Only an extensive effort at gathering and distributing charity saved these people from starvation. With the richest people fleeing for the country and with commerce at a standstill, hordes of the working poor lost their positions. (The latter effort was frustrated by the Great Fire of London that swept through the following year and destroyed many of the city records.) One aspect of the plague is dealt with at length. What I found compelling about the book, even more than the facts it related, was the narrator's journalistic efforts to separate truth from falsehood by interviewing people and reviewing official documents. The anecdotes are interesting, the statistics less so. Defoe may have based it on a relative’s actual journal. A Journal of the Plague Year isn't a novel in any conventional sense it's a collection of statistics and anecdotes made by someone who identifies himself as a merchant, and who stayed behind when others fled.
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