires H.F. confesses with such conviction in A Journal of the Plague Year: “my own Curiosity…was sufficient to justify my running that Hazard” (54). Defoe emphasizes the affective force of this desire—an undeniable compulsion to witness for himself London’s devastation, here embodied in the burial pits filled with the dead. To refuse a “strict Order” in pursuit of the freedom of mobility even at great risk—that was how much of the pandemic felt to me. That is, aside from a crushing banality of days melting into one another much like the meandering, recursive form of the Journal (53). But most striking to me now is how Defoe’s novel holds space for what feels like an illicit desire in the face of epidemic crisis. As Christopher Loar has brilliantly argued, “Defoe’s texts identify this insular approach to the epidemic constitution as inadequate. Instead, they seek to supplement it with a different ecology: a vision of vulnerability, a perspective that underscores the dependence of human bodies and lifeways on their environments—indeed, their embeddedness in them” (44). Rather than an irrational, contradictory behavior and characterological flaw, H.F.’s persistent refusal to remain quarantined reflects an intimacy with risk that recognizes the futility of absolute security (from the Latin sēcūrĭtās, to be untroubled or free from cares), a fantasy that Defoe himself acknowledged was impossible to achieve beyond a measured preparedness for the inevitable return of crisis.[1]

As a Chinese American, I also experienced first-hand the unique stigma of those H.F. observes being “shut up” in their houses: those deemed infected or even possibly infected were sealed into their homes painted with red crosses and policed by city militia. While I do not claim to share the same experience of medical neglect and state cruelty, the feeling of being marked out as infectious and even deserving of debilitating illness or death feels all too familiar. To have my body presumed viral after being identified by the nation as a threat even despite my citizenship is not novelty but refrain: the same yellow peril bleeding red again as friends, family, and community became targets for blame, for violent containment. My racialized body itself became what H.F. repeatedly calls “tokens” of the plague—legible signs of risk in need of mitigation or violent expulsion from the nation’s white, healthy body before it was too late. What underpins the proclamation “that the city was healthy,” that our nation be “yet alive!” in the face of a global pandemic that has (and continues to) “swept an Hundred Thousand Souls / Away?” (Defoe 9, 193). Almost two years into this pandemic, when can we ethically claim to be “after” COVID-19? And if we make such a claim, at whose continued expense does this “after” become possible, especially given the ongoing forms of anti-Asian racism and the necropolitical refusal to enable global access to vaccines?

To consider the stakes of these questions, I return to where my 2016 essay began: the Royal Experiment of 1721 that would, as part of the collective efforts of Hans Sloane, Charles Maitland, Mary Wortley Montagu, and Caroline of Ansbach, help to popularize smallpox inoculation—variolation—throughout Britain. Seven Newgate prisoners—John Alcock, John Cawthery, Richard Evans, Elizabeth Harrison, Ruth Jones, Mary North, and Anne Tompion—condemned to death were selected as experimental subjects and in exchange granted pardons in the form of transportation to the Americas. While at the time of my first essay I had not fully learned the already limited history about these seven prisoners, I am struck now by the state’s dependency on criminalized bodies to legitimize a medical practice for the aristocracy and ultimately for the general British public. To put this in Spencer Weinreich’s assessment, the prisoners were “both the experimental subject and the royal subject, for the human experimental subject is always also the political subject” (38). Because these experiments were done in the carceral space of Newgate where the subjects were also in the care of these physicians, we can see the ways in which preventative medicine has always depended upon (and subsequently disavowed) the disenfranchised to produce immunity and health security for the nation. Political benefit was also expected, as “inoculation’s success, assuming it materialized, would bolster the Hanoverians’ reputation as enlightened monarchs” (34). These prisoners would not enjoy the protected life their bodies were making possible for others. The all-too-convenient “yet” of H.F.’s concluding lines underscores the privilege of immunity made possible by the Royal Experiment held the very same year that Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year.

In the current moment of mounting vaccine resistance and robust anti-vaccination and anti-masking campaigns, I have been meditating on what Kathryn Olivarius has aptly called “immunoprivilege”[2] and what Martha Lincoln has termed “immunosupremacy.”[3] Both of these terms signal the ways in which immunity has come to be touted by many countries in the Global North as a moral virtue and civic expectation critical for a “return to normal”: many businesses, for example, have begun mandating complete vaccination for employment. Yet the racial and geographic disparities surrounding access to COVID-19 vaccination and testing reveal the unacknowledged immunoprivilege of predominantly wealthy, white communities in the U.S. and Europe who were able to self-isolate comfortably and have the luxury of choosing whether or not be vaccinated at all. These countries also continue to manufacture and stockpile the largest supply and most effective forms of COVID-19 vaccine. Thus, the dismissive choice by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director, Rochelle Walensky, to refer to the current rise in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths as “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” bypasses fraught histories like that of the Newgate Experiment and of medical racism in Britain and America that continue to animate legitimate skepticism and suspicion of medicine, especially among Black communities.[4] To be clear, I am not endorsing an anti-vaccination view, but rather calling attention to how Western public health’s uncritical valorization of vaccination as a panacea must necessarily confront the historical inequities in which it remains complicit and the markedly disparate ways the pandemic is being lived (or not lived) out globally. Whose health gets to matter and thus merits protection? Whose health must necessarily be sacrificed for the wellbeing of others and then subsequently blamed for their failure to uphold wellbeing that is not their own? 

