Name: A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials, Of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as Well Public as Private, Which Happened in Lond (in English)
Price: 29.46 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Daniel Defoe
ISBN: 9781909606470

portada A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials, Of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as Well Public as Private, Which Happened in Lond (in English)

Type

Physical Book

Author

Daniel Defoe

Publisher

Spradabach Publishing

Language

English

Pages

376

Format

Hardcover

Dimensions

21.6 x 14.0 x 2.5 cm

Weight

0.63 kg.

ISBN13

9781909606470

Synopsis "A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials, Of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as Well Public as Private, Which Happened in Lond (in English)"

In November 1664, rumours began winding their way through crowded, filthy, stinking alleyways about the death of two Frenchmen from the Plague at Long Acre. The plague had raged in Amsterdam with incredible violence the year before, as some still remembered, and it appeared to have its made to London by boat. At first, the family with whom the Frenchmen were staying, and then those who had caught the invisible contagion, attempted to conceal it, but soon enough the deaths began to mount, and the cat was out of the bag. Along with the disgusting buboes, the dead carts, and the secret mass graves, people's fervid imagination snowballed too, conjuring all manner of horrors-about the symptoms, about the disease, about pestilential houses filled with rotting corpses-sweeping the city with a foul wave of paranoia and terror. Who had it? Was it in the air? Was it divine punishment? Whither could one flee? Defoe, who lived through these events during infancy, and apparently basing his narrative on his uncle's diary, plus a variety documents, tells the story in the manner of a witness account. Its frightening immediacy makes it far superior, and vastly more engrossing, than Hodges' formal, medically-focused volume on the same subject. In the end, the plague claimed over 68,000 lives, about a quarter of the city's population. Sociologically and in terms of the official response, astonishing, sometimes tragicomical parallels, emerge in the mind of the modern reader, between what became known as the Great Plague of London of 1665, and the more recent coronavirus pandemic. There are occasions for eyerolls, anger, laugher, and contempt herein. It seems that although we know history, we are condemned to repeat it anyway.

Daniel Defoe

(Author)

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Daniel Defoe (Londres, 1660-1731) fue novelista, periodista, poeta e historiador; su vida transcurrió por oscuros vericuetos: viajes, empleos diversos, amistades políticas y misiones secretas. En su obra cultivó distintos géneros, como la sátira: El verdadero inglés de Inglaterra (1701), El medio más rápido para acabar con los disidentes (1702) y Augusta Triumphants o Cómo hacer de Londres la ciudad más floreciente del mundo (1728); la novela realista: La aventuras de Moll Flanders (1722), Diario del año de la peste (1722) y Roxana o la amante afortunada(1724), y el ensayo económico-político: Consideraciones sobre el crédito público (1724), El perfecto comerciante inglés (1726) y Plan del comercio inglés (1728). Con todo, su obra más conocida es sin duda Robinson Crusoe (1719).

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