Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year and Covid-19: A Tale of Two Pandemics 3031312856, 9783031312854

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Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Covid-19 A Tale of Two Pandemics

Stuart Sim

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

Stuart Sim

Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Covid-19 A Tale of Two Pandemics

Stuart Sim Northumbria University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-31285-4    ISBN 978-3-031-31286-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31286-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to my editor at Palgrave, Eileen Srebernik, for all her help in knocking the proposal into shape, and to the readers of the proposal for their perceptive comments about useful amendments to make to the project overall. As ever, Dr. Helene Brandon provided invaluable support and advice throughout the writing of the book.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Societies in Crisis 1 2 A Journal of the Plague Year in the Twenty-­First Century15 3 Narrating the Pandemic: A Journal of the Plague Year25 4 Narrating the Pandemic: Covid-1949 5 Pandemics in Perspective65 Index77

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Societies in Crisis

Abstract  This introductory chapter establishes the main themes and concerns of the book: the parallels between Covid-19 and the Great Plague of London in 1665 (as portrayed in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year), and what these tell us of the politics and belief systems of their respective societies. A key objective is to show that pandemics reveal the fault-lines in each society’s ideology, creating tensions within the social contract. Defoe’s work is to be used as a means of exploring those tensions in our contemporary Covid-impacted world. The intention to look at the depictions of plague in Samuel Pepys’s Diary and Albert Camus’s The Plague in comparison to Defoe’s, is also outlined. Keywords  Daniel Defoe • Pandemic • A Journal of the Plague Year • Plague • Covid-19 • Spanish flu • Libertarianism • Virus • Samuel Pepys • Albert Camus Daniel Defoe’s novel A Journal of the Plague Year has taken on a new relevance of late with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic; it becomes an illuminating exercise to compare the attitudes, beliefs, and conduct of the public portrayed in the book and those in our embattled Covid era.1 There are certainly striking 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 plague-ridden 1660s as it descends into a state of near chaos, with © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Sim, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Covid-19, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31286-1_1

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plague pits being rapidly dug and just as rapidly filled up throughout the city, to the understandable dismay of the city’s inhabitants. We are all too familiar as well with the general air of unease, and just plain bewilderment, that settled over society then, a sense of not quite knowing what to do or how to behave in a situation that we had little defence against. There are even equivalents to the party-going antics of the Conservative government machine in Downing Street, with a devil-may-care attitude towards infection being displayed by some London residents, as if somehow anyone as important as they took themselves to be would be immune from infection (or from infecting others either, a consideration that largely seemed to escape the Downing Street crowd). A Journal of the Plague Year (henceforth 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. Which of these aspects is allowed to dominate in our politics is a matter of some considerable importance. Do we become a more authoritarian society or a more democratic one? More inclined to help others or less? These are issues that have to concern all of us, and it would have to be said that the outlook is not all that promising at present. The pandemic has therefore been a rude awakening, as nothing on this scale has happened since the Spanish flu episode in the aftermath of World War I, and as Laura Spinney has noted, ‘as infectious diseases become more prevalent, so do conservative, authoritarian attitudes’ (there may even be links between the rise of the Nazis and the social disorder generated by Spanish flu, as an intriguing case in point).2 It is only too easy to note examples of this happening throughout the current geopolitical order (Russia, Hungary and Poland spring readily to mind at present, but there are many others), and supporters of liberal democracy have come to realise that they have a fight on their hands to prevent this from becoming the norm. The war in Ukraine and then the energy crisis that grew out of this have not helped matters on that front either. Most people in the West would have thought such events as a pandemic were things of the past, that modern medicine had more or less overcome them—or would, given a short time to develop appropriate treatment. Being brought to a standstill by some mysterious microbe would not have crossed most people’s minds, particularly the thought of such an extraordinary state of affairs stretching into the future, disrupting one’s lifestyle apparently indefinitely in the process. Pandemics really do force us to reset our worldview quite comprehensively.

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This project will be an exploration of societies in crisis, 1665 London as envisaged so vividly by Defoe and the UK (plus the West in general) in the early 2020s, where their respective ideologies and belief systems are being cast into serious doubt as the situation rapidly spirals out of control. We then find the authorities struggling, not very efficiently most of the time, to deal with the breakdown of normal life that results. The relationship between the individual and authority becomes very problematic under those circumstances, inviting critical analysis as to what that tells us about our socio-political system. One of the most revealing aspects of the pandemic is how it has disproportionately affected the lower-income groups, whose infection rate has far exceeded those at the upper end of the scale— as was the case also in the Great Plague of 1665, as Defoe records: ‘the Misery of that Time lay upon the Poor, who being infected, had neither Food or Physick’.3 He goes into considerable detail about all those who suffer when, as a direct result of the plague’s inroads, ‘Trade, except such as related to immediate Subsistence, was, as it were, at a full Stop’, and this in a society with only a minimal welfare system to offer help to its citizens in such instances (as the experience of servants alone, often turned out into the streets by their employers, clearly signals).4 That is a discrepancy which becomes all the more startling in our own time when comparing infection rates in the West and the developing world, with its often rudimentary public healthcare and welfare systems; the lower one goes on the income scale then the lower the likelihood of one’s survival becomes when any kind of disaster strikes. This is a topic I will be returning to at later points in the book. We see individuals increasingly being thrown back on their own resources as the authorities’ ineffectiveness is made glaringly obvious, a condition which sparks a growth in conspiracy theories, with all their toxic effect on human relations. We are still living in the shadow of these several years after the pandemic was first identified, with the market for them remaining depressingly buoyant. As Spinney has also pointed out, ‘plague challenges the “master narrative” told by the spiritual or secular leaders and allows new stories to emerge that explain where things went wrong, and how to put them right’, and conspiracy theory has certainly generated its share of such new stories.5 Once again, that does liberal democracy no favours, undermining the rational debate that it so depends on to maintain its political well-being. A health crisis cannot avoid becoming a political crisis too. Libertarianism has also contributed to that political crisis in the way that it has rejected many of the proposals that governments have put

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forward to reduce the spread of infection, libertarians claiming that they constitute an attack on their basic freedoms—health crisis and political crisis merging yet again in a distinctly unhelpful fashion. The pandemic has been a master-class on the perils of political extremism. Pandemics expose the fault-lines in ideology, therefore, putting the social contract at risk, a phenomenon that we have become well aware of, as Covid has gone on generating new variants and problematising painstakingly worked-out plans of action. (Such mutation can never be ruled out, no matter how much the situation appears to improve. It is in the nature of microbes to keep on producing variants, as we have seen happen persistently with flu over the course of the twentieth century, from the devastating Spanish flu outbreak onwards with its estimated 50 million deaths: ‘a byword for viral Armageddon’ as Mark Honigsbaum has described it in his survey The Pandemic Century.6 Flu is never really conquered, just contained to what is taken to be a socially acceptable degree, which 50 million deaths plainly was not—in a world where the population was just under 2 billion rather than our almost 8 billion.) The question that pandemics ultimately pose is whether we can continue to rely on our current socio-political set-up or whether it requires a radical rethink. (Conspiracy theory could even be considered a rethink on those lines, but not one that alters the system for the better.) The more that money determines health and life expectancy, cutting off the poor from ‘Food and Physick’ as it were, then the less democratic a society we have, and there is little doubt that the pandemic has made that very obvious. There is a pressing need for more debate on this issue, and this project is designed to make a case for that: we need a new story here and we need it urgently. Apart from anything else, the pandemic has taught us that we need to think internationally about such phenomena. It is short-sighted to assume that we can isolate ourselves from what is occurring elsewhere on the globe. If the pandemic is left raging in one place, it will inevitably find its way into others no matter what protection they may have taken: microbes can emigrate where they will. That was true in Defoe’s time as well. The plague was carried from port to port by ships trading between countries around Europe and the Ottoman empire (plus the new colonial possessions that European nations were busily amassing, of course), so there is a recognition then of there being an international dimension to the problem. It is even more the case in a world that has become as interconnected as ours has in modern times, where airline travel can transport a virus over vast distances in just a few hours. Pandemics can only be accelerated in

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such a condition, and it is not one likely to change. Airline travel has predictably increased sharply as pandemic restrictions have been relaxed, and microbes are primed to take advantage of just such situations: they could almost have been designed for them. For the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy the virus is ‘all-too human’ in that respect, in that its success in spreading is a direct consequence of our socio-economic progress: as he pointedly puts it, it is ‘in every way a product of globalization’.7 It is something to ponder on that our progress facilitates the virus’s progress. Reference will also be made throughout this study to Samuel Pepys’s Diary, a first-hand account of the plague in contrast to Defoe’s imaginative reconstruction, as well as to Albert Camus’s novel The Plague.8 For both Defoe and Camus the pandemic has a wider metaphorical significance, political and metaphysical in Camus and both political and spiritual in Defoe, who is trying to make sense of the event from a dissenting religious position (nonconformism as it came to be known). The precariousness of human existence comes through powerfully in each case, as it has during the current pandemic, whether the cause is human evil in the guise of fascism or an uncompromising divinity that will punish those of us who fall short of its strict notions of morality (and by the ruthless penalty of eternal damnation). After considering some of the parallels to be noted between Defoe’s plague and the Covid-19 pandemic in Chap. 2, the project will go on to consider the narrative that was constructed for each event in Chaps. 3 and 4 (still being constructed for Covid in fact, as it is proving a remarkably resilient opponent whose impact looks set to be long-term). In each case I will be analysing the relationship that develops between ideology and pandemics, how the latter create problems for any society’s belief system, showing up its inconsistencies and weaknesses and testing the authorities responsible for dealing with these. I will conclude by putting the pandemics in perspective, summarising what pandemic experience reveals about us; as well as considering what that tells us about what we ought to be bearing in mind for future outbreaks—as there is little doubt that there will be. Covid is unlikely to be the last of its kind (as noted above we have still not rid ourselves of flu, which rolls around every winter without fail in a new mutation, claiming yet another crop of victims, new and constantly improved vaccines notwithstanding), and we need to be careful not to become complacent in that respect. Unfortunately, complacency already appears to be creeping into our pandemic in the aftermath of the vaccination programme, as if we could just return to normal and pretend that the

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event was over and done with and could now be consigned to history. Warning voices are already beginning to sound from within the health profession about dropping all the safety measures that had helped to guide us through the darkest days of Covid, such as face-masks and social distancing—plus extensive use of lateral flow tests (H.  F., too, notes with disapproval the increasingly reckless behaviour of London’s citizenry as the bills of mortality began to fall, such that they even ‘went boldly into Company, with those who had Tumours and Carbuncles upon them, that were running, and consequently contagious, but eat and drank with them, nay into their Houses to visit them’9). Governments seem determined, however, to signal that everything is back to normal and that we can all now relax; whether the virus is minded to is another matter altogether. Some friends who went on a Mediterranean cruise in summer 2022, reported that by the end of the two-week trip more than 10 per cent of the ship’s passengers and crew had to be quarantined in their cabins because of a Covid outbreak on board (other such tales began to come through in the news, bearing out the virus’s persistence). In this context, JPY becomes a book of our times, linking us back to the suffering of our predecessors, in particular, the anxiety that became such an inescapable part of their lives. JPY’s protagonist H. F. may have a very different worldview than ours, but we can easily identify with his despair about his situation, his awareness of his personal vulnerability, his debilitating sense of helplessness in the face of social disaster. For any of us as individuals, a pandemic poses an existential crisis where our very survival is at stake on a daily basis; H. F.’s plight becomes ours in that respect. Pandemics are not the only kind of existential crisis that we have to worry about: the radical change that is taking place in our climate, before our very eyes, has the potential to make our planet all but uninhabitable, and may very well generate new pandemics to intensify that experience as the situation worsens. (Diseases are already starting to migrate north from tropical zones with the heat, a trend that can only worsen as things stand, and that presents yet another set of unwelcome challenges to beleaguered health services.) Wandering around a stricken city as the death toll mounts could become our fate too: yet another reason to pay close attention to what JPY is telling us about such an event and the effect it is having on the hapless inhabitants involved. The situation recalls Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the ‘event’ as a traumatic experience that shakes a society to its foundations, involving ‘the impact, on the system, of floods of energy such that the system does not manage to bind and channel this energy’.10 JPY

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gives us life at the very edge of viability, where the virus’s copious ‘floods of energy’ are wreaking havoc on an entire community and its way of life.

