Skip to main content
Mansfield College Oxford home
  • Home
  • About
    • « back
    • About
    • Principal’s Welcome
    • Values and Ethos
    • Environmental Sustainability
    • Our History
      • « back
      • Our History
      • 40 Years of Women at Mansfield
        • « back
        • 40 Years of Women at Mansfield
        • A Photographic History of Mansfield's Women: 1979 - 2020
        • Women at Mansfield: A Brief History
        • A Brief History of Mansfield's Women (For Screenreaders)
    • News & Features
    • Events
    • Mansfield College Public Talks
    • Emeritus & Honorary Fellows
    • Mansfield People
    • Explore Mansfield
    • Mansfield College Chapel
    • Public Documents & GDPR
    • Vacancies
    • Contact us
    • Press
  • Prospective Students
    • « back
    • Prospective Students
    • Why Apply to Mansfield?
    • How to Apply
      • « back
      • How to Apply
      • The Admissions Process
      • Information for Applicants
      • Feedback
    • Undergraduate Study
      • « back
      • Undergraduate Study
      • Subjects
      • Studying at Mansfield
      • Living at Mansfield
      • Student Life
      • Fees & Finance
    • Graduate Study
      • « back
      • Graduate Study
      • Studying at Mansfield
      • Living at Mansfield
      • Student Life
      • Fees and Finance
      • Graduate Scholarships
    • Visiting Student Programme
      • « back
      • Visiting Student Programme
      • Subjects
      • Living at Mansfield
      • Student Life
      • Fees and Finance
      • How to Apply
    • Open Days
    • Schools and Colleges Liaison
      • « back
      • Schools and Colleges Liaison
      • Digital Outreach
        • « back
        • Digital Outreach
        • Mansfield Isolation Conversation
          • « back
          • Mansfield Isolation Conversation
          • 3rd and 4th Century Social Distancing in the Desert (Jenn Strawbridge, Theology)
          • Avoiding an Empty Universe with Solitary Neutrinos (Steve Biller, Physics)
          • Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (Ros Ballaster, English)
          • Doing Community in Isolation: Mosques, Mecca and One Direction
          • Isolation and Revelation (Alison Salvesen, Oriental Studies)
          • Magnets in isolation (Stephen Blundell, Physics)
          • Oscar Wilde in prison (Michèle Mendelssohn, English)
          • Physically, but not socially, isolated: Insights from a small Micronesian island
          • Power and politics amidst COVID-19 seclusions—perspectives from geography (Amber Murrey, Geography)
          • Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude’ (Ruth Scobie, English)
          • Social Distancing in Ancrene Wisse (Lucinda Rumsey, English)
          • Social distancing and quantum computing – are we all qubits now? (Jason Smith, Materials Science)
          • Thomas Nashe: ‘Plague’s Prisoner’ (Chris Salamone, English)
          •  Even buildings need isolation (Sinan Acikgoz, Engineering)
        • Resources to explore your subject
      • Visiting Mansfield
      • Visiting Your School or College
  • Current Students
    • « back
    • Current Students
    • Student Hub
    • The College Office
    • Student Handbook
    • Information for Graduates
    • Prizes, Scholarships & Grants
    • Library
      • « back
      • Library
      • Hours, access and conditions of use
      • Finding and borrowing books
      • Book suggestion form
      • The Library building
      • Special Collections and Archives
      • Assistive equipment & procedures and recommended self-help & study skills reading
      • Online and e-resources
      • Online library forms
    • Graduation
    • Welfare
    • Junior Deans
    • JCR
    • MCR
    • Reach Scholarship
    • FAQs
  • Alumni & Supporters
    • « back
    • Alumni & Supporters
    • Support Mansfield
      • « back
      • Support Mansfield
      • Making Your Gift
        • « back
        • Making Your Gift
        • Give Online
        • Give By Post
        • Give By Phone
        • Give By Bank Transfer
        • International Giving
        • Remembering Mansfield in your Will
        • Other ways to Support Mansfield
          • « back
          • Other ways to Support Mansfield
          • Gifts of Shares and Vouchers
          • Payroll Giving
          • Tax-efficient giving
          • Donating Time and Support
      • Mansfield Matters Fund
      • Student Support Fund
      • Access and Outreach
      • The Campaign for Teaching
      • Buildings and Environment
      • Scholarships
        • « back
        • Scholarships
        • The Adam von Trott Memorial Appeal
          • « back
          • The Adam von Trott Memorial Appeal
          • The Adam Von Trott Scholars
      • Recognising your Gift
      • Remembering Mansfield in your Will
      • How Your Gift Makes a Difference
      • Alumni and Supporter Promise
    • Alumni & Supporter Events
    • News & Publications
    • Latest alumni publications
    • Stay in Touch
    • Meet the Team
    • Mansfield Alumni Association
    • Online Shop
    • Regular Support
  • Conferences & Events
    • « back
    • Conferences & Events
    • Conferencing
    • Conference Facilities
    • Conference Accommodation
    • B&B
    • Fine Dining
    • How to Book

