The Great Plague of London, which reached its height in 1665, has left
an abundant aftermath both in literature and art. The main story of its
ravages is too well known to call for repetition.
There were still some ready to see in the plague, as they were in
the case of the fire, evidence of the handiwork of malevolent Jews.
Since their expulsion from England by Edward I, the Jews had never yet
obtained the legal right of re-entry, their open petition to Cromwell
having failed. With the restoration of Charles II to the throne, they
seem to have taken the matter into their own hands and found their
way quietly back, so that at the time of the plague there were many
resident in London, to the great advantage of trade and to the relief
of an ever-needy Government. But three centuries of plague, punctuated
by fierce outbreaks at regularly recurring intervals, had served to
unravel much of the mystery of pestilence, and the people had learnt
that it was not to be exorcised by a holocaust of Jews, or by the
brutal murder of imaginary poisoners.
Celestial portents were not lacking to presage the plague. A blazing
comet appeared for several months before the plague. Men affected to
see, in its dull colour and slow solemn movement, a prediction of the
heavy punishment of pestilence; whereas that which preceded the fire
was swift and flaming and foretold a rapid retribution.
Superstition raked up images afresh from the scrap-heap of discarded
fancies. Women saw flaming swords in the heavens, some even saw
angels brandishing them over their heads. Astrologers had strange
tales of malignant conjunctions of the planets. Medical opinion was
still divided along the same lines of cleavage, as it had been for
2,000 years before. There were those who referred the disease to some
occult poison, and those who referred it to an excess of some manifest
quality, such as heat, or cold, or moisture, in each case corrupting
the body humours. Speculation was rife as to the nature of the causal
poison. Some, as Lucretius had done, conceived it to be pestiferous
corpuscles of atomic character, outside the range of human vision,
generated either in the heavens by a malignant conjunction of planets,
or in the soil, and so often liberated by the agency of earthquakes.
These poisons, however generated, found their way into the human body
through the medium of the distempered atmosphere.
Some had noticed an unusual absence of birds before the epidemic, as
Thucydides and Livy had done in their times. Boyle observed a great
diminution of flies in 1665, Boghurst a superabundance of flies and
ants in 1664. Sir George Ent and others attributed the disease to
minute invisible insects, but Blackmore conceived these to be rather a
consequence than a cause.
Insects, so-called, had been vaguely associated with pestilence from
remote antiquity, more especially flies, lice, and locusts; but in the
medical literature of the sixteenth century and after they are assigned
a much more definite role. Mercurialis[182] states that huge numbers of
caterpillars paraded the streets of Venice during the plague of 1576.
Goclenus[183] mentions swarms of spiders during the plague of Hesse
in 1612, and Hildanus swarms of flies and caterpillars this same year
in plague-stricken Lausanne. Bacon speaks of flies and locusts, as
characteristic of pestilential years, and Diemerbroeck[184] of flies,
gnats, butterflies, beetles, grasshoppers, and hornets in the same
connexion. Gottwald[185] reported the presence of multitudes of spiders
during the plague of Dantzig in 1709. Arabian physicians considered
the putrefaction of swarms of dead locusts an important cause of
pestilence. Hancock,[186] as late as 1821, argued that locusts caused
famine by destroying the crops, and so prepared the way for human
pestilence.
Talismans, amulets, reliquaries, and all the stock-in-trade of
magic were in brisk demand among the populace. Quack vendors of
antipestilential remedies innumerable effectively replaced physicians,
most of whom took refuge in flight. All honour to those who stood fast
at their posts and reclaimed for medicine what Galen had renounced, the
captaincy of its own soul. These are the men who had no fear for ‘the
pestilence that walketh in darkness or the arrow that flieth by day’:
1. Dr. Francis Glisson } Presidents of the Royal College
2. Sir Thomas Witherley } of Physicians.
3. Dr. Nicholas Davys }
4. Dr. Edward Deantry }
5. Dr. Thomas Allen }
6. Sir John Baber }
7. Dr. Peter Barwick }
8. Dr. Humphrey Brooks } Fellows of the Royal College
9. Dr. Alexander Burnett } of Physicians.
10. Dr. Elisha Coysh }
11. Dr. John Glover }
12. Dr. Nathaniel Hodges }
13. Dr. Nathan Paget }
14. Dr. Thomas Wharton }
15. Dr. William Conyers Member of the Royal College of Physicians.
16. Dr. O’Dowd
17. Dr. Samuel Peck
18. John Fife }
19. Thomas Gray } Members of Barber-Surgeons’ Company.
20. Edward Hannan }
21. Edward Higgs }
And yet a few beside these, whose names are inscribed on no human
document, but whose deeds are imprinted in imperishable type on the
deathless record of righteous human endeavour.
