Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year and Covid-19

“A useful, original, and timely book, written with rigour, passion, and emotion. It deserves a wide readership among those who believe classic literature can tell us about our own circumstances and help us to work towards solutions to problems of the present.”

─Prof. Nicholas Seager Head of the School of Humanities, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK

Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year has taken on a new relevance with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through an exploration of two chronologically distant societies in crisis, this study compares the attitudes, beliefs, and conduct of the public portrayed in the book and those in our own embattled Covid era. There are interesting similarities to note, with equivalents to the Covid-deniers and the anti-vaxxers to be found in Defoe's bleak vision of London in the 1660s as it descends into a state of chaos. JPY offers us some uncomfortable truths about human nature that resonate strongly in our own times, revealing how responding to a pandemic can bring out both the best and the worst in our character as we face up to a world where the old certainties no longer seem to apply. Pandemics expose the fault-lines in ideology, putting the social contract at risk - the question they pose is whether we can continue to rely on our current socio-political set-up or whether it requires a radical rethink. There is a pressing need for more debate on this issue, and this project is designed to make a case for that.

Stuart Sim is a retired Professor of Critical Theory at Northumbria University, UK, having previously worked for the Open University and the University of Sunderland. He is widely published in the fields of critical theory, literary studies and philosophy, and is a Fellow of the English Association.