A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2) by Charles Creighton

suggestive of Dekker. The somewhat meagre references by Hodges might have sufficed him for his frequent theme of the hardships and horrors of shut-up houses, even if he had not seen two other tracts, of 1665, on the same. The accounts of the Marseilles plague, one of the worst in history, would have kept him right in picturing that of London. Whatever materials Defoe took from Hodges, Vincent, or the writers on other plagues, he enlarged them by his power of circumstantial construction into a narrative which must be accounted on the whole veracious. He based upon figures, whenever he could get them; he seems even to have sought among the archives of the City for accounts of monies distributed to the poor. He prints in full the orders of the Mayor and Aldermen, and professes to give the text of a formal resolution which they passed to remain at their posts throughout the crisis. His table of the number of plague-deaths in each of twenty-six towns or villages near London does not, indeed, agree with the figures in the parish registers, as the table on a later page will show; but it can hardly have been drawn up at a guess. The best instance of Defoe’s skilful use of authentic documents is his description of how the infection invaded one part of London after another from the western suburbs to the eastern, so that its intensity was nearly over in one place before it had begun in another. That is the most interesting epidemiological fact in the whole outbreak; and Defoe has done ample justice to it. Boghurst had stated it with equal clearness and emphasis in his manuscript of 1666, which Defoe may or may not have seen[1201]; however the latter deduced it afresh, and illustrated it by numerous tables from the bills of mortality, which showed the incidence of plague upon each of the one hundred and forty parishes from week to week. Antecedents, Beginnings and Progress of the Plague of 1665. When the London plague of 1665 had given indications that it would grow to be one of the great outbreaks of that infection, much was made, in the retrospect, of a single death from plague which had occurred towards the end of December, 1664, in a house in or near Long Acre. Connected with that case was one of those trivial chains of evidence which are so often produced as the easy solution of a difficult problem. A bale of silks had come to the house from Holland, and that bale of silks could be traced to the Levant; therefore the seeds of the great plague of London were imported Levantine seeds. This was pretty well for a city which had a continuous record of plague-infection in its soil ever since the Black Death of 1348. But credulity could ignore facts more recent than the history for three centuries. The death in Long Acre in December was a solitary one, and was of no more import for what followed than any of the five other sporadic plague-deaths in 1664[1202]. Only one more death from plague occurred in the bills (in the middle of February), until the last week of April, 1665; even then the progress of the infection was slower for the next two months than it had been in many former seasons of moderate plague, such as the five years 1606-1610 and the eight years 1640-1647, or than it had been in the great plague-years of 1603, 1625 and