Nathaniel Hodges[187] shows us something of the daily life of a
physician in the course of this plague. He himself rose early, took his
antipestilential dose, attended to the affairs of his household, and
then repaired to his consulting room, where crowds awaited him. Some,
who were sick, he treated, others he reassured and sent away. Breakfast
followed, then visits to patients at their homes. On entering a house
he would vaporize some aromatic disinfectant on a charcoal brazier:
if he arrived out of breath, he would rest a while, and then place
a lozenge in his mouth, before proceeding to the examination of his
patients. After a round of several hours’ duration, he would return
home, drink a glass of sack, and then dine on roast meat and pickles or
some similar condiments, all of which were reputed antidotal. More wine
followed the preliminary curtain-raiser. Afternoon and evening, till
eight or nine o’clock, were devoted to a second round of visits. His
late hours he spent at home, a stranger to noxious fumes of tobacco,
quaffing sack, to ensure cheerfulness and certainty of sleep. Twice the
fatal infection seemed to have slipped past his outposts, but Hodges
had still his remedy: he merely doubled the dose.
Of all the literature of pestilence none has been more widely read than
Defoe’s _Journal of the Plague Year_: all later records take their
colour from Defoe. Nevertheless, a careful study and comparison of
other contemporary accounts leaves little room for doubt that Defoe’s
picture does not accurately represent the general state of London
during the plague. His picture is far more true of Marseilles in 1720
than of London in 1665, and in this connexion one should remember that
he had sedulously collected materials for a diary of the plague of
Marseilles, which have been printed in some editions of his works.
These can hardly have failed to colour his _Journal_, which was not
submitted to the public till 1722, two years after the plague of
Marseilles.
Defoe himself was but six years old at the time of the plague, so that
his own childish memories can have aided him but little in his task. He
will have had, at most, a dim recollection of some hideous catastrophe,
round which ranged tales of parents and friends in his boyhood. To
these he will have added facts and incidents borrowed from the chief
records available in print. Intrinsic evidence goes to show that these
were three: London’s _Dreadful Visitation_, Hodges’s _Loimologia_, and
Vincent’s _God’s Terrible Voice in the City_. The first of these will
have given him the Bills of Mortality and other general information:
the second, the aspect of the plague from a physician’s point of view:
the third, a vision of the plague as it appealed to popular imagination.
That Defoe intended to write history and not fiction, there is no
reason to doubt. Judged only by the accuracy of his facts it is
history, but it is in the facts that he omits, just because he had
never heard of them, that he unconsciously lapses into fiction.
Comparison of details and incidents with the unimpeachable record of
Pepys confirms his accuracy, but it shows also that, by separating
incidents from their surroundings and by compressing his description
to the exclusion of all but selected incidents, the picture, as a
whole, does not accurately represent the aspect of the city, as it
was. Pepys, who was an actual eye-witness, has noted not only the most
striking events but those of everyday commonplace interest, so that
his narrative is far more true to life. Defoe, on the other hand, has
removed his picture from its setting. Pepys shows us that, though the
spectre of plague was everywhere, everyday life went on, though in
subdued fashion. Defoe would have us believe that all activity was
paralysed.
For all this, however, as one reads the _Journal_ the narrative has
such an air of verisimilitude, that one instinctively pictures the
writer as describing what he has seen with his own eyes, so perfect is
the illusion. Mead, indeed, himself an authority on the plague and so
soon after the event, believed that the _Journal_ was the authentic
record of an eye-witness. Defoe’s faculty of visualizing what he has
not seen is inferior only to the vividness with which he describes what
he has visualized.
