Hence it was that this rumour died off again, and people began to forget it as a thing we were very little concerned in, and that we hoped was not true till the latter end of November or the beginning of December 1664 when two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague in Long Acre, or rather at the upper end of Drury Lane. But it seems that the Government had a true account of it, and several councils were held about ways to prevent its coming over but all was kept very private. But such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now. We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since.

Defoe's account, which appears to include much research, is far more systematic and detailed than Pepys's first-person account. The novel is often compared to the actual, contemporary accounts of the plague in the diary of Samuel Pepys. Additionally, it provides tables of casualty figures and discusses the credibility of various accounts and anecdotes received by the narrator. In the book, Defoe goes to great pains to achieve an effect of verisimilitude, identifying specific neighborhoods, streets, and even houses in which events took place. and is probably based on the journals of Defoe's uncle, Henry Foe. Defoe was only five years old in 1665, and the book itself was published under the initials H.

Presented as an eyewitness account of the events at the time, it was written in the years just prior to the book's first publication in March 1722. The book is told somewhat chronologically, though without sections or chapter headings. This novel is an account of one man's experiences of the year 1665, in which the Great Plague or the bubonic plague struck the city of London. A Journal of the Plague Year is a novel by Daniel Defoe

A journal of the plague year sparknotes