Kenyon College

NOTES

1. See “What Preparations Are Due?” (Lapham’s Quarterly, 2020), where I discuss Defoe’s Due Preparations for the Plague, a plague treatise that was published but one month before A Journal of the Plague Year, and its pre-epidemiological vision for national preparedness.

2. “The Dangerous History of Immunoprivilege.” The New York Times, 13 April 2020. See also “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans.”

3. “Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19.”

4. See “C.D.C. Director Warns of a ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.’” The New York Times, July 16, 2021.

WORKS CITED

Anthes, Emily and Petri, Alexandra. “C.D.C. Director Warns of a ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.’” The New York Times, 16 July 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/health/covid-delta-cdc-walensky.html.

Lau, Travis Chi Wing. “Defoe Before Immunity: A Prophylactic Journal of the Plague Year.” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries. 8.1 (2016): 23-39, https://digitaldefoe.org/2016/10/19/defoe-before-immunity-a-prophylactic-journal-of-the-plague-year.

—. “What Preparations Are Due?” Lapham’s Quarterly. XIII.3 (2020): 209-217.

Olivarius, Kathryn. “The Dangerous History of Immunoprivilege.” The New York Times, 13 April 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/opinion/coronavirus-immunity-passports.html.

—. “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans.” American Historical Review. 124.2 (2019): 425-455.

Lincoln, Martha. “Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19.” Open Anthropological Research 1.1: 46–59.

Loar, Christopher. “Plague’s Ecologies: Daniel Defoe and the Epidemic Constitution.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 32.1 (2019): 31-53.

Weinreich, Spencer J. “Unaccountable Subjects: Contracting Legal and Medical Authority in the Newgate Smallpox Experiment (1721).” History Workshop Journal 89 (2019): 22-44.

And now being to enter into a melancholy relation of a scene of silent life, such perhaps as was never heard of in the world before, I shall take it from its beginning, and continue in its order.

—Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe 

In March of 2020, the early days of the pandemic in the US, when the college where I was then teaching made the decision to move all classes online for the remainder of the semester and shipped us all home, or at least, elsewhere, I sent all of my students an email to see how they were doing, and to offer them a piece of advice. “Consider keeping a journal—this is a unique experience!” I wrote, chirpily. “Someday people might be asking you what it was like! You will be glad to have a record of your thoughts and impressions. As well, writing is a really good way to work through fears and trauma. Writing out your feelings—without judging or criticizing yourself!—can be a great way to check in on yourself; to identify things that are scaring you; to examine things from various perspectives; etc.”

This last bit is drawn from Jonathan Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis, a pop psychology text that had been assigned in the college’s first-year course for a few years, and would therefore (hopefully) ring a bell for some of my readers. In Chapter 7 of the book, Haidt considers the questions of whether adversity sets us back, or spurs us to growth—whether what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Reviewing the evidence from various psychological studies, he finds mixed results, but something that is quite clear from the research is that one of the most tried-and-true ways to recover from tragedies—not just to survive, but to grow and develop resilience—is to write about them. By writing, he says, we actively process our feelings and find ways of making meaning, and this turns out to be crucial to our ability to flourish in the wake of disaster.

At a moment when so many people felt isolated, cut off from others, confronted with a new reality, it seemed wise to counsel my students to write, both for themselves, and for posterity. But, I must confess, I did a rather middling job of following my own advice.

Rather than writing about my thoughts or feelings, I mostly made check-lists of all the things I wanted to get done that day—both to organize myself, and for the small thrill of mastery when I could cross things off the list: chaos tamed, accomplishment in spite of everything. I kept a log of case numbers in my county, and a record of what my partner and I had for dinner (very useful, it turns out, if you’re wondering how old those leftovers are), and noted what variety of tea I’d made that day (mostly because my partner suspected that I wasn’t really drinking all those different teas I kept buying). This seemed different from the drive to quantify one’s life with a FitBit or music scrobbler: I wasn’t interested in aggregating the data, or discovering patterns. Just in making some kind of mark that left a trace of the day, of what was happening when it felt like so much was happening, but also, nothing.

Note: White Trash Bash was not an event I attended, but one that took place nearby (yes, really) and was noted so as to see if it produced a spike in cases.

I thought that I would spend my quarantine year writing, but instead, I mostly spent it…buying books. And teas. And t-shirts supporting various restaurants and small businesses that I was desperate to help in the only way that I could. And above all, I kept those various logs of things I was eating, drinking, doing (mostly on Zoom). It turned out, as my friend Stephanie put it, the basic mode of being in pandemic is not production, but consumption. Rather than writing a diary of my own, I read diaries and letters written by other people: Astrid Lindgren, Tove Jansson, Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, Zygmunt Bauman. I was surprised to find that what I really enjoyed in those texts, during that anxious Spring and weary Summer, was not the profound reflections and record of emotional lives so much as the very minor details, the little minutia of everyday life that snuck in. What they had for dinner. Gossip about a friend. A plan to go skating tomorrow. My own checklists suddenly began to seem more interesting. I went back to an old diary I’d half-heartedly kept years earlier and discovered that there too, it was not the accounts of thoughts and feelings that surprised or interested me, but the references to minor detail, the scrawled to-do lists—still trying to finish writing this chapter, need to read this thing, schedule this appointment.