What is the secret of this vividness? More than all else, extreme
simplicity of language. The simple style was Defoe’s natural style,
and for that reason his use of it is fluent and easy, and knowing this
he fitly puts his story into the mouth of a simple saddler. Defoe
wrote for a growing class of readers of a lowly social order. He is
the apostle of the common people: that is why he imitates their way of
speaking. Not only is his narrative colloquial, but it deliberately
affects the language a saddler would use in reciting to his intimates
the memories of what he had lived through. There is no striving for
dramatic effect, no drawing of lurid pictures, no literary artifice,
but always the same sustained simplicity of diction, even in describing
the most appalling occurrences. There must be no chance of missing
the smallest point, so he even does such thinking as is necessary by
running comments on his own story.
The educated reader, particularly in these days, when even literature
is administered in tabloid form, must needs be wearied by the
prolixity, and irritated by the redundancy of the narrative. But
again it must be pleaded in extenuation that these very defects are
deliberate. Constant repetition, as every teacher knows, sooner or
later penetrates the densest brain.
But the _Journal_ is something more than a mere chronicle, vivid enough
at that, of what happened, and how men behaved, during the plague.
Defoe regards the plague as the judgement of God, and this attitude
imparts a strong moral purpose to the work. This is why he dwells so
much on the mental and moral effects of the catastrophe, inculcating
his lesson without the appearance of undue insistence. Pepys, as
we know, could find heart to make merry during the plague, just as
Boccaccio depicted his company of Florentines: to Defoe the mere idea
of merriment is revolting. Pepys, on New Year’s Eve, as he looked
back over the abomination of desolation, could make this entry in his
_Diary_:
‘December 31, 1665. I have never lived so merrily
(besides that I never got so much) as I have done this
plague time ... and great store of dancings we have
had at my cost (which I am willing to indulge myself
and wife) at my lodgings. The great evil of this year,
and the only one indeed, is the fall of my Lord of
Sandwich, whose mistake about the prizes hath undone
him.’
Pepys was a stranger to imagination: his pleasures and his griefs were
things of the surface and matters of the moment. His creed is egoistic
hedonism in all its naked brutishness. He is far more concerned over
the fire, where there is a chance of losing his property, than over
the plague where the chance is of losing his life. His New Year’s Eve
retrospect is not the only glimpse he gives us of callous indifference
to the horrors of the plague. Look at September 30, 1665, when the
fiercest spell was only just past:
‘So to sleep with a good deal of content, and saving
only this night and a day or two about the same
business a month or six weeks ago, I do end this month
with the greatest content, and may say that these
three months, for joy, health, and profit, have been
much the greatest that ever I received in all my life,
having nothing upon me but the consideration of the
sicklinesse of the season during this great plague to
mortify mee. For all which the Lord God be praised!’
It was not that Pepys was unconscious of the terrible scenes of
suffering around him, only that he was unmoved by them. Into one short
letter to Lady Cartaret, at the height of the plague, he compresses all
the grim details that fill a volume for Defoe.
Historians frequently lay it down that the fire of London swept away
the plague. As a fact it probably had little to do with its departure.
Several English towns were as hard hit as London, and yet in the
absence of any conflagration subsidence and disappearance of plague
followed the same course as in London. At Salonica,[188] about A.D.
1500, a fire which destroyed 8,000 houses was actually followed by
an outbreak of plague. It was a common contemporary belief that the
departure of plague from London was hastened by the coming of pit-coal
into general use, so that the atmosphere was constantly permeated by
sulphurous fumes.
Records in art of the Great Plague of London, though numerous, are
mostly unimportant. Generally artists have been content to illustrate
its copious literature. In 1863 Frederic Shields commenced an intended
series of illustrations of the _Journal_ of Defoe. Ruskin lavished
great praise on the woodcuts, for their imaginative power and for the
superlative excellence of the design. Proofs of six of these woodcuts
were to be seen at the Memorial Exhibition of the works of Shields
(Alpine Club, September-October 1911). The set of six comprised the
following scenes:
1. _The Decision of Faith_
A man is seated at a table, on which lies a Bill of
Mortality, with his Bible open before him. He says to
himself, ‘Well I know not what to do, Lord direct me.’