Defoe and the Plague Although written almost 57 years after the plague, H. F.s plight is something Defoe could understand only too well. He was born in 1660, meaning that the plague was a highly significant part of his childhood that even someone as young as he was when it broke out could hardly forget. Despite his being evacuated from the city after it started, the Great Plague was such a catastrophic episode that no-one of Defoe’s generation could fail to have been unaware of the devastating impact it had, and tales of it were well etched into the public memory over the course of the author’s life (as they were with the Great Fire of London that followed on a year later also). Neither had the plague disappeared by the time Defoe was writing JPY. Outbreaks were to continue throughout the eighteenth century; even later in fact (Los Angeles was to have its own worrying experience of this in 192411), so its return was always a distinct possibility. The reports that kept filtering in of where else it was currently raging made sure the citizens of busy ports like London remained uncomfortably aware of its continued threat, as H. F. reports: It was about the Beginning of September 1664, that I, among the Rest of my Neighbours, heard in ordinary Discourse, that the Plague was return’d again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the Year 1663[.]12

H. F. also notes the many rumours flying about as to the source of the plague this time around: ‘some said from Italy, others from the Levant among some Goods, which were brought home by their Turkey Fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus’.13 In other words, it is the usual trade routes that eventually will lead to London; there is no guaranteed safe haven from plague as long as one is part of that network. But as H. F. goes on to laconically remark, ‘It matter’d not, from whence it come; but all agreed, it was come into Holland again’.14 There was a sense of it inexorably closing in on London, a fate that could not be avoided indefinitely. It was not so much a matter of if, as when it would arrive. Plague was no mere historical phenomenon to Defoe and his contemporaries, it was something they had to live with and make sense of as

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best they could within their belief system. How they did so, and how that relates to our own pandemic experience, is what this project is designed to explore. Overall, this will be an exercise in using literary fiction as a basis for analysing complex socio-political issues in the contemporary world. That is something we do almost automatically with the fiction of our own day, which very often is deliberately addressing key concerns in the public sphere and inviting us to think them through more thoroughly. But classic fiction, such as the work of Defoe, is admirably suited to that task as well, particularly a narrative dealing with a social crisis on the scale of the Great Plague of 1665, which threatened the stability of an entire society. It is a method I have previously deployed in The Eighteenth-Century Novel and Contemporary Social Issues, which sought to demonstrate the instructive parallels between our two ages that could help us to perceive such issues, and their socio-political implications, more clearly, such that we could devise more effective strategies for dealing with them.15 Defoe’s Roxana, as a case in point, invited us to re-examine gender inequality and the various restrictions women have to face in a patriarchal society, many of which are still with us in our supposedly more enlightened age. It is a text that resonates strongly now, prompting us to investigate our own attitudes and assumptions on the topic. Fiction from the past could be applied to the present therefore, taking on a wider sociological significance as a result. That is the role allotted for JPY here, a depiction of crisis which directs our attention to our own extended engagement with the same phenomenon in the destructively resourceful form of Covid-19. It is a work of serious intent asking us to think through some very serious issues, literature at its most socially conscious. We can see it as a novel of ideas by which to test, and I am suggesting even pass judgement on, our own reaction to what has proved to be a disruptive and disorienting event unlike anything seen in Western society since the days of World War II. It offers a window onto the experience of almost overwhelming social crisis which will repay our close study. Eventually the work raises the critical question: what can the individual do when society is breaking down around him or her? H. F. becomes the vehicle through which Defoe can explore this most pressing of issues. JPY may be fiction, but as one of its editors neatly sums it up, it ‘lies like the truth’.16 In a recent addition to the canon of plague literature, Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague, the narrator notes that ‘[t]his is both a historical novel and a history written in the form of a novel’, which constitutes a

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particularly apt description of Defoe’s approach in JPY.17 It really does not matter that its protagonist is named after a relative of Defoe’s (his uncle Henry Foe), nor how close he comes to his character; all that is incidental to the book’s powerful impact as a portrait of a society mired in extreme distress. In the process, Defoe more or less invents the historical novel well before authors such as Sir Walter Scott establish it as a major literary genre.

Narrative and Pandemics As indicated above, the role of narrative in responding to pandemics will be emphasised in my analysis, particularly the relationship that obtains between the public narrative our belief system offers us, and expects us to adopt, and the private narrative that we develop for ourselves. The latter can vary quite considerably from the former, depending on how critical we come to be about that and how credible we feel it to be overall. Lyotard’s concepts of ‘grand’ and ‘little’ narrative are worth referring to here.18 A culture’s ‘grand narrative’ (i.e., official ideology) dictates how we are supposed to process events, forming the basis of the official line taken on these. Pandemics, however, as Spinney noted, put grand narratives under considerable strain, the consequence of which is that alternative narratives emerge to fill in any gaps in that official line—and there always will be such gaps, as we know well from our own encounter. Not all of these competing narratives will be found convincing by every member of the public (conspiracy theorists, e.g.,), who can be motivated to create their own personal, little narrative to explain the crisis they find themselves in and how they think best to deal with it. Lyotard is no fan at all of grand narratives, which he feels are authoritarian and thus constrain individual creativity; he recommends that we should simply stop using them altogether and consign them to history. As we shall be discussing in Chaps. 3 and 4, there was an official public narrative regarding the pandemic in both Defoe’s time and our own, but this always left much unexplained and individuals still had to work out how to cope with the crisis in their own particular way. Public and private, grand and little, narratives were often in conflict, and individuals were caught up in the resulting tension, as Defoe’s H. F. so obviously is, hence the many contradictions and changes in his thought and decisions that he records over the course of his journal (to be discussed in more detail in Chap. 3). That tension will constitute a major concern of this book, given what it reveals about the shortcomings of our belief systems. What can you do when your grand narrative fails you? A

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pandemic is a political and ideological crisis as well as a health one, a point made forcefully by Jean-Luc Nancy in his book An All-Too-Human Virus: Having emerged from the fault lines or the fissures of what for a long time we took to be western infallibility, the virus was almost immediately perceived as something that revealed—indeed, deconstructed—the fragile and uncertain state of our rational and smoothly functioning civilization.19

Pandemics, Epidemics, and the Endemic Before proceeding further, it would seem appropriate to devote some attention to definitions, since we are more familiar with epidemics than pandemics, as well as with medical conditions that are deemed endemic. So, these do need to be differentiated to make clear what we are dealing with and what risks they pose for us. Nowadays it is the World Health Organisation (WHO) that declares whether a pandemic has broken out (as it did back in 2020), and it is the level of contagion that determines this decision. Epidemics are more localised, and although they can still be very contagious (as flu proves to be every winter, without fail), it is not to the same degree as with a pandemic, when, effectively, everyone everywhere is at risk. Flu is now endemic in that respect, in that it is predictable that there will be periodic outbreaks, and these can be catered for with the latest version of the flu vaccine (although it can still lead to deaths amongst the frailer members of our society even so). Looking back in history requires a bit more interpretation and analysis, but there seems little doubt that plague qualifies as a pandemic. It was a particularly persistent and savage one too, which kept breaking out regularly throughout Europe for centuries, with the Great Plague of 1665 in London one of its last major outbreaks, and the best documented of the various episodes of plague. Go back to the Black Death of the fourteenth century and we are dealing with an almost unimaginable death toll. It is estimated that as much as half of the population of Europe at the time died from this in just a few years; pandemic at its very worst. It is the universal threat that a pandemic presents that makes it such a compelling subject for fictional treatment. Epidemics we learn to live with, as we do endemic diseases (and the hope is that Covid will eventually gain that status), but pandemics create a far more profound problem for our culture. H. F. could be any one of us, because no-one is completely safe when a pandemic strikes. The image of him roaming restlessly through the

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stricken city appalled at the human suffering he finds all around him and that he is unable to do anything about, is haunting, bringing out fears that I suspect most of us have about the spectre of social breakdown and what we would do then. It is that spectre as much as anything that speaks so powerfully to us now, and as I will keep noting throughout, the climate crisis has the potential to plunge us into precisely that situation. JPY might just be regarded as a primer for that seriously scary possibility; it constitutes a particularly resonant metaphor in that regard. That is how I will be treating it over the course of this study, therefore, using it selectively to draw our attention to the striking correspondences it has with our own times and the lessons these have for us. JPY and our Covid experience will be read against each other.

Notes 1. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), ed. Louis Landa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 2010. 2. Laura Spinney, ‘Going Viral’, New Scientist, 23 July 2022, pp.  43–5 (p. 44). It is a topic Spinney explores in more detail in her book Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, London: Vintage, 2018. 3. Defoe, JPY, p. 74. 4. Ibid., p. 82. 5. Spinney, ‘Going Viral’, p. 45. 6. Mark Honigsbaum, The Pandemic Century: A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19 (2019), revised edition, London: Penguin, 2020, p. xi. 7. Jean-Luc Nancy, An All-Too-Human Virus (2020), trans. Cory Stockwell, Sarah Clift and David Fernbach, Cambridge and Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2021, p. 9. 8. Samuel Pepys, The Diary Of Samuel Pepys, I-XI, eds Robert Latham and William Matthews, London: Bell and Hyman, 1972; Albert Camus, The Plague (1947), trans. Stuart Gilbert, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. 9. Defoe, JPY, p. 193. 10. Jean-François Lyotard, Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Paul Geiman, London: UCL Press, 1993, p. 64. 11. See Honigsbaum, The Pandemic Century, for a discussion of this episode. As he goes on to note, plague has still not completely disappeared from the USA. See Christian W. McMillen, Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, for more historical background on pandemics in general.

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12. Defoe, JPY, p. 3. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Stuart Sim, The Eighteenth-Century Novel and Contemporary Social Issues: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. 16. David Roberts, ‘Coronavirus: Defoe’s Account of the Great Plague of 1665 has Startling Parallels with Today’, https://the conversation.comdefoes-account-of-the-great-plague-of-1665-has-startling-parallels-with-­ today-­135579’ (accessed 22 September, 2022). 17. Orhan Pamuk, Nights of Plague (2021), trans. Ekin Oklap, London: Faber and Faber, 2022, p. 3. 18. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, p. 61. 19. Nancy, An All-Too-Human Virus, p. ix.

References Camus, Albert, The Plague (1947), trans. Stuart Gilbert, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Defoe, Daniel, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), ed. Louis Landa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 2010. Honigsbaum, Mark, The Pandemic Century: A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19 (2019), revised edition, London: Penguin, 2020. Lyotard, Jean-François, Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Paul Geiman, London: UCL Press, 1993. ———. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. McMillen, Christian W., Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Nancy, Jean-Luc, An All-Too-Human Virus (2020), trans. Cory Stockwell, Sarah Clift and David Fernbach, Cambridge and Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2021. Pamuk, Orhan, Nights of Plague (2021), trans. Ekin Oklap, London: Faber and Faber, 2022. Pepys, Samuel, The Diary Of Samuel Pepys, I–XI, eds Robert Latham and William Matthews, London: Bell and Hyman, 1972. Roberts, David, ‘Coronavirus: Defoe’s Account of the Great Plague of 1665 has Startling Parallels with Today’, https://the conversation.com-defoes-account-­ of-the-great-plague-of-1665-has-startling-parallels-with-today-135579’ (accessed 22 September, 2022).

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Sim, Stuart, The Eighteenth-Century Novel and Contemporary Social Issues: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Spinney, Laura, ‘Going Viral’, New Scientist, 23 July 2022, pp. 43–5. ———. Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World. London: Vintage, 2018.

CHAPTER 2

A Journal of the Plague Year in the Twenty-­First Century

Abstract  This chapter discusses the increased relevance of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (JPY) since our own pandemic experience with Covid-19, emphasising that the work has in consequence taken on a new significance which invites us to compare the way each society responded to the ensuing crisis. There are intriguing parallels to be noted, and the socio-­ political implications of these will be sketched out here. The characteristics of living in a pandemic world (suspicion of others, fear of human contact, general anxiety, and a sense of confusion) are outlined. The contention is that JPY has become a text for our own times, its metaphorical resonance amplified by having to learn how to deal with a pandemic ourselves. Keywords  Daniel Defoe • A Journal of the Plague Year • Pandemic • Covid-19 • Great Plague • Conspiracy theory • Lockdown • Virus • Vaccine A Journal of the Plague Year (JPY) is one of the great classics of what can be called ‘plague literature’, or, as we might also consider it now to be, ‘pandemic literature’. What are we to make of the work three centuries after it was first published? What does it have to tell us now? Given that we have over the last few years undergone our own chastening experience of a pandemic from Covid-19 and its many, still multiplying and coming on stream, variants, it seems obvious that JPY has to appear to us in a very © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Sim, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Covid-19, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31286-1_2

