A Journal of the Plague Year - Definition and Overview

A Journal of the Plague Year is a novel by Daniel Defoe. It is a fictionalised account of one man's experiences of the year 1665, in which the plague struck the city of London. The book is a roughly chronological account, purporting to have been written several years after the event. It was in fact written in the years just prior to the book's first publication in March of 1722 – Defoe was only five years old in 1665, and the book itself was published under the initials H. F.

In the book, Defoe goes to great pains to achieve an effect of verisimilitude, identifying specific houses in which events took place, providing tables of casualty figures and discussing the credibility of various accounts received by the narrator.

External links

• Free eBook of A Journal of the Plague Year (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/376) at Project Gutenberg
• The works of Daniel Defoe (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/author?name=Defoe,%20Daniel) at Project Gutenberg.
• The Introduction (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/decameronintro.html) to Boccaccio's The Decameron.