His finger points to the answer in the open Bible:
‘Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge,
even the most High, thy habitation: there shall no evil
befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy
dwelling.’
2. _The Death of the First-born_
A youth lies in convulsions on a bed, while a woman
kneels beside it. In the background are bearers
carrying away a corpse: both are smoking pipes. On the
ground lies an hour-glass.
3. _Solomon Eagle warning the Impenitent_
Solomon Eagle stands with a brazier of live coals on
his head in a fierce preaching attitude before a group
of lewd young women at an open window.
4. _The End of a Refugee_
A man with a long hooked pole is dragging a corpse
along. Beside him stands a grave-digger with spade,
dog, and dinner-basket.
5. _The Plague-Pit_
Bodies are being shot from a cart into a pit by the
light of a torch, which a man is holding.
6. _Escape of an Imprisoned Family_
The door of a house has been hacked down, and is lying
on a dead body.
George Cruickshank contributed four plates to Brayley’s edition of
the _Journal of the Plague Year_. Three of them, the ‘Dead Cart’, the
‘Great Pit in Aldgate’, and ‘Solomon Eagle’ are vivid and powerful; the
fourth, ‘The Water-man’s Wife’, feeble and commonplace.
The preaching of Solomon Eagle is the subject of a picture by P. F.
Poole, R.A., in the Mappin Gallery at Sheffield. The scene depicted
is taken from Harrison Ainsworth’s novel _Old Saint Paul’s_. It shows
Solomon Eagle, with the brazier of live coals on his head, nude but for
a loin-cloth; and discoursing to the terrified citizens outside old St
Paul’s Cathedral, during the plague. All around are strewn bodies of
dead and dying: a house displays the damning red cross and the words
‘Lord have mercy upon us’. In the background bearers are carrying away
a corpse to burial.
An incident, that Pepys describes in his _Diary_ under September 3,
1665, as follows, is represented in a modern picture by Miss Florence
Reason.
‘Among other stories, one was very passionate,
methought, of a complaint brought against a man in
the towne for taking a child from London from an
infected house. Alderman Hooker told us it was the
child of a very able citizen in Gracious Street, a
saddler, who had buried all the rest of his children
of the plague, and himself and his wife now being shut
up and in despair of escaping, did desire only to save
the life of this little child: and so prevailed to have
it received stark-naked into the arms of a friend, who
brought it (having put it into new fresh clothes) to
Greenwich; where, upon hearing the story, we did agree
it should be permitted to be received and kept in the
towne.’
In 1679 a terrible epidemic of plague broke out in Vienna, then an
opulent city, with a population of some 210,000, and the seat of
Leopold, the Holy Roman Emperor. Our chief knowledge of the visitation
is derived from Sorbait (_Consilium medicum oder freundliches
Gespräch_), Abraham a St. Clara (Merk’s _Wien_), and Fuhrmann (_Alt-
und Neu-Wien_). The disease was preceded by an epidemic of the ‘Hot
Sickness’, (_Hitzige Krankheit_), which was very fatal. Bubonic plague
followed in its wake and Vienna presented the spectacle of one huge
lazaretto for the sick, one gigantic plague-pit for the dead. Convicts,
as at Naples, were employed both to nurse the sick and bury the dead.
Clothing, furniture, and bedding lay littered in the streets mixed
with the dead and dying. When carts failed, the bodies were thrown
into the Danube. A Plague Committee strove in vain to shut up all
infected houses and segregate the inmates in lazarettos and stations of
quarantine. Death by public hanging was the penalty of disobedience.
Some of the royal princes, and foremost among them Prince Ferdinand of
Schwartzenburg, together with many of the nobility, devoted themselves
courageously to fighting the plague, undertaking even the most menial
duties. But many of the citizens and the Emperor himself fled. Leopold
conceived his obligations to his people discharged by a pilgrimage to
Maria-Zell to pray for cessation of the plague. Then he moved his court
to Prague, whence plague drove him to Linz.
During the plague the Viennese set up a wooden column, to which
frequent processions were made, observing the ancient ritual of the
Flagellants. At the end of the plague Leopold made a vow at St.