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different light than before, as medical experts, amongst others, have been noticing (as they have with Albert Camus’s The Plague as well).1 Assessing it from the third decade of the twenty-first century is going to be a very different experience than it was pre-Covid, because that event constitutes an existential crisis for humanity that we have not yet fully processed, a distinct break point in our history. We now find ourselves with an affinity to what had until recently seemed a very distant and radically different age and culture than our own. Pandemics cast a very long shadow in that respect. It has challenged our belief systems in dramatic fashion, notably including their provision for public health, and is likely to do so for quite some time yet. Covid-19 took our world by surprise in terms of its impact, and with those variants giving it new impetus, it could go on catching us out again just as it did in 2019.2 (Perhaps it is best to say, however, that it took the general public by surprise. For David Quammen, ‘[t]o some people it wasn’t surprising, the advent of this pandemic. … Those unsurprised people were infectious disease scientists. They had for decades seen such an event coming’.3) New diseases are simply part of the human lot and will undoubtedly go on being so, regardless of how sophisticated medical science becomes. And it must always be remembered that diseases can be just as sophisticated in their own right when meeting resistance to their spread: they set the terms of engagement and we have to adjust our behaviour accordingly. We are no less locked into a perpetual struggle with the microbe world than our forebears were in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it is a daunting adversary designed for the long haul. You do not conquer that world; you have to learn how to work with it and around it: it acts, we react. Covid-19 has given us a crash course in what that involves. The Great Plague delivered an even more drastic crash course, turning JPY into compelling reading for anyone who has been through Covid (although whether we will ever entirely be through Covid, remains to be seen; as noted in the Introduction, plague is still around today). Defoe’s literary reputation is of course founded on Robinson Crusoe, one of the seminal texts in the development of the novel genre and one of the most widely read books in world literature. He was a prolific author and although his other novels have continued to be published into our own day, and generate a great deal of academic interest, only Moll Flanders, and to a lesser extent Roxana, have maintained a significant readership. JPY has never achieved the same level of popularity, and it is not difficult to understand why: it is overall a grim tale (far more so than Camus’s The Plague, for example), spare in its characterisation, claustrophobic in its

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settings, and with little to lift the spirits except the survival of its protagonist. It is not a comfortable narrative to read, and in fact, many of its scenes are deeply disturbing (not a relaxing bedtime read by any means). All of those features deserve to be revisited and reassessed, however, because it is no longer an historical work, but a report that resonates all too truthfully with us in the twenty-first century, portraying a society in the throes of extreme crisis, battling to maintain itself against an implacable enemy that is threatening the social order very seriously indeed. A fictionalised account, yes, but one making adroit use of the documentary evidence and public memories available to the author, acknowledged to be one of the founders of modern journalism and well versed in such techniques. As M. E. Novak has remarked, Defoe’s ‘main excellence as a writer was his sense of the importance of external objects and his willingness to describe an event with detailed accuracy’.4 Its grimness ought to be seen as the factor that recommends it most powerfully to us as a twenty-first century audience, because we have just had our own scare as to how comprehensively, and rapidly, things can go badly wrong. JPY now invites us to read the text through our own disorienting pandemic experience, and equally, to invite us to read the latter through Defoe’s narrative (some mention was also made of the text during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, and it later became the basis for a short animated film called The Periwig-Maker (2000)5). The medical writer Brian Birch, for example, considers the book to be a source of sound advice about how to manage future outbreaks of the disease, suggesting that we should take heed of Defoe’s recommendations and ‘resist premature celebration, remain on our guard, observe simple rules to reduce spread, and be aware that a failure to do so will result in more unnecessary deaths’.6 We can think of ourselves as plague partners, therefore, with important information and insights to share between us. Crisis concentrates the mind in that respect, and short of war, nothing concentrates it quite as effectively as a pandemic does; especially in its early stages, it swamps all other considerations, dominating public discourse and government actions. Pandemics cannot be ignored. My contention will be that if we take JPY as a portrait of our own times (with the West in general, and the UK in particular, as points of reference), then it will reveal many aspects of human nature that we would rather not acknowledge—and that ideally we should want to change. While it would be somewhat trite to note that when it comes to basics such as responding to a social crisis, human nature does not seem to change all that much over

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time, it is far more important to identify where we keep falling into the same traps and making much the same mistakes in dealing with the event— and why. We are just as capable of going into denial about what is happening, and its causes, as our predecessors were; that is an all-too-human reaction when faced with a situation where confusion reigns and we seem to be losing control of events. It is such blind spots that I want to focus on across this analysis, the product as they so frequently are of uncritical belief, which plays far too large a role in our culture, whether deployed in the service of conspiracy theory, political ideology, or religion. The refusal to accept the validity of beliefs other than your own, or evidence to the contrary of those, is one of the least appealing features of public life, and one that I have consistently argued against over my writing career (conspiracy theory takes full advantage of that trait, and it had a field-day doing so during Covid, when, for all the wrong reasons, so many of the public were more open than usual to the claims of such material).7 The politics of JPY invite close scrutiny, therefore, no less than the politics of Covid do, especially since the latter is a narrative which is still unfolding (and hard to say for how much longer, viruses being notoriously unpredictable as to their trajectory). The parallels involved, and their socio-political implications, will be considered here and then expanded on in the chapters on the pandemic as narrative.

Pandemic Worlds My wife and I went on a short break to Paris in January 2020, returning home on February 3. On arrival at Paris de Gaulle airport we witnessed queues of other travellers coming in on flights from the far East, all of whom seemed to be wearing masks and looking warily around them at those of us who were not (the European contingent, as it were). While coronavirus had been mentioned in the news since before Christmas, with reports coming in of the growing number of cases in various Chinese cities (with Wuhan as the apparent epicentre), it had not yet spread to the West on any significant scale. At this stage it was considered to be mainly a Chinese problem—with, sad to say, more than a hint of racism involved in that assumption, to be compounded by such influential public figures as President Donald Trump, for whom it was the ‘Chinese disease’. (Scapegoating was to become a very notable side-effect of the Covid regime, highlighting one of the more unpleasant traits of human nature that never helps to resolve any problem; it serves instead only to distort

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our understanding of what is going on and what needs to be done. The Spanish flu pandemic had its share of this too, as did the AIDS epidemic.) Observing those arriving from South-East Asia, however, offered considerable pause for thought. Could they be carrying the virus with them? How contagious was it? There was a general sense of unease to be noted in the airport—and in the city too. At that time there was no ban on travel (certainly not to nearby European destinations, as we were engaging in) and no-one in the West really knew quite what to expect, most of us probably assuming that the virus could be contained or that treatment for it would be forthcoming fairly soon. The fear that we might be headed for a pandemic was just that, a fear rather than a reality, and those medical experts who were warning us that it was imminent were thought by many commentators to be exaggerating the threat unduly (or at least they were hoped to be). That was not a narrative the general public particularly wanted to hear: pandemics were simply alien to our experience, difficult for us to envisage. We knew about the Great Plague and Spanish flu, but those belonged to past centuries, surely not our own medically highly sophisticated times? Perhaps after all it would turn out to be a false alarm, as had happened at various points in recent history? (as in the SARS outbreak of the early 2000s, which, although serious, was contained enough to prevent it from turning into a full-scale pandemic affecting everywhere in the world). Within just a few weeks of us arriving back in the UK, however, we were plunged into lockdown, although it was felt this would be temporary and that normal life would return in a few weeks, or at worst months. ‘It will all be over by Christmas’ became a common refrain (even from government sources, who should have known better than to be so offhand about such an unpredictable, and at that point barely understood, phenomenon). We were advised to think of it as a temporary disruption in our normal lifestyle, tiresome but bearable if we just had patience: ‘Keep Calm about the Virus and Carry On’ as it were, and despite a considerable amount of grumbling, we did. The assumption was that with all the resources at its disposal, the West would find a way to overcome whatever the microbial world could throw at it (how the rest of the world would fare was of less consideration, racism again making its unpleasant and unhelpful presence felt). As we now know, an early victory was not to be the case, and activities like air travel—travel of almost any kind, in fact— began to seem like a distant memory, part of the ‘before times’ that we were coming to view with a sense of wistful nostalgia. The lockdown

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dragged on for what seemed like an interminably long time, and the stresses and strains that the loss of that lifestyle imposed on our society have taken their toll on all of us. Socialising, for example, still has a certain edginess to it even in our post-vaccine state, as does travel with its inevitable multiple encounters with others. Whoever we interact with could be a carrier of the virus, or even worse, a super-spreader (given that not everyone chose to take advantage of the vaccination programme). Such thoughts cannot be entirely dispelled from our minds, every reported rise in Covid cases, happening again as I write, bringing them sharply into focus and urging caution on us. Seventeenth-century England was no better prepared for the outbreak of plague either, despite a history of such events occurring regularly over the previous centuries (with the Black Death as the most extreme example, the microbe world at its most lethal). For H. F. this constituted a failure on the part of the authorities, and he is quite scathing of their lack of foresight: Surely never City, at least, of this Bulk and Magnitude, was taken in a Condition so perfectly unprepar’d for such a dreadful Visitation, whether I am to speak of the Civil Preparations, or Religious; they were indeed, as if they had had no Warning, no Expectation, no Apprehensions, and consequently the least Provision imaginable, was made for it in a publick Way.8

As with Covid, much wishful thinking went on in the early days of the plague: that it might not be too bad an outbreak this time around; that it might be possible to isolate oneself from its effects even if it was; that it would soon pass when the seasons changed; that remedies could be found if only individuals hunted for them hard enough and applied them diligently enough. There are many similarities to be noted in the response to the crisis that befell each society, and those are worth some serious reflection as to what they say about human nature and our belief systems: fiction as a basis for socio-political analysis, as the Introduction outlined. Although we live in a very different world to that of the seventeenth century (or Defoe’s early eighteenth-century vantage point on that), that does not mean we are less vulnerable psychologically to dramatic social upheaval; there is no reason for us to feel in any way superior on that score. ‘Living with Covid’ has become a government catchphrase, but the reality is not that straightforward. It means living with a degree of uncertainty that few of us are used to, echoing that associated with living through a war, when

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we have to keep adjusting to an ever-changing new normal, never quite sure what the next day will bring or how to prepare ourselves for it. ‘Keep Anxious and Carry On’ perhaps. Pandemics constitute a stringent test for our temperament in that regard. Uncertainty is always there in the background at any point in our lives of course, but we can normally keep going about our daily business without dwelling on the topic all that much: bad things do happen, but generally only intermittently—and not to everyone at the same time. Covid was to change all that very rapidly, and with as yet unknown long-term effects on our collective psychology and lifestyle. We find ourselves in all too interesting times, a salutary reminder that normal life as we have come to expect it cannot be taken for granted: that we may have to become accustomed to a new, and far less congenial, normal that will tax our emotional resources quite profoundly. Pre-Covid and post-­ Covid are very different worlds indeed, and the latter is very much a work in progress.

Living in a Pandemic World There are distinctive characteristics to a pandemic world to be noted in both the case of the Great Plague of 1665 and Covid. Other human beings come to be viewed with suspicion, public places avoided as much as possible, danger perceived to lie round every corner just awaiting the unwary or the careless, even just the plain unlucky. In H.  F.’s case there is the added problem of having to steer clear of dead plague victims lying in the streets, which is one thing at least we have been spared in Covid times (although hospital staff will have had to experience the incidence of Covid deaths amongst their influx of patients to a depressing degree; being able to carry on in such conditions has to draw one’s unqualified admiration). There is an overall sense of fear that one can be struck down at any point, and in any place, by the contagion (as with the unfortunates just mentioned), that one is never really safe no matter how watchful we might be. It is as if the virus is stalking us 24/7, keeping us in a state of suspense that is deeply unsettling and not a little unnerving, just waiting to surprise us with yet another variant. Daily life turns into a series of difficult choices to be made in the face of ever-present risks, a negotiation that has to begin again every morning and that never becomes any easier. As long as the pandemic rages, it can hit anyone without warning regardless of their social status, in what can seem like a lottery (although this is weighted towards the wealthier of our compatriots, a point I will keep picking up on

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throughout this text). In consequence, living in a pandemic world is truly exhausting, and the longer it goes on the more vulnerable almost all of us begin to feel; hypersensitive to any symptoms that might suggest the onset of the virus (that cough, that sneeze, that sore throat, that constant checking of one’s sense of smell and taste to check if they are still as sharp as usual), dreading the result of that next lateral flow test to determine our condition. The anxious wait that the latter created until it registered its result as either positive or negative is something that will no doubt live long in the folk memory. Even the release of tension when it is negative can only be temporary, providing no guarantee that the virus will not intrude the next time around (the more pessimistic among us might begin to wonder about false negatives as well). JPY communicates that same sense of dread with all the journalistic flair and attention to detail that we have come to expect of Defoe. It is a narrative that mirrors our own experience in many striking, and sometimes very worrying ways, as we shall now go on to consider: a text for our century as much as it was for Defoe’s. In fact, when it comes to dealing with socio-political crisis in general, few texts have more metaphorical resonance than JPY, an aspect I will keep emphasising throughout my analysis. We might well regard it as our misfortune that it has become quite so resonant for us however.

Notes 1. See, for example, Brian Birch, ‘Covid-19 and 1665: Learning from Daniel Defoe’, Hektoen: A Journal of the Medical Humanities, Winter 2022, and Frank Palmeri, ‘Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and the Year of Covid-19’, History News Network, 4-12-20. On Camus see Carlos Franco-Paredes, ‘Albert Camus’s The Plague Revisited for Covid-19’, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 71.15, 2020, pp. 898–9. 2. It may well be on the verge of doing so. New Scientist has reported that ‘a soup of new coronavirus subvariants looks set to drive a new wave of infections across Europe and the US’ in late 2022 (Carissa Wong, ‘Subvariant “soup” may drive wave’, New Scientist, 5 November, 2022, p. 11). 3. David Quammen, Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus, London: The Bodley Head, 2022. Quammen himself had earlier warned of the inevitability of more pandemics in Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, London: The Bodley Head, 2012. 4. M.  E. Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man, London: Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 157.

