“I say they had dug several pits in another ground, when the distemper began to spread in our parish, and especially when the dead-carts began to go about, which was not, in our parish, till the beginning of August. Into these pits they had put perhaps fifty or sixty bodies each; then they made larger holes wherein they buried all that the cart brought in a week, which, by the middle to the end of August, came to from 200 to 400 a week; and they could not well dig them larger, because of the order of the magistrates confining them to leave no bodies within six feet of the surface; and the water coming on at about seventeen or eighteen feet, they could not well, I say, put more in one pit. But now, at the beginning of September, the plague raging in a dreadful manner, and the number of burials in our parish increasing to more than was ever buried in any parish about London of no larger extent, they ordered this dreadful gulf to be dug—for such it was, rather than a pit.

They had supposed this pit would have supplied them for a month or more when they dug it, and some blamed the churchwardens for suffering such a frightful thing, telling them they were making preparations to bury the whole parish, and the like; but time made it appear the churchwardens knew the condition of the parish better than they did: for, the pit being finished the 4th of September, I think, they began to bury in it the 6th, and by the 20th, which was just two weeks, they had thrown into it 1114 bodies when they were obliged to fill it up, the bodies being then come to lie within six feet of the surface. I doubt not but there may be some ancient persons alive in the parish who can justify the fact of this, and are able to show even in what place of the churchyard the pit lay better than I can. The mark of it also was many years to be seen in the churchyard on the surface, lying in length parallel with the passage which goes by the west wall of the churchyard out of Houndsditch, and turns east again into Whitechappel, coming out near the Three Nuns’ Inn.

 

It was about the 10th of September that my curiosity led, or rather drove, me to go and see this pit again, when there had been near 400 people buried in it; and I was not content to see it in the day-time, as I had done before, for then there would have been nothing to have been seen but the loose earth; for all the bodies that were thrown in were immediately covered with earth by those they called the buriers, which at other times were called bearers; but I resolved to go in the night and see some of them thrown in.

There was a strict order to prevent people coming to those pits, and that was only to prevent infection. But after some time that order was more necessary, for people that were infected and near their end, and delirious also, would run to those pits, wrapt in blankets or rugs, and throw themselves in, and, as they said, bury themselves. I cannot say that the officers suffered any willingly to lie there; but I have heard that in a great pit in Finsbury, in the parish of Cripplegate, it lying open then to the fields, for it was not then walled about, [many] came and threw themselves in, and expired there, before they threw any earth upon them; and that when they came to bury others and found them there, they were quite dead, though not cold.

 

This was a mournful scene indeed, and affected me almost as much as the rest; but the other was awful and full of terror. The cart had in it sixteen or seventeen bodies; some were wrapt up in linen sheets, some in rags, some little other than naked, or so loose that what covering they had fell from them in the shooting out of the cart, and they fell quite naked among the rest; but the matter was not much to them, or the indecency much to any one else, seeing they were all dead, and were to be huddled together into the common grave of mankind, as we may call it, for here was no difference made, but poor and rich went together; there was no other way of burials, neither was it possible there should, for coffins were not to be had for the prodigious numbers that fell in such a calamity as this.”

The passage can be divided into three parts:

1)      the realistic description of the pits dug for burials, through the use of such communicating details as size,place and capacity.We learn how deep they were, where they were located and how many bodies they could hold;

2)      the dreadful effects the plague had on people who,on realizing they were infected, in some cases threw themselves into the pits to put an end to their suffering

3)      the horrific description of a death cart and its awful load of bodies.

All four parts are described with extraordinary vividness, in a journalistic style full of details and marked by objectivity. The attention is focused on the pit around which people move and act, out of necessity like the buries, out of curiosity like a narrator or out of despair, like the suicides.These people are uncharacterized atoms which make up the collective body, increasing the impression that the pit, the dreadful gulf,” as Defoe calls it (Par 1) is the image of London with its anonymous suffering community.The Journal has often been compared to the description of the plague in Manzoni’s Promessi Sposi. In spite of certain analogies,however, the techniques used by the two writers are different. There are plenty of details and information in Defoe and we really get to know a lot about the plague. But the detached tone of its author turns into a kind of report without poetry and art which are present in Manzoni. Although avoiding the horrible details so frequent in Defoe, Manzoni was able not only to reconstruct the general atmosphere of pestilence stricken Milan, but also to analysize individual responses to the plague with a poetic sensitivity of his own.