Perhaps the work of a diary is not, as Haidt suggests, to process feelings and build a narrative—or rather, perhaps that process emerges from those trivial details that seem so forgettable later. It is only now, a year and a half later, that I am beginning to do the kind of reflective writing that I thought I would spend my time in quarantine producing. For that first year, all I could really muster was a running tally of mundanity.

But in this, I find, I am not so different from that notable predecessor of the human in extremis, for the portrait of life in isolation that is Robinson Crusoe is also, for the most part, a product of emotion recollected in tranquility. Crusoe does recover paper, pen, and ink from the shipwreck, but he does not use them to write the memoir that we read. That supply, it turns out, is used up for somewhat less memorable documents.

The first text he produces is a preliminary effort to get a grasp of his situation, a comically literal reckoning of the evil and good of his situation. The effort to do some accounting of the pros and cons is strangely touching in its determination to produce a balanced ledger. To paraphrase:

Con: I am cast upon a horrible desolate island, void of all hope of recovery.

Pro: But I am alive!

Con: I have not clothes to cover me.

Pro: Who needs clothes, in this heat?

This is the sort of reflection that is clearly the product of a sense of obligation: what one ought to write, in order to begin grappling with the conditions one faces. It is a touchingly laughable document, and one that does not provide much insight into the emotional realities of Crusoe’s astonishing experience.

Then he begins to write a journal. It is only once he has gotten his living quarters situated, he says, and some time has passed, that he is able to begin writing, for, “at first I was in too much of a hurry, and not only hurry as to labour, but in too much discomposure of mind.” If he had started writing immediately, he says, “my journal would ha’ been full of many dull things.” He provides an example of what such a dull entry might be, a fake entry for Sept 30^th, one that is in many ways quite similar to the entry he actually provides for Sept 30^th…which is itself a fake, because we know he only began the journal later. Both are notably different from the more extended account that we first get of the same day, provided in narrative form. But after this preliminary entry, once the space as been cleared, as it were, the journal becomes something that now seems much more familiar to me: a combination of checklists and logs. “November 1. I set up a tent under a rock, and lay there for the first night, making it as large as I could with stakes driven in to swing my hammock upon.” “November 3. I went out with my gun, and kill’d two fowls like ducks, which were very good food. In the afternoon went to work to make me a table.”

I suspect that many readers of Robinson Crusoe have forgotten this portion of the text entirely. Crusoe himself seems largely uninterested in it, freely jumping in to offer longer elaborations that seem like later additions. The text ends abruptly—he quits writing, he says because he runs out of ink—and the regular flow of the retrospective narrative resumes without significant comment. But I have a new appreciation for this section now, after my time as a castaway on the shores of my own apartment. Those brief entries turn out to be a far more compelling representation of the experience of being cut off from a larger social world than I could ever have imagined: the realism of a new kind of reality.

Ithaca College

And here I may be able to make an Observation or two of my own, which may be of use hereafter to those, into whose Hands this may come, if they should ever see the like dreadful Visitation.

Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

For the Spring 2020 semester, I put Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) on my eighteenth-century novel syllabus seemingly on a whim. The subject matter—an outbreak of the bubonic plague in London in 1665—was distant from life at a rural state university, but felt likely to generate interest. Who doesn’t love a medical disaster narrative?

We read the text early in the semester and were done by the first week in February. We debated its non-linear structure and its use of statistics and primary sources before moving on. Defoe’s attempt to cash in on a plague scare in the 1720s receded in my own mind. This was until the last few weeks of the semester. My institution closed its doors to in-person classes on Friday, March 13, 2020. I kept the class mostly on schedule, and we continued our new readings. Defoe’s Journal, however, started to creep back into the sorts of things I found myself talking and thinking about. Our class discussions, which took place on asynchronous video uploads, had the same sort of broken-up feeling that Defoe’s Journal has, and that feeling of taking in the lists of the dead and dying in Defoe’s novel felt like the lists and numbers I saw reflected in my own online newsfeeds.

There is a strange divide between reading A Journal of the Plague Year before a pandemic and during it. The somewhat jumbled structure—where the narrator H.F. picks up ideas, is interrupted by something, and comes back to them dozens of pages later—suddenly makes sense. My social media is filled with people joking about how time does not exist in the same way anymore. The text’s repetitions also rings true, as the same arguments, the same sorts of reports, and the same actions repeat themselves in my own life. Defoe’s “Repetition of Circumstances” in the text has gained significance for me (163).