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5. Robert Mayer discusses this film (made by the German animators Steffen and Annette Schäffler) in ‘Defoe’s Cultural Afterlife, Mainly on Screen’, in Daniel Cook and Nicholas Seager, eds, The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 233–52. JPY would strike one as an ideal candidate for a several-part TV adaptation now, thus usefully extending its screen afterlife into the Covid age. 6. Birch, ‘Covid-19 and 1665’. 7. See, for example, my book Empires of Belief: Why We Need More Scepticism and Doubt in the Twenty-First Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. 8. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), ed. Louis Landa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 2010, p. 80.

References Birch, Brian, ‘Covid-19 and 1665: Learning from Daniel Defoe’, Hektoen: A Journal of the Medical Humanities, Winter 2022. Defoe, Daniel, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), ed. Louis Landa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 2010. Franco-Paredes, Carlos, ‘Albert Camus’s The Plague Revisited for Covid-19’, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 71.15, 2020, pp. 898–9. Mayer, Robert, ‘Defoe’s Cultural Afterlife, Mainly on Screen’, in Daniel Cook and Nicholas Seager, eds, The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 233–52. Novak, M.  E., Defoe and the Nature of Man, London: Oxford University Press, 1963. Palmeri, Frank, ‘Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and the Year of Covid-19’, History News Network, 4-12-20. Quammen, David, Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus, London: The Bodley Head, 2022. ———. Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, London: The Bodley Head, 2012. Sim, Stuart, Empires of Belief: Why We Need More Scepticism and Doubt in the Twenty-First Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Wong, Carissa, ‘Subvariant “soup” may drive wave’, New Scientist, 5 November, 2022, p. 11.

CHAPTER 3

Narrating the Pandemic: A Journal of the Plague Year

Abstract  This chapter starts by outlining the belief system lying behind Defoe’s prose fiction, which has its roots in nonconformist religion in seventeenth-century England and the literary genre of spiritual autobiography. The importance of the concepts of predestination and providentialism within this tradition, and how they affected Defoe protagonists such as H. F. in A Journal of the Plague Year, are discussed. The notion of the plague as an act of divine vengeance, demonstrating the precariousness of human existence, is seen to hang over the narrative and all of H.F.’s actions, giving it a very sombre tone that still echoes in today’s world. The treatment of the plague in Samuel Pepys’s Diary and Albert Camus’s The Plague is also briefly analysed by way of comparison. Keywords  Daniel Defoe • A Journal of the Plague Year • Spiritual autobiography • Nonconformism • Providentialism • Predestination • Calvinism • John Bunyan • Samuel Pepys • Albert Camus A Journal of the Plague Year presents us with a nightmare landscape, one where human beings are at a loss as to how to cope with the deaths occurring all around them on a depressingly regular basis; a situation that demands some sort of narrative response as to how to interpret it. What does this all mean, what is it telling us? Contextualising the plague becomes a major preoccupation of those caught up in it, striving to work out some © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Sim, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Covid-19, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31286-1_3

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sort of pattern as to what is happening so they can order their lives accordingly. Spiritual autobiography, as well as the Calvinist predestination theory that so often underlay its conception of salvation, gives Defoe just such a narrative framework by which to explain plague (or any other such misfortune befalling the human race), so its role in Defoe’s fiction and its influence on his characters’ actions will be outlined. That framework is particularly notable in his best-known novel The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, but there are echoes of it to be found in JPY too.1 The narrator, H. F., does not push this theological point, steering clear of what the time knew as ‘enthusiasm’—zealous nonconformity to the creed of the official state church, Anglicanism, an issue of considerable political import then— but it lies behind Defoe’s worldview nevertheless. H. F. becomes a sort of honorary nonconformist in the way that he records the plague’s progress, charting its relentless passage through the city’s boroughs as if it were a direct message from a wrathful God (a very wrathful God, one has to assume with a pandemic as destructive as the Great Plague proved to be). Providentialism plays a critical role in Defoe’s oeuvre, as it does in predestination theory (the extreme end of the providentialist spectrum, as it were), but providence does not always act in one’s favour; you cannot assume it will choose to intervene particularly on your behalf, and would be deluding yourself if you ever did. Those from a nonconformist background would always be aware of that possibility, and I would argue that it lends a certain edge to Defoe’s fiction, even when not made explicit. Samuel Pepys’s Diary records his observations on the plague in 1665–1666 as he journeys around London, and it is worth comparing his real-time reactions to the impact it was having with those of Defoe’s fictional protagonist. H. F. Pepys’s is an interesting account because although he recognises the dangers posed by the plague (it would have been all but impossible not to, given the severity and persistence of the outbreak), it does not dominate his thought to the same extent that it does with H. F. There is more of a sense of daily life and business going on in Pepys than in H. F., who dramatizes the event to a far greater degree than the former does, most likely reflecting Defoe’s Calvinist-influenced approach to narrative, which all too easily can encourage a doom-laden outlook especially as regards one’s spiritual prospects. One must never presume too much on that score, the odds are stacked against you as far as predestination theory is concerned—very much stacked against you. Albert Camus’s plague narrative will also be brought into the discussion here,

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showing how resonant the form can be in capturing human vulnerability, in this case without a religious framework to fall back upon. Camus is very critical of those of his characters who still abide by this, regarding it as a pointless activity on their part, a refusal to face up to the reality of the human condition. In terms of the plague’s psychological effect on them, however, Camus’s characters have to go through much the same set of experiences; whether religious or not, they have to deal with the emotional churn that a full-scale, life threatening, crisis almost inevitably induces. There is a particular narrative arc to pandemic literature that is easily identifiable in both Defoe and Camus; life for their protagonists turns into a melodrama they can see no end to, and they are at its very centre, fearing the worst—as the mortality statistics give them every reason to do. The point of the chapter is to indicate that we have much to find out about how to react to pandemics from reading JPY from the perspective of Covid. Mistakes were made then that we can, and should, learn from now, including far too much credibility in what the respective social media were telling the population each time around (taking rumour to be the seventeenth-century equivalent of how social media operates now). Communication is a critical area during such an episode, and as we have seen, one that can be abused—much to the public detriment, as the spread of conspiracy theories since Covid broke out has all too clearly signalled. In this and a host of other ways that I will be outlining throughout the text, a pandemic is a test that any society will struggle to deal with, no less now in a technologically advanced one such as our own than in that of our far more vulnerable predecessors (and we always have to remember that not all parts of the world are as technologically advanced as the West is either). No matter how advanced a culture may be, there always seems to be a market for rumour and fake news, as the rise of the post-truth and ‘alternative fact’ industry over the last few years would attest (one of the more shameful legacies of the Trump presidency, it has to be noted). Indeed, it may well be, as one commentator has provocatively suggested, that many of us have our own ‘inner conspiracy theorist’ lurking within our consciousness, very much open to such ideas—especially when we are under undue stress and desperate to make some kind of sense of what is going on.2 Reducing that market by weaning us away from that inner theorist ought to become a priority; it constitutes an example of intellectual laziness that contributes nothing useful to public debate.

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Predestination as Explanation Spiritual autobiography informs the narrative structure of Defoe’s fictions, and he inherits from this tradition the deployment of predestination theory in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a book that all nonconformists knew very well indeed. Defoe himself was from nonconformist stock, and had initially set out to train as a Presbyterian minister when he became a pupil at the Dissenting Academy in Stoke Newington.3 Predestination theory provides a ready explanation for any event on the scale of the plague, which becomes part of God’s plan to bring home to humanity the precarious nature of its spiritual state as regards salvation: as H. F. remarks, ‘I look’d upon this Dismal Time to be a particular Season of Divine Vengeance’.4 That was a topic Calvinist-influenced nonconformists like Bunyan were always keen to preach on (he was in fact more than somewhat obsessed by it). Plague is a particularly forceful way of doing so, one that nobody can fail to comprehend in terms of their own life. What could be more precarious than existence in a city effectively under siege by a deadly, highly contagious disease for which there is no known cure? No one could be emotionally blasé about such a situation, where the risk factor is so high—and steadily becoming worse as the outbreak takes hold. The theory states that the whole human race is to be divided between the saved and the damned (the ‘elect’ and the ‘reprobate’ in the theory’s terms of reference), with the latter far exceeding the former in number. To assume one would be of the elect is all but proof that you will not be, since the decision is not yours to make, no matter how virtuous a life you might be leading or how deep your religious faith runs. Only God can decide who will or will not be saved and his decision has been taken before you even came into being, rendering your views on the topic meaningless. There is nothing at all one can do to change such a decision; it stands for all time, a narrative which takes no account of your personal character or the goodness of your intentions. ‘Divine Vengeance’ can be exacted on anyone—and will be. Viewed from a twenty-first-century perspective this can all seem to constitute a recipe for fatalism, not to mention deep depression, but nonconformism did not interpret it that way (although as I will go on to discuss later, it certainly promotes the growth of dread, especially amongst the sensitive or thoughtful). To be damned was to be considered a just punishment for being guilty of original sin, and all human beings were inescapably guilty of that from Adam and Eve onwards. There was absolutely

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nothing at all you could do about that, it was simply humankind’s inescapable heritage, and its harshness just had to accepted as the natural order of things. You were expected to keep reflecting on your life for signs of possible divine mercy being accorded you, but you were never to believe you could depend upon these as proof of your ultimate fate. The narrative of your life could take many twists and turns, any of which could catch you out as to its meaning, and your spiritual destination remained up in the air until the very end as far as you were concerned. Even as he crosses the River of Death in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan’s protagonist Christian is in much doubt as to the fate awaiting him at the gates of heaven just up ahead, experiencing ‘horror of mind, and hearty fears that he should die in that River, and never obtain entrance in at the Gate’ (as one of his companions on his journey, Ignorance, does not, and is immediately consigned from there to hell instead).5 If someone that exemplary can be so worried, then none of us can feel truly safe. A happy end like Christian’s, his last-­ minute fears having proved unfounded, is to be considered very much the exception rather than the general rule for humankind—we are far more likely to suffer the fate of Ignorance. ‘Keep Extremely Anxious and Carry On’. Each individual’s life falls into a pattern of alternate states of hope and despair; psychological ups and downs which provide the narrative structure of Defoe’s major fictions, as they had done with his nonconformist predecessor John Bunyan in his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and then his hugely influential allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress.6 Defoe makes extensive use of the spiritual autobiographical form throughout his fiction from Robinson Crusoe onwards.7 Spiritual autobiography, such as Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, charts the emotional trials of a believer’s life as they search for signs of God’s grace being extended towards them, and with that, salvation rather than damnation as their ultimate fate. Such signs are never foolproof, but they can bring comfort to the beleaguered individual, although that is only too often temporary in nature, at best keeping anxiety and dread at bay for a while. Doubt, often very severe doubt, soon creeps back in to one’s mind to unnerve one. What is being sought for is the ‘conversion experience’, by which a character like Bunyan, or Crusoe, can come to feel that God is on their side and that salvation is a real possibility rather than a mere forlorn hope; an epiphany pointing in the right direction, suggesting providential intervention on their behalf. Moll Flanders, too, will have such an experience— dramatically enough during her stay in Newgate Prison as a convicted

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thief, with execution a distinct possibility as her punishment (transportation to Virginia proves an altogether more acceptable alternative). Roxana, however, crucially never does and must be considered damned for her many sins—prostitution and, it is hinted, being an accessory to the murder of her estranged daughter, being notable amongst these.8 In the latter’s case, the narrative ends with her in a state of complete despair at the immoral life she has led and the likely fate of damnation awaiting her: the ‘Blast of Heaven’ pursuing her, as she poignantly puts it.9 H. F., too, has to live with the prospect of that ‘Blast’ coming after him, and it could well come in the form of plague infection—at any minute. You are at the mercy of a supreme power in that regard. Crusoe in particular echoes both Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress in terms of its overall narrative structure, and the stages the protagonist has to go through before finding his desired salvation of rescue and departure from his desert isle (aptly named ‘Despair’, echoing Christian’s imprisonment in the dungeon of Giant Despair’s Doubting-­ Castle in The Pilgrim’s Progress, where the Giant tries to talk him into committing suicide10). What has to be recognised is that it is God’s decision which dictates how your life works out, and that you just have to accept your fate whatever it may happen to be—and with as good a grace as you can muster, fatalism being frowned upon (this latter, as H. F. notes, is a characteristic of Islam and it is to be deplored, although modern secular readers may well wonder why, since there is no suggestion you can do anything about the process as an individual in either case). The sheer vulnerability of individual existence is, however, the lasting impression one is given from such a theory and the narratives it gives rise to. It is only the very finest of margins that separate salvation and damnation, a tough psychological burden for anyone to bear in such a conspicuously religious age when theological doctrine was taken as absolute truth. There is always more to make one fear than to feel positive about the future, more to fill one with a sense of dread about how this could all play out. It is a theory to keep one perpetually on edge, providing little in the way of lasting comfort on the psychological front. Little wonder that Bunyan often sounds like an emotional wreck in his autobiography, a man apparently at the end of his tether. There are still believers in this kind of explanation for pandemics, with evangelical Christians always willing to see God’s hand everywhere and just as convinced of humanity’s permanent guilt from original sin, hence susceptibility to divine punishment. It offers an instantly recognisable

