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Media type:
E-Article
Title:
Defoe and the Disordered City
Contributor:
Novak, Maximillian E.
imprint:
Modern Language Association of America, 1977
Published in:PMLA
Language:
English
ISSN:
0030-8129
Origination:
Footnote:
Description:
<p>During 1721, when a violent plague raged around Marseilles, concern in England focused not so much on the nature of the disease as on problems of civil order, particularly among the London poor. But in his Journal of the Plague Year (1722), an account of the plague of 1665, Defoe's compassion for the poor extended to a sympathetic account of their spirit of rebellion. Defoe's work compares the sufferings of the past and the potential agonies of a new plague, but reflects also the mental despair caused by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble during 1721. Yet Defoe's fictional account celebrates the past and future triumph of London through the compassion of its citizens. In making history as much prophecy as a reflection of the past, Defoe also created the first realistic fiction with a narrator sympathetic to both victim and survivor, common sufferers trapped by forces beyond human control.</p>