Top bar menu

  • Accessibility Statement
  • Contact
  • Meal booking
  • Student Hub
  • Vacancies
  • Home
  • About
    About
    • Principal’s Welcome
    • Values and Ethos
    • Environmental Sustainability
    • Our History
    • News & Features
    • Events
    • Mansfield College Public Talks
    • Emeritus & Honorary Fellows
    • Mansfield People
    • Explore Mansfield
    • Mansfield College Chapel
    • Public Documents & GDPR
    • Vacancies
    • Contact us
    • Press
  • Prospective Students
    Prospective Students
    • Why Apply to Mansfield?
    • How to Apply
    • Undergraduate Study
    • Graduate Study
    • Visiting Student Programme
    • Open Days
    • Schools and Colleges Liaison
  • Current Students
    Current Students
    • Student Hub
    • The College Office
    • Student Handbook
    • Information for Graduates
    • Prizes, Scholarships & Grants
    • Library
    • Graduation
    • Welfare
    • Junior Deans
    • JCR
    • MCR
    • Reach Scholarship
    • FAQs
  • Alumni & Supporters
    Alumni
    • Support Mansfield
    • Alumni & Supporter Events
    • News & Publications
    • Latest alumni publications
    • Stay in Touch
    • Meet the Team
    • Mansfield Alumni Association
    • Online Shop
    • Regular Support
  • Conferences & Events
    Conference & Events

    Mansfield College offers a range of conference, fine dining and corporate event facilities within one of the most attractive sites in Oxford. 

    • Conferencing
    • Conference Facilities
    • Conference Accommodation
    • B&B
    • Fine Dining
    • How to Book

Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (Ros Ballaster, English)

Title from early edition of the book. It reads 'Memoirs of the Plague'.

Ros Ballaster,
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies

This is a story of ‘oral contagion’.[1] In 1722, Daniel Defoe describes how news of a terrifying disease took grip in Holland in 1664, reputedly brought to its shores by a Turkish fleet. All too soon the illness was spreading by unknown means through London: and with it gossip and speculation about bungled state attempts to contain the swift transmission. Defoe’s short fiction – now being eagerly read on screens by those confined indoors in 2020 and hungry for literature that speaks to their own moment – was itself composed in response to a later outbreak of plague: in Marseille, France, in the 1720s. Britain, an expanding maritime trading empire, saw its economy as well as the lives of its people under threat once more and looked to the recent past for weapons to prevent a similar devastation.

There is much to learn and to fascinate in Defoe’s fiction. And we will recognise the patterns that the narrator, a saddler [2] only known as ‘H.F.’, describes: the struggle to maintain social distance in a crowded metropolis; the panicked exodus to the country, which only spreads the disease further; the pressure on those delivering care; stories of greed mixed with those of generosity; contradictory reactions of opportunism, providentialism and resignation. In all, Defoe provides a gripping study of human behaviour and in particular the struggle of mind to get a grip in circumstances of threat and sudden change.