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cause and solution for the chaos that the situation produces, one that church leaders can use their sermons to broadcast repeatedly to congregations highly receptive to such a message. Some Islamic clergy have also claimed that Covid is a case of divine wrath directed against humankind for its sins: monotheisms do tend to make such connections. For the devout, it is a narrative that is ready and waiting for all occasions of human adversity. It is a position which the secular can argue against as much as they like, but it is largely immune from rational explanations, as faith generally is. Like H. F., modern-day evangelicals can only see everything that happens as part of a divine master-plan that humanity must bear as patiently as it can, unable to have any really meaningful impact on the narrative that is unfolding around them. ‘Nothing but the immediate Finger of God, nothing but omnipotent Power could have done it’, as H. F. sadly notes, ‘the Contagion despised all Medicine, Death rag’d in every Corner’.11 And just as God alone is to be considered the source of the pandemic, so too is he the only one with the power to end it: ‘In that very Moment, when we might very well say, Vain was the Help of Man; I say, in that very Moment it pleased God, with a most agreeable Surprize, to cause the Fury of it to abate, even of it self’.12 As with salvation, there is always the possibility, no matter how remote it can seem to the fearful individual, that God will choose to spare you from the plague. H. F. survives, but the daily and weekly counts of his fellow citizens failing to do so are appalling; far worse in percentage terms of the population than with Covid, bad as that was at its pre-vaccination high point. Hundreds and even thousands were dying each week in a London where the population was only around the 500,000 mark, most living in cramped conditions ideal for the rapid spread of disease (those kind of conditions have had the same effect around the world during Covid, the poor again bearing the brunt). No individual could feel truly safe under those circumstances, regardless of what they did to protect themselves—not where the contagion had reached the stage ‘when it was reported, that above 3000 People died in one Night’.13 By anyone’s standards, this sounds apocalyptic—a test of psychological endurance taken to its limits. The odds against one being infected are falling sharply by the minute at such points, and that can only promote a climate of fear. Christian W. McMillen notes of plague, ‘A word more freighted with meaning in the history of disease would be hard to find’.14 There may well have been ‘fashionable’ diseases in the period, but as Hélène Dachez emphasises, plague manifestly was not one of them, being ‘a wide ranging

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disease which carries no social cachet and hits everyone, with no distinction of class, gender, age or occupation’.15 There was not much in the way of protection to fall back on. H. F. is living at a time when medical knowledge is rudimentary by our standards nowadays, although there were many supposed remedies for the plague being touted by the unscrupulous (as there were in the Covid era, with President Trump’s ‘bleach’ cure amongst the most infamous, but by no means the only example of modern quackery that our pandemic generated as it rumbled on; the horse medicine Ivermectin also had its vocal supporters online, despite medical disclaimers). H. F. remarks disapprovingly on how Londoners ‘were more addicted to Prophesies, and Astrological Conjurations, Dreams, and old Wives Tales, than ever they were before or since’, which had its modern counterpart in all the conspiracy theories that raged on social media during our own pandemic.16 The main treatment for the disease in official terms, is quarantining; but quarantining of a drastic variety compared to its Covid equivalent. In H. F.’s London, this takes the form of forcible quarantine within one’s own home, the front door marked with a red cross to announce your status unequivocally to all your neighbours, with government-appointed officers stationed outside to ensure strict compliance. That is the theory anyway, although as H. F. is never slow to point out, there are many ways round this fate for the quick-­ witted. Guards can be bribed to turn a blind eye to the inhabitants of a house slipping away, or escape can be made by the intrepid into back-­ lanes, for example, often scaling walls to engineer a getaway. H. F. is adamant in his opposition to the policy: I believed then, and do believe still, that the shutting up Houses thus by Force, and restraining, or rather imprisoning People in their own Houses … was of little or no Service in the Whole; nay, I am of Opinion, it was rather hurtful, having forc’d those desperate People to wander abroad with the Plague upon them, who would otherwise have died quietly in their Beds.17

It is a theme he returns to repeatedly, noting at another point that ‘nothing could run with greater Fury and Rage than the Infection did when it was in its chief Violence; tho’ the Houses infected were shut up as exactly, and as effectually as it was possible’.18 When it comes to the plague or God’s will, humanity deludes itself if it thinks it can deflect these from running their course. There is no question where the power lies in such

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situations; only God can grant ‘agreeable Surprizes’, and he will hand them out sparingly at best. Predestination theory is beset with paradoxes, acknowledging, for example, that we have free will but that our fate has been predetermined by God, meaning that out actions are irrelevant when it comes to our spiritual fate. Nevertheless, we are personally to blame if we end up damned: as Calvin bluntly summarises it: ‘man falls according as God’s providence ordains, but he falls by his own fault’.19 To put it mildly, human agency becomes a problematic concept in such circumstances, when fatalism can come to seem an entirely justifiable response. H. F. reveals a similar cast to his thinking when he decides to remain in the city rather than flee to the countryside, as so many of his fellow London residents did, on the grounds that an omnipotent God could strike him down with plague ‘when and where he thought fit’, managing to convince himself that it would be ‘a kind of flying from God’ to leave London, as many do with mixed results.20 His recommendation to the reader is that, if faced with such a choice, ‘he should keep his Eye upon the particular Providences which occur at that Time, and look upon them complexly, as they regard one another, and as altogether regard the Question before him’.21 Doing so ought to reveal the ‘Intimations from Heaven’ as to how to act, but of course, we are capable of misreading such ‘Providences’, as well as their appropriate application to the ‘Question’, which leaves more than enough room for doubts to come creeping back in (and if you do misread the signs, that is your fault, not God’s of course).22 Nevertheless, the narrative is structured around that epiphany and the deep meaning it has for H. F., although his brother, interestingly enough, takes the opposite course and flees, having read the ‘Providences’ differently. Which decision is the most sensible, it would be very hard to say. The court fled London too, relocating to Oxford during this period (drawing some barbed comments from H. F. about their lack of interest in how the city of London was faring), while most others found themselves faced with far less settled, and often physically very exacting, retreats across the countryside. H. F. reports how ‘great Numbers’ of escaped Londoners were reduced to living ‘like Hermits in Holes and Caves, or any Place they cou’d find; and where, we may be sure, they suffer’d great Extremities, such that many of them were oblig’d to come back again whatever the Danger was’.23 Yet others were met with suspicion, and even open hostility, by fearful locals (hardly surprising under the prevailing circumstances), and forced to keep moving on in a desperate search for safe refuge. (Again,

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we see that it is the poor who are at the greatest disadvantage of this situation; the well-off have either their own country residences, or those of relatives, to relocate to.) Nevertheless, H. F. can still aver, in his narrative’s closing stages, that ‘the best Physick against the Plague is to run away from it’, despite conceding that this might just succeed in spreading the plague to areas where it had not yet reached.24 (The narrator in Pamuk’s Nights of Plague comes to the same conclusion, noting that ‘when antibiotics had not yet been discovered, the most sensible thing anyone caught up in an outbreak of plague could do was to flee’, while admitting that this could soon degenerate into a condition of ‘every man for himself’.25) No doubt, there were super-spreaders then as now amongst this exodus. There are no clear-cut solutions to dealing with the plague, or of knowing what is the best way to respond to the risks it confronts one with. ‘Providences’ give hints only, hence H. F.’s mixed messages, which bring out the confusion of the times very effectively; as Dachez remarks, ‘the instability of his discourse can be justified by the elusiveness of the disease itself’.26 Survival remains more than something of a lottery. Calvinist predestination theory can seem fairly irrelevant to most of us now, but there is still one aspect of it that resonates: the sense of helplessness that the individual feels when faced with a situation he or she can have no control at all over. The theory asserts that no one individual can change God’s mind about their fate; you have no role to play in the process except that of a pawn—and in the vast majority of cases, a victim, doomed to eternal damnation. Hence H.  F.’s contradiction over which is the most effective course of action to take, because in theological terms there is not one, a sobering thought in such a nightmare landscape where deaths are occurring all around one every day and at an ever-increasingly alarming rate. A pandemic is just as ruthless in targeting you as predestination is, especially before a vaccine has been generated. Even the vaccine cannot guarantee your survival, although it does give you a higher percentage of doing so. What it comes down to, however, is that you just have to hope that you will be among the ones to escape infection. In the plague’s heyday, of course, your chances of doing so were very significantly lower, as the massive mortality bills H. F. keeps noting indicate so starkly, but the sense of vulnerability is much the same at individual level now. Anxiety is an only too likely consequence; pandemics are all but guaranteed to have an adverse effect on a population’s mental health, the extent of which is yet to be fully realised. Risk never disappears during a pandemic, as hospital staff found to their personal cost in all too many cases.

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H. F. goes through all the emotional ups and downs one expects from the spiritual autobiographical form, trying to secure his safety as best he can despite being aware that all his efforts on that score might be for nothing, that he could become infected at any moment and be dead within a few days; just one more statistic on the weekly bill of his parish, which by then is beginning to lose its shock value. He practices social distancing as much as he can, remarking that his compatriots ‘began to be exceeding shie and jealous of every one that came near them’ (a response any of us will be very familiar with after Covid, when the sight of another person heading towards us on the street was enough to make most people hurriedly cross to the other side, generally averting their eyes as they did so, as if embarrassed by the action and the suspicion it revealed).27 Yet he continues to wander the streets compulsively even when he has no need to do so, having laid in enough provisions to keep his household going for a long period, and spurred on by his curiosity to discover how the plague is developing and his fellow citizens coping. The answer is, not that well in the main, with a distinct sense of panic in the air. His fears about the risks he is taking by his repeated excursions are never enough to restrict his conduct for very long, however. It is worth noting in passing that there is a certain horrified fascination involved in observing the effects of a social breakdown on this scale, and H. F. certainly exhibits this trait. There is more than a touch of the gothic in his record of his wanderings in the ‘desolate Place’ that London has turned into, especially when he is observing bodies being unceremoniously dumped from carts into huge plague pits at night (‘dead of night’ might be an appropriate way of putting it), a horrifying vision that would scare even the most emotionally resilient of onlookers.28 The Gothic novel that developed later in the eighteenth century made extensive use of the concept of the sublime, that force which transcends human power and makes us realise our insignificance in the larger scheme of things.29 We can only react with awe (and a sense of terror too) when confronted by the sublime, knowing that it is a force that lies beyond our understanding or ability to control. The Great Plague has that character as far as the residents of 1665 London are concerned, with the plague pits a potent symbol of human insignificance. In the final analysis it hardly matters what H. F. does anyway, given that he is a mere pawn in an omnipotent God’s game. Whether to flee the scene or to stay is a false choice under the circumstances; no more than guesswork on the individual’s part, a reading, or quite possibly a misreading, of the ‘particular Providences’ in play at the time (where a misreading

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could cost you your life). Not surprisingly, this is a line of thought that causes many Londoners to become fatalistic and thus careless about their conduct: ‘one would say to another, I do not ask you how you are, or say how I am, it is certain we shall all go, so ‘tis no Matter who is sick or who is sound, and so they run desperately into any Place or any Company’ (precisely what H. F. disapproves of amongst the Islamic community).30 The longer our own pandemic ran on, the more frequently many of our peers came to much the same conclusion—even if it was just a case of hugging each other, which the guidelines strongly recommended against. When sanctions began to be lifted by the government, such behaviour became even more common. Some were to catch Covid after attending sporting events, newly cleared to take in spectators, for example, when prudence might have suggested otherwise (social distancing measures still being in place elsewhere in public spaces). Microbes are no respecter of persons in that regard, a sure-fire way of revealing our personal insignificance in the larger scheme of things. In H. F.’s London, the risk from such maverick behaviour is far worse, as in the fate of the denizens of the Pye-­ Tavern, ‘a dreadful Set of Fellows’ who ‘behaved with all the Revelling and roaring extravagances, as is usual for such People to do at other Times’, to the extent of mocking mourners of plague victims as they passed the tavern windows on their way to the local cemeteries.31 They are to pay dearly for their presumption, however, as H. F. reports: ‘every one of them carried into the great Pit’ of plague dead within a fortnight.32 It is, as H. F. sees it, an unmistakable judgement of Heaven that is at work in such cases. You test the power of your agency against that of God at your own peril. Although H. F. does make it through the plague, there is no conversion experience in Bunyan’s sense of a wave of relief and gratitude that God is giving him a sign that he will be saved (‘Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed, I was loosed from my afflictions and irons, my temptations also fled away’, as Bunyan puts it33)—even if this is just a case of ‘most likely’ rather than ‘absolutely guaranteed’. Individuals must never presume they can second-guess God’s will, especially when it regards salvation. That said, the episode when H. F. decides that leaving London would be akin to ‘flying from God’ could be seen as equivalent in its way. What he demonstrates at this point is the depth of his belief (or looked at another way, his despair; the two emotions are nicely balanced in such perilous situations), putting himself in God’s hands as far as his fate is concerned, which could be read as a sign from God that he will be protected. Those who flee

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London could be showing their lack of faith in God’s protection (which does not show the court in a very good light, it has to be said; nor the richer London citizens who so swiftly decamp to the country), and that too could be read as a sign—a far more problematic one. The riotous behaviour of the Pye-Tavern drinkers is a sign that bodes particularly ill, as if they are openly declaring their reprobate status and the near certainty of a bad end. That is certainly the way that H. F. reads it, his disapproval, and marked lack of sympathy, showing through clearly: God is never to be mocked. If he does later feel moved ‘to pray for those who dispitefully used me’, his tone is not particularly compassionate.34 It is how his response would appear to God that is more of a concern.

