A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2) by Charles Creighton
1625. His account of the burials by the cart-load in plague-pits is also
585 words | Chapter 82
suggestive of Dekker. The somewhat meagre references by Hodges might have
sufficed him for his frequent theme of the hardships and horrors of
shut-up houses, even if he had not seen two other tracts, of 1665, on the
same. The accounts of the Marseilles plague, one of the worst in history,
would have kept him right in picturing that of London.
Whatever materials Defoe took from Hodges, Vincent, or the writers on
other plagues, he enlarged them by his power of circumstantial
construction into a narrative which must be accounted on the whole
veracious. He based upon figures, whenever he could get them; he seems
even to have sought among the archives of the City for accounts of monies
distributed to the poor. He prints in full the orders of the Mayor and
Aldermen, and professes to give the text of a formal resolution which they
passed to remain at their posts throughout the crisis. His table of the
number of plague-deaths in each of twenty-six towns or villages near
London does not, indeed, agree with the figures in the parish registers,
as the table on a later page will show; but it can hardly have been drawn
up at a guess.
The best instance of Defoe’s skilful use of authentic documents is his
description of how the infection invaded one part of London after another
from the western suburbs to the eastern, so that its intensity was nearly
over in one place before it had begun in another. That is the most
interesting epidemiological fact in the whole outbreak; and Defoe has done
ample justice to it. Boghurst had stated it with equal clearness and
emphasis in his manuscript of 1666, which Defoe may or may not have
seen[1201]; however the latter deduced it afresh, and illustrated it by
numerous tables from the bills of mortality, which showed the incidence of
plague upon each of the one hundred and forty parishes from week to week.
Antecedents, Beginnings and Progress of the Plague of 1665.
When the London plague of 1665 had given indications that it would grow to
be one of the great outbreaks of that infection, much was made, in the
retrospect, of a single death from plague which had occurred towards the
end of December, 1664, in a house in or near Long Acre. Connected with
that case was one of those trivial chains of evidence which are so often
produced as the easy solution of a difficult problem. A bale of silks had
come to the house from Holland, and that bale of silks could be traced to
the Levant; therefore the seeds of the great plague of London were
imported Levantine seeds. This was pretty well for a city which had a
continuous record of plague-infection in its soil ever since the Black
Death of 1348. But credulity could ignore facts more recent than the
history for three centuries. The death in Long Acre in December was a
solitary one, and was of no more import for what followed than any of the
five other sporadic plague-deaths in 1664[1202]. Only one more death from
plague occurred in the bills (in the middle of February), until the last
week of April, 1665; even then the progress of the infection was slower
for the next two months than it had been in many former seasons of
moderate plague, such as the five years 1606-1610 and the eight years
1640-1647, or than it had been in the great plague-years of 1603, 1625 and
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