I have a colleague at Wuhan University, Dr Wen Zhang, who has been reading Journal of the Plague Year and, in our mutual social isolation, we’ve been sharing our thoughts online about its relevance. She quotes to me H.F.’s observation that people would improve in their behaviours and what he calls ‘morals’ under such pressures, but ‘it must be acknowledged that the general practice of the people was just as it was before, and very little difference was to be seen.’

Defoe gives us insight through H.F. into the way we tend to think and respond when we find ourselves in a world-shifting environment. H.F. can’t think his way out of things. H.F. keeps ‘resolving’ on a course of action and then repenting of it. When he goes out, he decides to stay in. When he stays in, he starts to long to get out:

Such intervals as I had I employed in reading books and in writing down my memorandums of what occurred to me every day, and out of which afterwards I took most of this work, as it relates to my observations without doors. What I wrote of my private meditations I reserve for private use, and desire it may not be made public on any account whatever.

H.F. is an inveterate counter of things: financial losses, the numbers of the dead (the ‘bills of mortality’). And yet he is also a hoarder and he explicitly states that there are things he is not telling us: his private meditations that he is ‘reserving’. It is worth noting the play on the word ‘tell’. To ‘tell’ is to count (think of a bank-teller), but also to narrate. Stories are built on the not-said, the implied, as well as what we can count. And this is a fiction that counts costs: not only in terms of human lives, but human dignity, and our sense of integrity.

Defoe shows us the mentality of the ordinary person facing extraordinary invasions of privacy. And he also shows us resilience, our inner resources. The last word of Journal of the Plague Year is ‘alive’:

‘I shall conclude the account of this calamitous year therefore with a coarse but sincere stanza of my own, which I placed at the end of my ordinary memorandums the same year they were written:—

                             A dreadful plague in London was

                             In the year sixty-five,

                             Which swept an hundred thousand souls

                            Away; yet I alive!

                           H. F.

[1] See Paula McDowell, ‘Defoe and the Contagion of the Oral: Modelling Media Shift in “A Journal of the Plague Year”,’ PMLA Vol. 121, No. 1, Special Topic: The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature (Jan., 2006), pp. 87-106.

[2] A saddler makes leather equestrian equipment and H.F. tells us that most of his trade

 

 

Find out more about Professor Ros Ballaster here. Professor Ros

  • Mansfield Isolation Conversation
    • 3rd and 4th Century Social Distancing in the Desert (Jenn Strawbridge, Theology)
    • Avoiding an Empty Universe with Solitary Neutrinos (Steve Biller, Physics)
    • Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (Ros Ballaster, English)
    • Doing Community in Isolation: Mosques, Mecca and One Direction
    • Isolation and Revelation (Alison Salvesen, Oriental Studies)
    • Magnets in isolation (Stephen Blundell, Physics)
    • Oscar Wilde in prison (Michèle Mendelssohn, English)
    • Physically, but not socially, isolated: Insights from a small Micronesian island
    • Power and politics amidst COVID-19 seclusions—perspectives from geography (Amber Murrey, Geography)
    • Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude’ (Ruth Scobie, English)
    • Social Distancing in Ancrene Wisse (Lucinda Rumsey, English)
    • Social distancing and quantum computing – are we all qubits now? (Jason Smith, Materials Science)
    • Thomas Nashe: ‘Plague’s Prisoner’ (Chris Salamone, English)
    •  Even buildings need isolation (Sinan Acikgoz, Engineering)

Footer menu

  • About
  • Prospective Students
  • Current Students
  • Alumni & Supporters
  • Conferences & Events
  • Student Hub
  • Vacancies

Mansfield College and University of Oxford logos

Facebook iconFacebook
Linkedin iconLinkedin
Twitter iconTwitter
Flickr iconFlickr
Instagram iconInstagram
Copyright Mansfield College 2019. All rights reserved. Site Design by Franks and Franks Development by Olamalu