H. F. and Guilt One of the most disturbing aspects of predestination theory is the immense sense of guilt it imposes on the believer, who can, as we see with Bunyan, become overwhelmed repeatedly by this throughout his life and all but unable to function for long periods as a result. H. F. too is prone to such feelings as he roams restlessly around London, aware that he is taking very considerable risks by doing so and wondering what it is that is driving him to act in that manner, what it says about his character that he cannot seem to stop doing it (those of us who followed the health authorities’ advice during Covid to make sure that we got regular exercise by taking daily walks, will remember the curious mixture of watchful apprehension and boredom that they could produce, given that most of us were confined to our own immediate neighbourhood in doing so). Behind everything he does lies the fear that whatever happens to him will be his fault, and that he will have deserved it as well; his recklessness being yet another sign of his unworthiness. The plague magnifies such feelings, bringing home forcefully to every individual caught up in it just how vulnerable they are and how little in control of their own fate. Guilt would seem to be a defining characteristic of humanity, an emotion that none of us can banish from our experience. Living with the plague is living with guilt, and having to face up to that every day that it continues to rage; somehow or other it is our fault for just being there at such a time. H. F.’s gloomy demeanour throughout his journal encapsulates this, a figure resigned to the likelihood that he is living on borrowed time, unable to do anything much at all to alter his fate—the plague pits only too graphically signalling his

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helplessness. He is no mere reporter, but an embedded participant at the mercy of events. For nonconformists, living with predestination is living with guilt in an even more extreme form, a lifestyle that just has to be borne without much hope of a happy end. Any periods of remission such believers might feel from its effect will soon disappear, as the prevailing sense of despair that it generates reasserts itself. Anyone not consumed by guilt, as in the case of the raucous regulars of the Pye-Tavern, are all but announcing themselves as doomed; to feel no guilt is to be beyond all hope of salvation, to be showing all the worst signs of God’s disfavour. A permanent feeling of guilt and an acute sense of one’s unworthiness are the minimum demands that God makes of us, with no exceptions to the rule. We are to be on constant alert for the worst happening, such as plague suddenly catching us and dispensing with us all too rapidly. To lose sight of our precariousness is to fail the most important test we have to face as human beings, one that will not be forgotten. Guilt ought to lead us into a state of dread concerning our fate, a recognition of the inherent hopelessness of the human condition, and it is an emotion that H. F. is only too aware of as he negotiates his way through the plague: ‘it is impossible to say any Thing that is able to give a true Idea of it to those who did not see it, other than this; that it was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such as no Tongue can express’.35 For those who had to stand by and watch as Covid claimed friends and relatives, ‘very, very, very dreadful’ was only too apt a description; the point at which, as David Roberts notes of H. F.’s response, we too have to admit ‘the inadequacy of words to the task’.36 H. F. is no mere cipher to construct a narrative around at such moments, but an understandably emotionally overwhelmed human being, who elicits our sympathy for the almost unimaginable scenes he has had to witness on a daily basis. The plainness of his language speaks volumes; it is a situation that does not require overdramatising.

Public Narrative and Private Narrative The abiding image of JPY is of a character alienated from the rest of his fellows by the collapse of his normal world and its comfortingly familiar daily routines. He is a merchant, in the saddlery business, but trade has now dried up and his brother and family have fled to the country, leaving him at a loss as to what to do with himself. Public life may continue on around him, if in somewhat sporadic and often chaotic fashion (damage

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control being the authorities’ major activity during this time), but H. F. is largely cut off from meaningful human contact, rendering him more and more introspective as the narrative unfolds, more wrapped up in his own self-centred little narrative. Interaction with others is kept to a minimum, always holding out the threat of contagion. He has to work out what the plague as an episode of divine justice signals in terms of his own personal narrative, how to cope with the condition of frequently abject loneliness that it propels him into—dread at its most debilitating. It is an experience that anyone of a nonconformist persuasion, such as Bunyan, has to go through, constructing their own private narrative in response to the many trials it will be their fate to undergo over the course of their lifetime, without knowing exactly where it might lead or how successful their efforts might be: ‘Assume the Worst, Yet Carry On’, it would seem. For one commentator on religion in the period, that experience was akin to being ‘a soldier in hostile territory’, where one’s every move is fraught with danger and any lapse into complacency will be punished severely.37 Robinson Crusoe’s enforced sojourn on his desert isle after his shipwreck serves a similar purpose, pushing him deeper and deeper into exhausting introspection to try and make sense of what has happened to him, constantly ransacking his Bible for whatever help it might give him and painstakingly poring over key passages in the hope of finding solace. Such characters know what the public narrative tells them, that all of humanity is subject to a strictly ordered divine plan, but how their own private narrative fits into this overall pattern has to be discovered bit by painful bit. A plague is a critical test of their character, the final verdict of which is hidden from them, with no more than hints to be discerned along the way—and hints that can be read in several, often manifestly contradictory, ways (as both Bunyan and Crusoe are to discover with the Bible, which is capable of being supportive or depressing depending on one’s psychological state at any given moment, hints of God’s support jostling constantly, and confusingly, with hints of his wrath the more one reads). Yet it is a task they cannot opt out of, no matter how troubling it proves to be; a soldier in hostile territory has to keep pressing on regardless, only too aware that any lapse on their part could be a sign of impending damnation. The semiotics of one’s life have to be meticulously interpreted, come what may; if nothing else, nonconformism boosts your analytical skills quite dramatically, although not necessarily to your emotional benefit. JPY is a sombre work for sombre times therefore, with the discomforting message that sombre times are never very far away. There is nothing

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quite as effective as a pandemic in bringing on a bout of Schopenhaurean pessimism, an unwelcome recognition that even in the best of health one cannot know what lies just ahead—something that the mere fact of ageing keeps insistently reminding one is our individual, as well as collective, destiny. ‘Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse—until at last the worst of all arrives’, as Schopenhauer so bleakly puts it.38 JPY works on several levels, a narrative that makes us very aware of our limitations, limitations that all of us share; it is a chastening read in that respect, with H. F. an only too realistic portrait of a fate that could befall any of us. No doubt, we would be just as confused and disoriented were it ever to happen.

Pepys in the Plague Pepys is certainly observant of the plague raging around him, regularly remarking on the weekly death toll and indicating his unease about the implications of this, but it does not stop him from going about his business as an important government official, nor detract from his busy social life: he is an indefatigable character in that regard, always rushing around from appointment to appointment. Two days after expressing himself ‘[m]ighty troubled at the news of the plague’s being encreased’, for example, he is visiting friends, ‘where mighty merry and sing and dance with great pleasure’.39 It is hard to imagine H. F. letting himself go in such a light-hearted fashion and forgetting the seriousness of the situation. Neither is there the suspicion of others that H. F. reports on amongst so many of London’s citizens. Pepys is constantly meeting up with associates and wining and dining with them, as well as making long trips around London and out to the coast on navy matters, despite noting how the Bills of Mortality are building up remorselessly week by week. The plague by no means consumes all his attention, nor invokes the same overall sense of gloom in him that it does in H. F. Looking back on the year in December, Pepys can even declare that ‘I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague-time’.40 By H. F.’s standards, this has to be considered ‘plague light’: ‘merry’ is not a word one would associate with him. Even Pepys, however, has to admit that he does not always act with the requisite caution: It was dark before I could get home; and so land at churchyard stairs, where to my great trouble I met a dead Corps, of the plague, in the narrow ally,

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just bringing down a little pair of stairs—but I thank God I was not much disturbed at it. However, I shall beware of being late abroad again.41

Coming across ‘a dead Corps of the plague’ is becoming an everyday experience for London residents, as H.  F. too is to note. Nevertheless, Pepys is able to continue on with his business dealings only slightly alarmed by the event: the next morning he describes himself as off to the Exchange, from where he moves on to other business meetings and then to yet another dinner at a friend’s. H. F., however, finds it far harder to reconcile himself to the carnage that is all too visible around him, the plague pits not surprisingly leaving a lasting imprint on him. The latter’s account is all the more compelling for doing so, making it resonate particularly powerfully to all of us who were caught up in the early, pre-vaccine, days of Covid when the virus was very much in the ascendant and social distancing, mask-wearing and constant hand-washing the only protection available. Like H. F. we kept checking the daily total of infections and deaths with a sense of growing alarm, hearing of relatives and acquaintances who had contracted the virus, fearing that we too could be next in line and knowing, like him, that there was nowhere we could escape to where we would be entirely safe from the virus’s reach. ‘Flying from Covid’ made no more sense than ‘flying from God’; its scope was as all-encompassing and at that point scarily resistant to all efforts to hold it in check. ‘The worst of all’ was an ever-present possibility, regardless of how careful we were about social distancing, mask-wearing or hand-washing. We were, in effect, trapped, forced to acknowledge just how little control over our lives we had and how drastically circumscribed our existence had become in consequence: waiting for the vaccine began to feel like waiting for Godot. Every journey outside our house, to purchase groceries or medicines, for instance, became fraught with danger, yet another opportunity for the virus to catch us unawares—as can still occur even after vaccination, especially given the virus’s well-honed talent at producing variants (still coming through as I write in late 2022). The memory of this is likely to linger long after Covid recedes or becomes less contagious—neither of which can be assured, however, any more than salvation could with nonconformist believers. When it comes to microbes we are all in hostile territory, pitted against an adversary that is always working away tirelessly in the background, permanently on the lookout for opportunities to mount a strike and programmed to go on searching for ways round whatever barriers medical science might contrive to put in its way. As we are all

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potential targets, a pervading sense of dread is a not unreasonable response from any of us.

Camus’s Plague Camus’s Oran has its share of sceptics and fatalists when it comes to the plague outbreak there, responding in their fairly predictable way to an event dragging on with no apparent end in sight. Once again, it is that sense of uncertainty that most unsettles the characters, who become progressively more worn down as the plague continues to hold sway month after weary month, forcing them to recognise ‘the precariousness of all things in this world’ (H. F. could only agree).42 Life goes on but in a shadowy, highly tentative manner tinged with fear, anxiety and dread for the city’s citizens: ‘the plague forced inactivity on them, limiting their movements to the same dull round inside the town, and throwing them, day after day, on the illusive solace of their memories’.43 The local government officials are reluctant to acknowledge that there is a plague at all, until it becomes unrealistic to deny it any more, with the death toll steadily mounting and reports of new cases of infection coming in every day. Our own government was slow to concede the seriousness of the situation too; the Trump-led one in America even more so, to the point of shameful negligence of its public health responsibilities, as the massive death toll there, as a percentage of population being one of the highest in the West, attests (the direct result, as Frank Palmeri uncompromisingly puts it, of ‘the fecklessness, delusion, and inaction of the highest authorities in the federal government’44). Eventually, the whole city is placed under quarantine, which predictably creates an air of desperation that the inhabitants struggle to live with. A contemporary specialist on infectious diseases sums it up, ‘more than anything, Camus reminds us that we can never be mentally or fully prepared for pandemics’.45 The narrator, Dr Rieux, tries to remain as dispassionate as he can about the situation, as befits his role as a senior doctor working in a local hospital, but he knows only too well how limited his power is to help his patients, even when a serum does become available (just to complicate matters, it does not always work, failing to offer certainty on that score either). The overriding impression is of a society being overwhelmed and of a population being trapped, with little sign of relief apparent. Even those desperate to escape, like the Parisian journalist Raymond Rambert, marooned in Oran by the outbreak while on an assignment there, find all their attempts to do so coming to

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nothing, as if the outside world had abandoned them. It is the plague that is in control, not any one individual, almost as if such as Rambert are predetermined to be there until the event has run its course, which he eventually accepts is his fate. Under the circumstances, that counts as living in an authentic fashion, as existentialists would understand it; making what choices you can under the restrictions you are suffering through, rather than pretending you can escape from them (that was a lesson to be learned from World War II, and the experience of having to survive for several years in a Nazi-occupied France).46 As Patrick McCarthy puts it in his study of Camus’s oeuvre, Doctor Rieux and his circle of friends, ‘demonstrate the moral values of courage and fraternity which do not defeat the plague but which bear witness against it’.47 What authenticity would be from a nonconformist standpoint would be far more difficult to determine—being in a state of permanent high anxiety perhaps? The interpretation of the plague put forward by the city’s religious authorities takes the familiar line of blaming the populace—something of a default position in crises with monotheisms. The Jesuit priest Father Paneloux, for example, uses a High Mass during a specially organised Week of Prayer to tell the congregation that ‘this plague came from God, for the punishment of their sins’.48 Camus’s scepticism on the matter is made very plain: ‘To some the sermon simply brought home the fact that they had been sentenced, for an unknown crime, to an indeterminate period of punishment’.49 For Camus, this needs no religious explanation; it is instead a manifestation of the Absurd. We could say the same of Covid now, although there is still a very sizeable group of believers internationally who are persuaded by the argument that it is indeed a just punishment meted out by their God, which they have no option but to accept without complaint as their due. The notion of disease as divine vengeance dies very hard, even in our ostensibly more rational times; the absurdity and sheer contingency of human existence does not register with this constituency, any more than it does with conspiracy theorists. The waterman whom H.  F. encounters in one of his rambles sums up this outlook very succinctly when he remarks that, ‘it is infinite Mercy, if any of us are spar’d; and who am I to repine!’.50 And this is someone whose wife and child are shut up in their house with the plague, and who has already lost another of his children to the disease. Whether it is vengeance or not, for the devout, it just has to be borne; that is simply the way of their God.