More so than this, though, I spent the last few weeks of the spring 2020 semester in reflecting on all of those little moments from the text that made up the bulk of the Journal—the reports of the dead, the anecdotes, and the observations by H.F. Many of the orders Defoe reprints from the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London in 1665 now feel strangely prescient: accurate death records must be kept and published, the ability to properly diagnose the disease must increase in every parish, persons confirmed to have the disease must go under home quarantine, funerals are to take place without family members or friends, public entertainments and feasts are to be canceled, and taverns and coffee shops are to close early to prevent socializing and drunkenness (34-41).  Each of these now carry a new weight, as I reread passages and think to myself, “Yes, self-quarantine. Yes, work on social distancing. Yes, increase testing. Yes, stay at home and don’t congregate in restaurants and bars.”

It is odd watching history, if not repeat itself, at least slip into an old groove for a moment. Our “asymptomatic carriers” are Defoe’s “THE WELL” who had “received the Contagion… yet did not shew the Consequences of it in their Countenances” (164) and our “we’re going to appreciate life when this is over” is Defoe’s “scum off the Gall from our Tempers, remove the Animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing Eyes” (151). That this text, written in 1722 to try to take advantage of a plague scare, is relevant again during COVID-19 is a strange rebirth; when Defoe wrote the text, he was already too late to cash in on the anxiety, and it didn’t see a second edition for more than two decades after his death. In April of 2020, it had become the inescapable novel on my syllabus. I asked my students to give a reflection back on the course as a whole as their final video assignment. One of my students called A Journal of the Plague Year “a transcendent constructing of an eighteenth-century Center for Disease Control” and another stated that “little did we know we would be living this novel.” More than any other text on the syllabus, Defoe’s work connected with my students.

While my students’ reactions to the novel formed a sympathetic connection back to this nearly three-hundred-year-old text, the negative connections were likewise inescapable. H.F. rails against “Doctors Bills, and Papers of ignorant Fellows; quacking and tampering in Physick” made by persons who used the fear of the plague as a way to make fast money from desperate people (27)—the colloidal silver and hydroxychloroquine of the seventeenth century. In a world where cellphone towers were being burned down in England in April of 2020, the easy explanation of “those were simpler people who believed in superstitions” becomes impossible to believe (Rachel Schraer & Elanor Lawrie). One of my students who initially did not like the book admitted at the end of the semester that the ways that Defoe pressed on “what is truth” and “can we distinguish between fact and fiction?” made him reevaluate the novel’s value, in the context of being confronted with just that dilemma in the world around him. Defoe’s claim that “no Body can account for the Possession of Fear when it takes hold of the Mind” is as true for us as it was for his original audience (207).

Defoe likewise has his narrator call the working poor “the most Venturous and Fearless of it [who] went about their Employment, with a Sort of brutal Courage,” memorializing the people who were the essential workers of his day who kept London going by “tending the Sick, watching Houses shut up, carrying infected Persons to the Pest-House, and which was still worse, carrying the Dead away to their Graves” (78), while also morbidly admitting that their deaths from these tasks were inevitable. Stories about essential workers and minorities dying at disproportionate rates show the same inequality in our society as existed during H.F.’s imagined day.

Reading Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year in the year of the COVID-19 pandemic became a learning experience for me. It brought the text I taught out of my lessons and into my own life in unexpected ways. It left me with two opposing feelings: hope for the future and worry over the shape that it will take. The Plague of 1665 ended. After about a quarter of London’s population died (a far larger percentage than any estimate of COVID-19), the people who were left were able to pick up, rebuild, and carry on. Yet, for the many who died, this would not be a world that they would shape or be a part of. And, so it seems, the world we inhabit today continues to expect the most out of those who can least afford it. Journal leaves me with no easy answers, at least not now. But, for the moment, I think it’s replaced Robinson Crusoe and Roxana on my syllabus. I think my students will have a lot to say about it. I’ll be ready to listen.

Jacksonville State University

WORKS CITED

Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. 1722. Edited by Louis Landa. Oxford UP, 2010.

Schraer, Rachel and Eleanor Lawrie. “Coronavirus: Scientists brand 5G claims ‘complete rubbish’,” BBC News, 15 April 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/52168096.

In A Journal of the Plague Year, H.F. tells his readers, “What I wrote of my private Meditations I reserve for private Use, and desire it may not be made Publick on any Account whatever” (65-66). I’ve always found that claim puzzling. What are those “private meditations”? What makes them different from the rest of the journal? Why is it so important that they be kept from us? Why not share them?

Even before the pandemic, I was skeptical about H.F.’s ability to compartmentalize, but now I find it even more perplexing. To H.F.’s mind, the things he observed and heard as he walked around London, and that he then recorded in his journal, were distinct from his “private Meditations.” The Journal seems to suggest that he found those private reflections and ruminations inadequate or inappropriate for the public record he was aiming to create.

In the wake of the past two years, however, I find myself doubting that it is possible to make distinctions between private and public records amidst a community crisis of the magnitude of a pandemic. Now I find myself re-reading A Journal of the Plague Year and asking: what if the existence of “private meditations” as distinct from public ones is a fiction itself?