The Journal is said to have inspired other works describing a city struck by sudden calamity, such as La Peste by Camus. Defoe’s reconstruction of a past age with the aid of actual document anticipated the historical novel of the 19 th century

A Journal of the Plague Year is one of Daniel Defoe's most popular and strangest works; it is an amalgam of history and fiction that attempts to relate what life was like in London during the plague of 1665-66. Published in 1722, nearly 57 years after the events depicted, the work is a first-person narrative told from the perspective of H.F., a saddler. Defoe himself was only a small child at the time of the plague, so he conducted meticulous research into the medical treatises, bills of mortality, and broadsides of fifty years prior to write his work.

 It is a first-person, mostly nonlinear narrative told by protagonist H.F., an unmarried saddler whose name is only revealed by his signature at the end of the work. The Journal is a tale of his experiences during the plague that afflicted London in 1665; the work is thus fiction but is peppered with statistics, data, charts, and government documents. H.F. begins by relating rumors that the plague had come to Holland, and closely follows the bills of mortality. Certain parishes are affected, but cold weather seems to stave off the worst of the plague during the winter. However, in May and June the numbers of dead begin to swing upwards and H.F. starts to wonder whether or not he should leave the city. After some debate back and forth, he decides that God wants him to remain.

H.F. observes that the rich are leaving the city and the poor are being strongly affected by the distemper. He relates how they succumbed to the wiles of quack doctors, fortunetellers, mountebanks, and astrologers in their fear and anxiety of the imminent plague.

City officials are rational and organized concerning the spreading plague, and publish the Orders of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London. These set up rules and regulations for the appointment of searchers and examiners and watchmen to guard the houses, for the shutting up of infected houses, and for the shutting down of events in which large groups of people would congregate. H.F. is generally against the shutting up of houses, commenting that it seemed to do more harm than good in most cases and could barely prevent the plague from spreading because Londoners found ways to escape or delude city officials.

H.F. tells many stories of how the people of London were affected by the plague. These stories include tales of grieving fathers, crazed men running through the streets, people throwing themselves into burial pits due to pain or grief, husbands trying to support their families, people blaspheming the name of God, houses being looted, and people trying to escape the city and travel to other towns in search of reprieve. H.F. is keen to debunk rumors that all was chaos in the city during the plague; he is sympathetic to the plight of the poor and refuses to believe the sordid rumors that surround the days of plague. He relates many stories of mercy, charity, and redemption.

H.F.'s narrative is rambling, digressive, and oftentimes contradictory, and he returns to several subjects over and over again – particularly the shutting up of houses and his conviction that the only way to survive the plague is to run away from it. He believes he erred in remaining in the city, and confesses his sins to God and begs for forgiveness. He spends his time shut up in his house for days on end, and when he can bear it no longer, he walks about the city. He muses on the causes of the plague and how it is spread, rejecting outlandish explanations but concluding that, while it must have some human causes, it is from God.

As he writes, he includes updated bills of mortality that trace the numbers dead from plague, which grow exponentially as the outbreak rages. He commends the city officials for their rational conduct, lauding the fact that there were never scores of dead bodies in the street, that provisions never fell to dangerous levels, and charitable measures were put in place to help the poor. Unfortunately, foreign trade takes some time to revive because those engaged in commerce avoid London.

September is the worst month of the plague, but eventually the bills begin to reveal that the distemper is abating. Less people were becoming infected and those who were ill were getting better much faster. For a while this information actually has a negative impact, as the people who saw the bills became careless and accidentally spread the plague even further, but thankfully the evidence that the plague was disappearing was validated some time later. H.F. observes that while many people are truly grateful for their deliverance and try to live their lives differently, most return to their old, sinful ways and appear to have learned nothing from their trials. H.F. ends his narrative with a small verse exulting that he survived.