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Conclusion In the aftermath of Oran’s plague, Camus’s narrator feels moved ‘to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise’.51 While one hopes this is true, pandemics nevertheless make us uncomfortably aware of the bad side of human nature, of how some will use such events to take advantage of others, such as the ‘quacks and mountebanks’ peddling false cures for the plague, of whom H. F. is so scathing. Or the astrologers with their prophecies of doom, designed to put even more fear into the populace, merely to boost the sales of their meretricious forecasts. The internet provides a forum for such types in our own day (quacks and mountebanks are always with us, sad to say), and it can be depressing to realise just how large a market there always seems to be for such material, celebrity-endorsed bleach cures and all. In his closing remarks, H.  F. declares that he has chosen not to ‘enter into the unpleasant Work of reflecting, whatever Cause there was for it, upon the Unthankfulness and Return of all manner of Wickedness among us, which I was so much an Eye-Witness of my self’, but it is clear that the experience has shaken his faith in human nature.52 This is very much what we would expect from a product of a society with such a deep belief in original sin and the fallen nature of humankind (symbolised so acutely by the despicable conduct of the Pye-Tavern regulars). From a Calvinist standpoint there certainly are not ‘more things to admire in men than to despise’: God would not be punishing humanity so severely with the plague were this not so, nor subjecting it to predestination and all the terrors it can induce in anyone even remotely sensitive. We are all sinners and that is all there is to it: none of us is worthy of mercy and it is folly to believe otherwise. Neither can any of us believe that we are beyond the reach of Covid either, which is at the very least a sobering thought, especially when it looks set to be around into the indefinite future: microbes never give up easily, biding their time for the next opportunity to strike. Precariousness aptly describes the human condition: you just never can know what will happen next, yet somehow you have to learn how to live with that immutable fact. Yet another sombre thought for us to brood on.

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Notes 1. Daniel Defoe, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), ed. Thomas Keymer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 2. Cass R.  Sunstein, Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014, p. 2. 3. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), ed. W.  R. Owens, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 4. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), ed. Louis Landa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 2010, p. 60. 5. Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 148. 6. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), ed. W. R. Owens, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. 7. G. A. Starr’s Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965, was one of the first critical studies of this aspect of Defoe’s work. 8. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722), ed. G.  A. Starr, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981; Daniel Defoe, Roxana, ed. John Mullan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. I consider this topic in more detail in Stuart Sim, Negotiations with Paradox: Narrative Practice and Narrative Form in Bunyan and Defoe, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. 9. Defoe, Roxana, p. 330. 10. Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 110. 11. Defoe, JPY, pp. 209. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., p. 149. 14. Christian W.  McMillen, Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 15. See Hélène Dachez, ‘Fashioning Unfashionable Plague: Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year’, in Allan Ingram and Leigh Wetherall Dickson, eds, Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature, London: Palgrave, 2016, pp. 127–44 (p. 127). 16. Defoe, JPY, p. 19. 17. Ibid., p. 62. 18. Ibid., p. 136. 19. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), I–II, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, London: SCM Press, 1961, II, p. 957. 20. Defoe, JPY, p. 11. 21. Ibid., p. 10. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., p. 130. 24. Ibid., pp. 170.

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25. Orhan Pamuk, Nights of Plague [2021], trans. Ekin Oklap, London: Faber and Faber, 2022, p. 202. 26. Dachez, ‘Fashioning Unfashionable Plague’, p. 141. 27. Defoe, JPY, p. 178. 28. Ibid., p. 87. 29. See, for example, the works of Ann Radcliffe, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), ed. Bonamy Dobrée, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. 30. Defoe, JPY, p. 150. 31. Ibid., p. 56. 32. Ibid., pp. 58. 33. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, p. 59. 34. Defoe, JPY, p. 61. 35. Ibid., p. 53. 36. David Roberts, ‘Introduction’ to Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), ed. Louis Landa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. vii–xxii (p. viii). 37. R.  H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (1926), London and New York: Verso, 2015, p. 228. 38. Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, p. 47. 39. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, I–XI, eds Robert Latham and William Matthews, London: Bell and Hyman, 1972, VII, p. 18. 40. Ibid., VI, p. 342. 41. Ibid., p. 192. 42. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960, p. 36. 43. Ibid., p. 60. 44. Frank Palmeri, ‘Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and the Year of Covid-19’, History News Network, 4-12-20. 45. Carlos Franco-Paredes, ‘Albert Camus’s The Plague Revisited for Covid-19’, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 71.15, 2020, pp. 898–9. 46. As John Foley has pointed out, although ‘The Plague was read, loosely, as an allegory of Nazi occupation’, many of Camus’s intellectual contemporaries felt that this was politically unacceptable, since in effect it ‘placed responsibility for the occurrence of evil outside mankind’ (John Foley, Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt, Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008, p. 50). Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir proved particularly critical of this interpretation, for example. From our later standpoint, however, it is the work’s general metaphorical resonance that keeps it relevant, rather than anything so specific; each generation of readers will find their own candidate.

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47. Patrick McCarthy, Camus: A Critical Study of his Life and Work, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982, p. 224. 48. Camus, The Plague, p. 83. 49. Ibid., p. 85. 50. Defoe, JPY, p. 94. 51. Camus, The Plague, p. 251. 52. Defoe, JPY, p. 212.

References Bunyan, John, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), ed. W. R. Owens, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. ———. The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), ed. W. R. Owens, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), I-II, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, London: SCM Press, 1961. Camus, Albert, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Dachez, Hélène, ‘Fashioning Unfashionable Plague: Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year’, in Allan Ingram and Leigh Wetherall Dickson, eds, Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature, London: Palgrave, 2016, pp. 127–44. Defoe, Daniel, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), ed. Louis Landa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 2010. ———. Moll Flanders (1722), ed. G.  A. Starr, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. ———. The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), ed. Thomas Keymer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. Roxana, ed. John Mullan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Foley, John, Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt, Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008. Franco-Paredes, Carlos, ‘Albert Camus’s The Plague Revisited for Covid-19’, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 71.15, 2020, pp. 898–9. McCarthy, Patrick, Camus: A Critical Study of his Life and Work, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982. McMillen, Christian W., Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Palmeri, Frank, ‘Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and the Year of Covid-19’, History News Network, 4-12-20. Pamuk, Orhan, Nights of Plague [2021], trans. Ekin Oklap, London: Faber and Faber, 2022. Pepys, Samuel, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, I–XI, eds Robert Latham and William Matthews, London: Bell and Hyman, 1972. Radcliffe, Ann, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), ed. Bonamy Dobrée, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

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Roberts, David, ‘Introduction’ to Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), ed. Louis Landa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. vii–xxii. Schopenhauer, Arthur, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Sim, Stuart, Negotiations with Paradox: Narrative Practice and Narrative Form in Bunyan and Defoe, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. Starr, G.  A., Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. Sunstein, Cass R., Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas, New  York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. Tawney, R.  H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (1926), London and New York: Verso, 2015.

CHAPTER 4

Narrating the Pandemic: Covid-19

Abstract  The various narratives (including those of conspiracy theorists) devised to make sense of the Covid-19 pandemic are discussed, as is the decline in religious explanations along ‘divine vengeance’ lines since Defoe’s time. Whereas Defoe used that religious framework for his pandemic narrative, our contemporary version became structured around the development of an anti-Covid vaccine. The anti-vaccination and anti-5G movements and their unhelpful (not to mention completely anti-­scientific) interventions in the public health campaigns to deal with Covid-19 are also explored in this context. The impact of Covid-19 on contemporary ideologies and belief systems (such as revealing the often stark social inequalities between rich and poor in terms of health provision) is emphasised, as it is throughout the book in general. Keywords  Covid-19 • Pandemic • Vaccine • Virus • Conspiracy theory • 5G • Lockdown • Guilt • Libertarians • Anti-vaxxers Defoe, his contemporaries and his immediate predecessors in the nonconformist community had a well-developed narrative scheme to fall back upon by which to explain misfortune, if of a particularly harsh and unforgiving character that hardly leads to peace of mind, but a twenty-first-­ century pandemic is more open to interpretation, some scientific, some imaginative to the point of straining credibility. ‘Providences’ come in a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Sim, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Covid-19, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31286-1_4

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different form nowadays, but are no more conclusive (unless you are a conspiracy theorist, i.e.,). The narrative of Covid was from the start closely tied up with the development of a vaccine to deal with it, and this, too, brought out some of the more questionable aspects of human nature. Conspiracy theories were rife throughout the pandemic and vaccination, when it came on the scene in 2021, became one of their main targets: a conflict which is not yet over and which signals some critical fault-lines in our culture. Uncritical belief, too, is rife in our culture and it does not need much to kick it into gear (uncritical belief in conspiracy theories is practically a given). Hence the argument that vaccination is an establishment plot to demonstrate its power over us and perhaps even inject us with microchips to monitor our movements (even if this assumes a level of governmental competence which is not always apparent in its daily dealings with far more mundane matters, examples of which are legion). Whereas we should be debating the merits of the various vaccines produced to counter the virus (Western, Russian, Chinese, etc.), we are all too often being drawn into utterly pointless exchanges based on prejudice rather than scientific evidence. Even the most rudimentary fact-checking is enough to demolish the claims of the former, but unfortunately, that does not always happen—denial of facts you do not like is the default position of the committed conspiracy theorist (not to mention a host of politicians, with Donald Trump an obvious example to cite). Prejudice should be kept out of the Covid narrative as much as possible; all it succeeds in doing is hampering the campaign to check the virus’s impact. Opinion not backed up by evidence, as in this case, can be socially harmful and needs to be called out whenever it happens. And that means scientifically provable evidence, not some unsubstantiated claims passed around on internet sites until they are assumed to have taken on an air of truth and legitimacy by their mere repetition: an outcome which, sadly enough, is becoming all too common. The religious explanations for the pandemic still remain available for the devout in our own times; and although this constitutes a much smaller percentage of the population in the West than in Defoe’s time, they still have considerable appeal in the non-Western world, where religious belief is more widespread and deeper-rooted in the culture (as it notably is with Islam, for instance). What the pandemic has revealed, both in religious and secular societies, is how persistent uncritical belief is, how resistant it can be to scientific explanation—and this despite the fact that science and technology form the basis of the modern world order and its commitment to a