As I have argued elsewhere, the first-person narrative that Defoe gives us in the Journal is actually a blending of multiple first-person narratives: much of the content of the Journal comes from H.F.’s observations as he walks around London, and so, while the Journal is H.F.’s, it tells the stories of the people he interacts with, such as the stories of a man at a mass gravesite (54-55) and three travelers he comes across in his own wanderings (100-102). In other words, these people’s experiences of the pandemic become part of H.F.’s own experience, and their stories are absorbed into his Journal.

Over the course of 2020 and into 2021, I found my inner narrative of the COVID-19 pandemic being shaped in the same way as H.F.’s seems to have been. Living in isolation, my experience of the world was reduced to the bits and pieces I could gather through phone and video chats, texts, faculty meetings and classes on Zoom, and the occasional backyard meetup of friends. It was as if I had gone from being the protagonist in a first-person novel to a reader of someone else’s story narrated in third person. No longer going from building to building and conversation to conversation on campus, meeting up with friends at happy hour, and slipping away to the art museum for lunch and a quiet moment in the galleries, I suddenly had no story of my own to tell when I did call or visit family or friends.

In my experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, other people’s experiences were not just part of my own narrative: they were the totality of it. With my daily activities and interactions so drastically reduced, I had nothing to recount and nothing to worry over with friends and loved ones. This seems like it would be liberating, but it wasn’t. The mental space that isolation freed up just filled with generalized anxiety and panic. There was no room for the peaceful contemplation and “sitting with my anxiety” that emails from my employer suggested. In the absence of inner peace, my private meditations became nothing more than anxious ruminations on the things I saw—empty grocery store shelves and shuttered businesses—and the things related to me by others—the Governor’s daily briefings, texts from friends reporting where they found Clorox wipes or good toilet paper in stock. There just wasn’t much more than observation to record of those months alone in my small apartment, and that’s what made me think about H.F. and his “private meditations.”

I think a lot about the terms we’ve used to describe our isolation, and the differences between “social distancing” and “physical distancing.” Even though “social distancing” is the term that has been used most widely, it isn’t at all accurate. As Paula Backscheider notes in her preface to the Norton Critical Edition of the Journal, a plague “allows no individuals” and “emphasizes human relationships” (ix). This, unlike H.F.’s claims about his private meditations, makes sense to me. As the crisis developed, I could see the boundaries between private and public eroding as our interdependency was laid bare in discussions first of closures, then masking, and then vaccinations. Thanks to my institution’s mask mandate and rigorous quarantining protocols, I was able to safely return to the classroom in the fall of 2020. Yet, now at a different institution that does not require masks or vaccinations, my colleagues and I can only hope that our students choose to vaccinate, mask, and test. The reality of a pandemic, it turns out, is that you don’t lose connection to people—you lose the agency to determine what those connections look like.

As private and public experience blend together, the inequities we already know exist have become impossible to ignore. In A Journal of the Plague Year, we see who has economic and political power through who is able to flee for the countryside and who is forced to stay in the city, who still has the means to make a living and who does not. We’ve seen the same in our own time as the wealthy fled to vacation homes, while others were deemed “essential” with little choice but to expose themselves to the virus, and still others lost their jobs. Even for those of us lucky enough to be able to work remotely, inequities became more starkly visible. Working from home via videoconferencing software completely collapsed the boundaries between private and public life for so many of us. I watched as tenured faculty and administrators joined meetings from houses they owned, with dedicated office spaces and, on nice days, patios to sit on while they worked. Meanwhile, many graduate students and contingent faculty joined from cramped apartments. Students joined classes from their childhood bedrooms and kitchen tables where they could no longer conceal from their peers and professors their material living conditions and familial dynamics.

Then as now, we see that even as a plague isolates us physically, it always seems to find ways to intertwine our lives even more than before. It no longer becomes possible for us to neatly separate our private and public lives and experiences, and, in making the power disparities among us so transparent, pandemics disrupt our relationships to one another. In turn, our individual reflections are never really, fully our own. Like those collected in this issue of Digital Defoe, they become part of a public record and a community history.

Georgia Institute of Technology

WORKS CITED

Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. Ed. Paula R. Backscheider. Norton, 1992.

Kelly, Caitlin L. “Private Meditations and Public History in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.” The Explicator, vol. 71, no.1, 2013, pp. 52-55.

As the coronavirus pandemic escalated in the winter of 2020, I found myself reflecting on Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) as a classic of epidemic literature in the tradition of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Prior to the pandemic, I had thought of her second great work of “political science fiction” after Frankenstein (1818) in other terms. Her novel about a global plague that triggers a near-extinction event for humanity then seemed to me to be Shelley’s unwieldy metaphor for all forms of artificially-made disaster, not a realistic literary depiction of the spread of a lethal contagion across national borders to overwhelm the whole world.

By mid-March 2020, I learned to read Shelley’s “PLAGUE” on two levels at once: metaphorical and realistic (vol. 4, 139). Like A Journal of the Plague Year, on which it was partly based, The Last Man told a grimly realistic political story about how human beings catch and transmit infectious diseases as a result of the drama of their interpersonal and international conflicts. As I prepared to teach Defoe’s novel as a source for Shelley’s poliscifi, I also began to appreciate the metaphorical layers of meaning in his fictional re-working of his uncle’s journal of survival of the Great Plague of London of 1665-66.

