A Journal of the Plague Year

Forty feet long, sixteen across, dug down twenty until the water stopped them: the pit in the churchyard at Aldgate, and a saddler who cannot keep himself from going to look in. He signs himself H. F., and he stays in London when everyone with a horse is leaving. What he brings back is the plague at street level, the bellman crying bring out your dead at one in the morning, grass coming up in Cornhill and the Exchange itself, a red cross painted on a door with Lord have mercy upon us set over it and a watchman outside to keep the family sealed in with the sickness. Then he breaks off and prints the parish bills of the dead, column by column, because the numbers are the only thing that will hold still. Daniel Defoe was five years old in the plague year. This is a novel in a document's clothes, and it ends on four lines of doggerel its narrator calls coarse but sincere, the most moving thing in it.