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.

Defoe’s “Repetition of Circumstances” in the text has gained significance for me (163). 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. My social media is filled with people joking about how time does not exist in the same way anymore. picks up ideas, is interrupted by something, and comes back to them dozens of pages later-suddenly makes sense.

The somewhat jumbled structure-where the narrator H.F. There is a strange divide between reading A Journal of the Plague Year before a pandemic and during it. 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. Defoe’s Journal, however, started to creep back into the sorts of things I found myself talking and thinking about. I kept the class mostly on schedule, and we continued our new readings. My institution closed its doors to in-person classes on Friday, March 13, 2020. This was until the last few weeks of the semester. Defoe’s attempt to cash in on a plague scare in the 1720s receded in my own mind. We debated its non-linear structure and its use of statistics and primary sources before moving on. We read the text early in the semester and were done by the first week in February. Who doesn’t love a medical disaster narrative? 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. 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.įor 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.

A plague year