A fictional version of his uncle Henry Foe, Defoe’s narrator H.F. offers a poetic definition of plague near the end of his tale: “A Plague is a formidable Enemy, and is arm’d with Terrors, that every Man is not sufficiently fortified to resist, or prepar’d to stand the Shock against” (271). Plague, in this sense, is not so much a pathogen or a disease as it is a psychological test of the individual to face the worst and deepest of their fears. With this metaphor, Defoe returned to Biblical conceptions of plague, as found in Job and Exodus. In those ancient texts, plague is a metaphor for being beset by hardship, feeling the blows of fate, or suffering tragedy beyond one’s control. The ten plagues of Egypt were not solely infectious diseases, but rather a range of terrifying and life-endangering hardships inflicted by the Hebrew God upon the Egyptian people to compel them to free the Israelites from slavery.

While it can be read on both levels—historical and literary—A Journal of the Plague Year is ultimately a novel like Defoe’s earlier classic, Robinson Crusoe (1719). H.F., like the shipwrecked sailor Crusoe striving to escape from the cannibal island with the aid of purchased servants, endures the plague of solitary woe, but never faces up to the limits of his solidarity with other human sufferers. H.F. ended his months-long quarantine with the verse, “A dreadful plague in London was/ In the year sixty-five,/Which swept a hundred thousand souls/ Away; yet I alive!” (287). With this concluding quatrain, H.F. does not dwell so much on the immensity of the loss of life as he does the good luck of his own survival.

When Shelley read Defoe’s Plague Year in 1817, she may have found in its closing poem the narrative kernel for The Last Man. The ostensible sole survivor of her fictional global plague is Lionel Verney, who is an avatar for the author herself in this roman à clef. Like the young Shelley mourning the death of her husband Percy and three of their children, Verney suffers solitary woe in the extreme as do H.F. and Crusoe. But Verney survives the global plague to develop a truly solidaristic vision of his relationship with the whole planet and all of its life forms: he summons the hope that a new Adam and Eve might be out there, somewhere, already with child, and looking for others with whom to rebuild human society in a way that is humane.

While the solitary woe of Crusoe led him to escape from the cannibal island, and the solitary woe of H.F. pushed him to survive the plague intact, the solitary woe of Verney inspired him to set sail upon the sea: not only in search of other survivors, but also on a quest to discover a whole new way of life that might sustain the best in humanity while leaving the worst of its conflicts and other social diseases behind.

It is this global vision of solidarity with life itself that inspired me to ask my students at Notre Dame to emulate Defoe and Shelley during our plague year of 2020 to 2021. As part of my undergraduate and graduate seminars on political thought and plague literature, they wrote a series of 1000-word “pandemoirs” (pandemic memoirs) that wove together their difficult and sometimes even harrowing experiences of infection, quarantine, contact tracing, social distancing, vaccination, isolation, depression, loss, and mourning, alongside their readings of classics of plague literature from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (429 BCE) to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam (2003-2013) and Handmaid’s Tale (1985-2019) series.

In a poignant moment of communal reflection, my first-year students and I looked back on our plague year of Zoom seminars by sitting down for an international Zoom call with anthropologist Eben Kirksey. In early May, he taped the deeply personal interview with the students for public viewing on YouTube as part of his “Multispecies Coronavirus Reading Group” series. The hour-long session provides a deep-dive into the psyches of the students, who had only recently been vaccinated in a mass campus drive, as they shared the real-life stories of resilience behind the personal and creative essays they wrote for our year-long humanities seminar. Though the technology had changed since Defoe and Shelley composed their plague memoirs with pen and paper, the purpose of our digitally-preserved pandemoirs was the same: to cure the plague of solitary woe with the incisive power of words to tie humanity together through time, space, and the depths of sorrow.

University of Notre Dame

WORKS CITED

Botting, Eileen Hunt. Artificial Life After Frankenstein. Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2020.

—. “Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein—And Then a Pandemic.” The New York Times. 13 March 2020.

Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations Or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as Well Publick as Private, Which Happened in London During the Last Great Visitation in 1665. London: E. Nutt, 1722.

Shelley, Mary. The Last Man, in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley. Ed. Jane Blumberg with Nora Crook. London: Pickering & Chatto, (1996) 2001.

The Tiber overflowed in the last decade of the sixth century, flooding granaries, uprooting houses, and heaping up carcasses on its banks, even into Rome itself. Soon thereafter followed new catastrophe, when the Justinian Plague made its way West from death-struck Byzantium. When they met it, the Romans called it an inguinarium, after the telltale swelling of the inguen, the groin. The Byzantine Emperor survived his encounter with it; the bishop of Rome did not. Gregory, later honored as “the Great,” stepped in reluctantly after the death of Pope Pelagius II to lead a penitential procession in hopes that such a demonstration of sorrow might prove the salvation of his city.