Stephan’s to replace it by a marble column, which was duly erected in
the Graben between 1687-93.
An incident of this plague, the story of the street-singer Augustin,
who was thrown alive, but drunk, into the plague-pit, but escaped none
the worse for his experience, recalls the like occurrence in Defoe. The
man is said to have composed the familiar ‘O du lieber Augustin’ in a
beer-house on the very night he was thrown into the plague-pit.
Amulets of various kinds were extensively employed in the seventeenth
century. In South Germany a common form was the so-called Pest Penny.
These had on one face, as a rule, the figure of St. Benedict or St.
Zacharias, and on the reverse some formula of exorcism.
Vienna[189] fell a victim to outbreak after outbreak of plague, but the
experience gained in the visitation of 1679 enabled the authorities to
stamp out the infection in 1691 and 1709, before it had grown out of
hand. But in 1713 all preventive measures failed to check its spread.
Then, in the month of May, processions and litanies were organized
to the plague column. The Emperor Charles VI remained in Vienna, and
pronounced a solemn vow in St. Stephan’s, that if the plague ceased he
would erect a church as a thank-offering. Such was the origin of the
Karlskirche. This church is a rich square edifice with a huge dome. It
is the _chef-d’œuvre_ of J. B. Fischer von Erlach, commenced in 1715.
The ravages of the plague are portrayed in relief, by Stanetti, in the
tympanum. Flanking the portico are two domed belfries, resembling
Trajan’s column, 108 feet high, with reliefs from the life of S. Carlo
Borromeo by Mader and Schletter. In March 1714, when the plague died
out after a total mortality of 120,000, a thanksgiving _Te Deum_ was
sung in St. Stephan’s, at which the emperor was present. Two series
of memorial coins were struck, the one showing the votive column, the
other the church dedicated to S. Carlo Borromeo.
The Plague Regulations, published in separate form at Vienna at the
time of this epidemic, give a good idea of current popular opinion
as to the nature of plague. There was no lack of adherents for each
belief of every preceding period. There were those who regarded it as a
signal evidence of God’s displeasure. There were those who attributed
it to poison in the air or food, generated in the stars and spread by
the malice of grave-diggers for their own purposes. Even the Jews were
incriminated. There were those who read its origin in the conjunction
of certain stars. Others ascribed it to famines, to poisonous fumes set
free by earthquakes, to comets, and even to dry seasons through the
multiplication of insects. Come how it might, clouds taking the form
of biers and funeral processions, noises in churchyards, and dreary
sounds in the air foretold its coming. On infected bodies the virus was
often visible as blue sulphurous fumes. There were clearly also some
who conceived a natural origin. A doctor, named Gregorovius, dissected
three dead bodies in search of the cause, but failed to find it. His
intrepid zeal was duly rewarded by the Emperor and by the Faculty of
Medicine in Vienna.
Conformably with the varying conceptions of cause, remedies were varied
and multifarious. Some pinned their faith to a devout life, aided by
processions and penitential sermons. Some lit fires to cleanse the air,
at times adding sulphur. A host of herbs, chief among them Angelica,
enjoyed repute as antipestilential remedies. The simple life appealed
to some, purgatives and blood-letting to others.
But side by side with this ill-assorted medley of measures, a code
of sanitary precautions had slowly grown up. Early notification by
the doctors, quarantine of suspects and segregation of the sick,
cleanliness and disinfection were all recommended and sedulously
executed, and supplied in embryo the essential principles of modern
sanitary science. Doctors were enjoined to keep sober, to fumigate
themselves, and to wear silk or taffetas, to which the virus would
not cling. We have arrived indeed at the parting of the ways, and
henceforth the stream of medical science, polluted less and less by
the surface waters of superstition, flows on clear and full in its
appointed channel. The sun of science emerges at length from its
protracted winter solstice.
FOOTNOTES:
[182] _De Peste._
[183] _De Peste._
[184] _De Peste._
[185] _Reports to Royal Society._
[186] _Researches into the Laws and Phenomena of Pestilence._
[187] _Loimologia, and Dict. of Nat. Biog._
[188] Rabbi Joshua, ii. 403.
[189] Krafft-Ebing, _Geschichte der Pest in Wien_.