This edition of Defoe’s ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ has restored all the original punctuation with nouns given capital letters and semicolons used instead of full stops. Whilst this gives the text a clear ring of authenticity, it also presents the reader (given the subject matter) with a long sometimes arduous read.

This aside however, the book written in 1722 still remains a powerful social document. Through clever use of a fictitious narrator (Defoe was 5 years old at the time) the book makes a more immediate impact. In reality the observations of the central character have been gleaned from Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe, Defoe’s own childhood recollections and the large body of research he amassed, before he began writing the book.

Defoe’s clever use of an ‘eye witness’ narrator coupled with his intricate knowledge of the streets and parishes of 17th century London, quickly place the reader at the centre of the action. This is a claustrophobic London where the streets are too narrow and the houses built too close together. In short the perfect breeding ground for any potential disease.

We hear of the initial stirrings of hysteria once word of the plague was first reported. How the church preached fire and damnation to its parishioners (instead of giving hope), urging them to repent before being ‘taken by the Lord’. How frightened members of the working classes paid good money to conmen, fortune tellers, astrologers and quacks in order to obtain ‘favourable predictions’. Many of which soon proved worthless, once the plague began to spread.

From this point onwards Defoe proceeds to give us a meticulous account of how the plague ravaged London throughout 1665. We soon learn of the speedy exodus of the wealthy to their country homes in order to escape infection; how the plague manifested itself through hard black swellings, which formed under the arm and in the groin (referred to in the text as ‘tokens’); how members of a household were all held in enforced

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