More keenly, though, Pope Gregory I hoped to save souls. What chiefly worried him was not disease but damnation. Paul the Deacon’s eighth-century biography of the Pope has him explain that “each one is snatched from life before he can turn to thoughts of penitence. Think, therefore, how he arrives in the presence of the severe judge when he has no time to atone for what he has done.” Gregory and Rome with him hope the plague will stop, but in the meantime, the procession aims primarily to save the Romans from dying unprepared. Every Roman, like everyone, is a sinner, and mostly what can be done is “to take refuge in tears of penance when there is time to weep and before we are struck down.” Death will take us, now or later, but we might still avoid unending torment.

What is absent, in other words, is any particular blame. Plague follows the Tiber’s flooding, and its end occurs sometime after the procession, though not during it: as they wend their way through Rome, in the very midst of their piety, eighty penitents drop dead. But from there, they and those who watched them die expect them to go on to eternal felicity. As all must die, they must die too, but perhaps not hopelessly.

That universal concern for our general mortal condition is nowhere near as present in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. The work is remembered for its formal peculiarities—its tabulations and calculations and its episodic attention to an ever-shifting set of victims and grifters—but no one can emerge from it, either, without feeling at least slightly uneasy about their neighbor’s behavior or even about their own. Though the Lord Mayor’s orders of late June 1665 seem, usefully enough, to target crowds (“loose persons and assemblies,” “public feasting,” “disorderly tippling in taverns, alehouses, coffee-houses, and cellars”), its chief targets are, obviously, any pleasure or activity or person, like the “swarms” of beggars, undevoted to the prevailing commonweal. It leaves unmolested any meeting for respectable commerce, for parliament, for hearing out the importunities of London’s citizens, or for study or experiment or dignified edification.

As dire as it was, the plague generated no reevaluation of values. There is no new form of care but only a crescendo of old condemnations from an office held by “a very solemn and religious gentleman”—historically speaking, John Lawrence, a businessman already inclined, one imagines, to wish to clean away the city’s beggars, alehouses, ballad-singing, and the like. Our narrator joins in this show of sobriety, complaining about an encounter with those “not afraid to blaspheme God and talk atheistically,” and praising, at length, a poor waterman whose faith is only increased by the likely mortal peril of his family, locked away from him in a house shut fast by plague. Piety, though, is not necessarily the right way either. For H.F. comes at last to condemn even those who abandon themselves too much to God: although God is reasonable insofar as he has “formed the whole scheme of nature and maintained nature in its course,” and majestic insofar as he might execute through means either natural or supernatural either “mercy or justice” (note the terrifying brevity of that two-item list!), anyone who decides that God’s overwhelming power means nothing needs to be done – that, our narrator insists, is nothing but “a kind of Turkish predestinarianism.”

We remain in this time of blame. Many of us are certain that bad actors, indifferent to the general good, are keeping our present plague going. But we also have something else: we moralize, some of us, and we thereby lift ourselves up, transfiguring our discomfort and inconvenience into sacrifice and semi-secularized penance. We grouse, some of us, at watching others whom we know to be tedious or otherwise burdened with a host of venial social faults apotheosize themselves by the simple expedient of donning a mask or by getting the jab expeditiously. Anyone reading this is likely already vaccinated: we did it to help others, to help ourselves, to save our families, to save what remains, to help ourselves by finally being able to lounge poolside someplace just warm enough. We did it for whatever reason. The others too have their own reasons, not all of them reducible to antisocial cussedness. What each side possesses, though, is, mostly, the ease of certainty.

Certainty is not what Gregory’s procession offers, nor, finally, does Defoe offer it either. The Journal of the Plague Year, of course, particularizes blame in a way Gregory’s Rome does not, but that particularization wanders, as H.F. does, always landing somewhere not quite foreseen. The Journal leaves us uncertain precisely about what we ought to do in the face of God’s majesty or the implacable plague. A posture of sobriety is necessary, but that would be necessary anyway for anyone with a streak of mercantile respectability.

It’s easy to hit an easy target. I’m not sure when you’re reading this but, as hard as this might be to believe, in late Summer 2021, a host of Americans were poisoning themselves with a multipurpose ointment, as helpless against Covid as it is effective against equine worms. Most of them, we have to assume, took it because they didn’t want to die. People are scared. Nothing could be simpler than mockery, nothing simpler than acquiring the congratulations the mocker gives themselves by jeering.

Gregory’s procession, a universal attempt to set ourselves right amid an inevitable mortality, at least targets those puffed up and convinced of their own perfect health: that condition, as always, is temporary, and more temporary now than usual. We cannot help but blame others, but Defoe’s blame, swirled as it is in uncertainty, without being inclined to elevate the observer H.F. into a hero, might be the best model the rest of us can imitate, while we too await mercy, or justice.

Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

The Violence of the Distemper, when it came to its Extremity, was like the Fire the next Year; The Fire, which consumed what the Plague could not touch, defied all the Application of Remedies; the Fire Engines were broken, the Buckets thrown away, and the Power of Man was baffled and brought to an End.

—Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

Looking back at 1665 from 1722, the “Fire the next Year”—the fire of 1666—appears as a strange kind of afterthought in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (35). Although the journal’s narrator, H.F., clearly marks it as a disaster, one comparable to the plague his Journal narrates, Defoe nevertheless uses it primarily as that: a means of comparison. In just a few words, he invokes the suffering and destruction of the next year’s crisis, but he ultimately does so not to describe that catastrophe, but to make the distress of the plague more palpable. One might pause to wonder whether H.F.—likely a survivor of the fire as well as of the plague—has stories to tell of the conflagration as he as of the pestilence. But one crisis, it seems, at a time.

That Defoe’s concern when he began writing was with the plague, not the fire, is understandable. Writing in the immediate wake of the 1720 outbreak of the plague in Marseilles, Defoe turns back to the last great plague in London in a way not unlike the many who, two hundred years later, have turned to Defoe’s novel in the face of the spread of Covid-19. It was the plague that Defoe had reason to recall to mind. Yet, over a year following that renewal of public interest in Defoe’s narrative—hailed as a “guide book” with “startling parallels” to our own moment—one might query how Defoe relegates the last great fire to the margins of the last great plague, as news of Covid-19 shares more and more space with news of wildfires that, in the summer and fall of 2021 alone, have devastated entire towns from California to British Columbia, burnt through tens of thousands of acres of sequoia groves, and engulfed the Mediterranean and Siberia.

I started thinking about the Journal’s brief mentions of the fire in mid-June, amid news of the heat dome descending over parts of Canada and the United States and the heatwave in the Middle East, with temperatures hitting 50 degrees Celsius—but before the U.S. surge of the Delta coronavirus variant began in July. When I started thinking about this moment in relation to pandemic life and recovery, that is, it was possible to believe we were in fact recovering, at least from Covid-19. I wanted, then, to raise a series of questions about how Defoe’s two crises might help us think about the ways we have been pivoting between disasters, with the recovery from one seeming to mark the intensification of another. The pandemic lockdowns, as many observed, sent carbon emissions plunging as the economy ground to a halt, offering a flicker of hope that, in the internet’s terms, nature might be healing, returning like it does in Defoe’s plague-stricken London, where, with its bustling commerce suspended, “the great streets…and even the Exchange itself, had grass growing in them” (87). For those in the future—for those writing from the same distance from Covid-19 as Defoe wrote from the 1665 plague—I wanted to ask what the crisis of the past year might look like in retrospect. How would the pandemic of the past year be understood in relation to the fires of the next year? Would it become a footnote in relation to the greater, more immediate threats of climate instability? Would we return to treating the idea of plague as a disastrous metaphor, in the way one New York Times writer was able to in 2019, when she wrote that “Climate change might be our successor to the Black Death”? How might we understand the way that pandemic recovery—at least economic recovery—was not only met with news of climate disaster, but also, perhaps, drove that disaster further, with emissions levels ultimately recovering with the economy itself?

But that surge of the Delta variant has changed things. There is, now, no plague of this year and fire of next year, no clear narrative sequence that moves from one crisis to another, with one emerging while the other ends, as it was possible to imagine for a few months following the release of the vaccine. Those broader narrative forms, like Defoe’s, that would have us attend to one crisis at a time seem to be cracking under the pressure of this simultaneous rise of global temperatures and Covid-19 cases, failing against the backdrop of a wider challenge to structures for comprehending catastrophe. What we still call once-in-a-century storms and floods, for instance, are predicted soon to become annual occurrences, unsettling the sense of disaster as occurring at distant, periodic intervals. As the formerly slow rhythms of crisis rapidly accelerate, then, we are faced with a challenge similar to that posed by the overlap of pandemic and wildfire: how to both imagine and respond to a tangle of multiple, ongoing crises, related yet distinct.

From an imagined retrospective position, looking back on the present from a distance of sixty years, perhaps the particular tangle of climate crisis and pandemic will still be unraveled into a clearer narrative. Perhaps 2020’s catastrophe will ultimately be a brief note relative to the more pressing history of how, to use Defoe’s words, the “power of man was baffled and brought to an end”—a history that might find its turning point not in 2020 but in 2021, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report sounded a “code red for humanity,” or when youth activists filed a petition with the United Nations to demand real climate mitigation measures following another round of apparently empty pledges from COP26 representatives. For now though, as we live through overlapping surges of plague and fire, reading news of both side by side, it remains difficult to imagine one becoming a footnote or metaphor for the other—almost as difficult as it is to try holding both crises in mind at once. Perhaps the question to ask of Defoe’s Journal now, then, is not how our twin crises fall into the retrospective model Defoe sketches, but whether that model can still be a guide for 2021 as it was for many in 2020. Perhaps the question to ask now is how we read the novel’s closing line, taken, as H.F. tells us, from the end of his “ordinary memorandums the same year they were written”: “Yet I alive!” (212). Can we still read that note of optimistic survival without imagining how H.F.’s own journal of disaster might have gone on, to tell of the fire, after these concluding words of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague? Can we still imagine a narrative of crisis with such a clear end?

Harvard University

WORKS CITED

Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. 1722. Edited by Louis Landa, Oxford University Press, 1969.