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systematic improvement in living standards and the overall quality of life. Without science as we know it, there would be little progress as we have come to expect it—as even conspiracy theorists do (where would they be without the internet?). There is absolutely no scientific evidence that the installation of the 5G telecommunications network has damaged the human immune system to make us more vulnerable to the Covid virus, but a vigorous anti-5G campaign refuses to believe otherwise. Nothing the political or scientific community says seems able to convince such zealots, who have tried to sabotage the 5G system wherever possible and have continued to spread disinformation about it. Those who see Covid as a judgement from God are just as resistant to rational explanations for the phenomenon; to them, it is not a matter for debate. There are narratives and counter-narratives that clash and in the process reveal some disturbing social tensions within our culture, particularly as regards the relationship between individuals and authority—the little narrative/grand narrative interaction at its most basic. It is enough for some people for the relevant authority to deny it for them to believe the exact opposite (religious authorities excepted in the case of the devout). For many, science is not to be trusted to tell the truth, and if what it says goes against their belief system then it is to be rejected. Enlightenment rationality is perhaps not as deeply rooted in our culture as liberals among us might want to believe (if it were, creationism would hardly exist, as a case in point). Granted, politicians are eminently capable of lying to us if they think it will advance their cause (hardly a rare occurrence either), but scientists really ought to be given the benefit of the doubt on that score. Ethics are far more of a concern to the latter group than the former, professional standards more diligently monitored and maintained by one’s peers, uncritical belief actively discouraged. The kind of rigorous fact-checking that constantly goes on in science is signally missing in the conspiracy theory world, which tends to disregard or rubbish evidence to the contrary of their beliefs. Scientists may still get things wrong (relying on well-established theories rather than paradigm-threatening new ones, for example), but they have the systems to correct this; conspiracy theorists do not, and would not want them anyway. Given the chaos that follows in their wake, however, it is hardly surprising that pandemics bring ideologies and belief systems into question. In that respect they also prove a gift to conspiracy theorists, who can always be relied upon to come up with answers as to why such a disaster is being visited upon their society. No matter how far-fetched or improbable such theories appear to be, they will always find an audience desperate to be

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given reasons for an event that is creating such havoc in their lives. (QAnon takes some beating in terms of improbability, given its contention that a global elite is running a child pornography and prostitution network, again assuming a level of competence amongst our rulers that is anything but apparent most of the time, never mind a damning lack of real, hard evidence as to where and how this operates and how it can be kept so hidden from so many of us.) God, as we have seen, can be cited as a cause, an entity bent on punishing humankind for its many failings. If scientists say different, then they are just wrong, contrary evidence simply being rejected yet again. For the truly devout, the Bible (or whatever their particular sacred text is) trumps any other source of explanation; it is received truth and not to be queried. More people may have believed in divine judgement being visited upon sinful humanity in Defoe’s time, particularly in the plague-ridden London he pictures in all its horror in JPY, but it still has its adherents nowadays amongst the religious, in the West and elsewhere. Conspiracy theorists of the Covid generation have been particularly imaginative about the source of the pandemic, as in the case of the 5G telecommunications network mentioned above (more on that to come).

The Official Narrative The official narrative delivered by governments in the West, once they realised that they just had to take action against coronavirus, their initial reluctance being overtaken by events as cases and deaths racked up, was that measures had to be introduced to reduce the possibility of contagion while we awaited the arrival of a successful vaccine. Those measures involved quite a severe lockdown that resulted in most of the UK’s population being confined to their dwelling places for most of the time (working from home where possible), a situation encouraging what was potentially an unhealthy degree of introspection in almost any of us—a Covid-induced condition it may well take some time to overcome. We sense H. F. withdrawing within himself as the year progresses (the periwig-­ maker shuts himself away completely for the duration), and that is something I suspect most of us felt happening during Covid’s darkest days, with less and less interaction with others to break the mind-numbing tedium that came to define daily existence. (It is only fair to point out, however, that hospital and care-home workers had a very different experience of Covid, one very far removed from tedium. Those able to work

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from home had activities to keep their minds occupied as well.) It was as if public debate went into hibernation until further notice; survival took precedence over everything else and became almost the only topic of discussion (most of which was by phone or email). Grocery shopping and trips for medical treatment were permitted (although subject to a significant degree of regulation), but we were all warned to keep these to a minimum and to make use of services such as supermarket van delivery systems where the opportunity existed. Staying as isolated as possible became the ideal: a duty we owed to others as we were advised to regard it by the government, and just to make sure, one subject to policing and law enforcement to ensure compliance. (Some government ministers even recommended reporting neighbours guilty of such breaches to the police, which could only emphasise our growing alienation from, and suspicion of others, trapped in our own little worlds as we were.) While essential services were kept operating, whole swathes of business and commerce shut down and town and city centres soon became eerie no-go zones all but devoid of traffic—being there, even if only fleetingly, reliably inducing that combination of apprehension and boredom mentioned earlier. Normal life largely ground to a halt, with the bulk of trade, as in H. F.’s London, coming to a ‘full Stop’ until further notice (although at least in our case, proper provision was made for those unable to go to work because of this situation, even if this could have its gaps). Meeting up with friends and family was actively discouraged and social distancing and mask-wearing had to be observed if out of doors. It all added up to a narrative of exclusion: avoid social contacts, restrict going out of one’s house except for necessary shopping, medical and exercise purposes, keep in isolation until the vaccine cavalry arrived as the ultimate providential intervention. Wariness of others soon became the norm, as every single one of us came to be seen as potential carriers, and therefore transmitters, of the virus—simultaneously villains and victims. It was all a bit like being stuck in a disaster movie— and dreading how it might develop at the personal level (and having lots of spare time to do so). That is yet another side-effect of Covid that may well linger. As far as the current generation is concerned, the fear of another such outbreak may never really go away entirely. The periodic spikes in reported Covid cases merely serve to reinforce that feeling, unwelcome reminders that we are not yet in the clear. Libertarians predictably opposed all this government intervention, but the vast majority of the country, however grudgingly, abided by the rules (even if the government itself did not, an issue I will return to below).

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Libertarians were to become more and more vocal as the exclusion narrative dragged on; however, as with conspiracy theory, their support continued to grow in a public becoming increasingly restless with the strictures imposed on them. The vaccine was actually developed quite quickly as these things go, but it did not seem that way when you were confined to quarters until further notice, with only the most minimal of human contact to break the wearisome monotony—much like house arrest as it could come to feel. The government was beginning to be regarded as the enemy by many, argued to be curtailing freedoms which were every human being’s right (although in this case that also appeared to include the right to infect others if out and about without a mask; libertarianism has many such blind spots). It was a counter-narrative to the official one and its appeal was undeniable, even amongst government circles, who were well aware how unpopular lockdown was making them—social media being full of complaint that became more vociferous as the weeks and months piled up and the public’s patience began to wear thin. The UK and American authorities, for example, jumped at the chance to relax the lockdown strictures whenever the opportunity arose, as when infection rates started to drop to any significant degree. It was a policy that often proved to be counter-productive, however, as infection rates could just as quickly rise again—and duly did, a cycle that we are still stuck in several years later (as I write in autumn 2022, they are yet again creeping up, in China particularly, an ominous sign with winter looming). It was a pattern eerily similar to the emotional ups and downs associated with the spiritual autobiographical tradition, to be incorporated into the early novel from Defoe onwards. Whatever optimism the protagonist may feel at any particular moment will soon be dashed by darker thoughts as to likely outcomes. Peace of mind never really comes, the threat of predestination being proof against that, keeping you permanently on edge and fearing the next bad sign to turn up. While this makes for exciting fiction as we follow the twists and turns of the narrative, it is altogether less fun when we are having to live these out in real life. The sense is of one’s little narrative being swamped by our belief system’s great. We now know that the government did not always follow its own guidelines, and that inside 10 Downing Street, the exclusion narrative was hardly being adhered to at all. A series of now notorious parties went on, the total opposite to what the general public was being told was allowed (and was being fined for, if even minor breaches were detected by the police), in what could be considered a contemporary version of the

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Pye-­Tavern revels. This is a scenario that is still being haggled over as I write, and there is little doubt that it has damaged public trust in government quite badly. The notion of authority being a law unto itself is one that undermines democratic principles, and it is a side-effect of the pandemic which could have far-reaching consequences. It is a widely held belief that political leaders should set a good example for those they rule, but it plainly did not happen in this instance, and, fairly or otherwise, it has tarnished the reputation of all politicians. ‘They are all the same, only in it for themselves; none of them can really be trusted; one law for us, but another for them’, and so on. It is a narrative that no-one gains from— except the conspiracy theorists, for whom it fits only too neatly into their meta-­ narrative of political corruption and general public gullibility. Thankfully, not everyone is that gullible, but enough are to keep conspiracy theorists in business. The far-right press and websites do not help the situation by being sympathetic towards, and often openly supportive of, conspiracy theories either.

Conspiracy Narratives Conspiracy theory provided a seductively available method of narrating the Covid pandemic, attracting a large band of followers thanks to the internet, which has turned into the most effective rumour-monger in human history. Its believers peddled a steady stream of stories about both the source of the virus and its causes to an audience eager for a simple answer to what was in reality a complex issue as to how to deal with the situation in its entirety. Conspiracy cuts through all that bewildering complexity and offers an escape route from all the anxiety and dread that grips a population during a pandemic, so one can understand its appeal and why so many went along with its claims; but it is illusory and of no practical help in dealing with the phenomenon. Its explanations can never be verified and are based on hearsay rather than hard evidence; dig into them and there is nothing substantial there. Once posted on the net, however, there is a tendency to regard them as true, and the more they are passed on as if they were actual news then the more readers they convince (that is the nature of our post-truth age, much to the dismay of all rationalists among us). And there always seems to be a steady stream of easily persuadable readers coming forward, disinclined to check the evidence for the claims being made, no matter how outlandish they may be. The criterion for

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acceptance is whether it fits your existing beliefs or not; if it does, no further questions are asked. As to some of those claims, China, where the virus made its first appearance, became the villain for many theorists (President Trump very notably amongst them), who saw it as the fault of the Chinese government for concocting the virus as part of its microbe research experiments at the Institute for Virology in the city of Wuhan. Finding a scapegoat is a popular pandemic pastime, and one that always seems guaranteed to attract a legion of avid supporters; although one would think this would qualify as yet another instance of, ‘It mattered not from whence it come’ (nevertheless, several years later Trump supporters still adhere loyally to this belief). Whether deliberately or by accident, the virus had then found its way into the wider community, spreading internationally from Wuhan with alarming speed and with devastating impact on public health. Within a few months, the entire world had been exposed to it, deaths were building up so rapidly that health systems were being thrown into chaos from which many have still to recover properly years later, and lockdowns were being instituted almost everywhere as a defence mechanism (if not always as fast as they should have been, gifting invaluable time and space to the virus to spread). First round of the contest unmistakably went to the virus, therefore, as the pharmaceutical industry struggled to come up with an effective vaccine to what proved to be a particularly resistant opponent. Along with the infection statistics, vaccine updates came to be a regular part of the news round.1 This was fertile ground for the conspiracy theory movement which could spin its narratives to a confused and frightened public, relentlessly worn down by the harsh demands of lockdown and the nerve-­ racking wait for a vaccine solution (the difficulty of finding this when dealing with a hitherto unknown virus was not always taken into account, it has to be said). Uncertainty is a condition that few can tolerate for very long, making them very receptive to those claiming to have the real inside story as to what is going on. In that situation, any explanation can seem better than none, with credibility being a lesser consideration as far as inner conspiracy theorists are concerned. Conspiracy theorists could not accept that there was a natural explanation for all of this, that viruses were always working away in the background because microbes were part of the life cycle. They could not be avoided: the best that humanity could do was to contain them and continue to develop vaccines that reduced their impact as much as possible when disease outbreaks occurred, as they have throughout history and

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look set to do for the foreseeable future. Ours is merely the latest in a long line of such encounters with an impressively inventive, and invasive, microbe world that has more than a suggestion of the sublime about it. (Monkeypox has just come on the scene as I write, posing yet another formidable challenge for the pharmaceutical industry’s research wing. How serious an outbreak this might be is still to be determined, but it is already being compared to AIDS in terms of its impact on the gay population.) Vaccines eventually were developed in this case, although not before a huge toll of deaths around the world from Covid and its medical complications, the current WHO estimate putting this at over 6 million.2 (It is to be noted that this estimate comes with the proviso that the figures from Africa and many Asian countries may be higher than the official statistics record, given the less-developed public health infrastructure often to be found there. H. F., too, questions the reliability of these, suspecting they might well be much higher given the confusion of the times: ‘if the Bills of Mortality said Five Thousand, I always believ’d it was near twice as many in reality’.3 It is to be hoped that the discrepancy is not as dramatic as it was with Covid, but only time and much more detailed research will tell.) To their credit, most Western governments managed to get mass vaccination programmes up and running fairly rapidly, to the immense relief of most of their citizens (although in America the Trump administration did drag its heels over this, to the dismay of its health officials). Yet almost immediately, vaccines too turned into a source of controversy, as an anti-­ vaccination campaign swung into action against them, arguing that they had not been tested enough before being brought into use. While there is certainly a basis for debate on this topic, one suspects that there could never be enough testing to satisfy the more extreme members of this group, whose minds are made up regardless of what may happen or what the health authorities say. Such extreme anti-vaxxers claimed that vaccinations were infecting people with the virus, and that they should be withdrawn from use until they were guaranteed to be safe. You can still hear the same claim being made by some over the annual flu vaccine. There was never any proof of this claim, as there never was with flu either; hearsay and rumour were being allowed to fill in the gap where hard evidence was needed. But that did not prevent protests from being mounted, with angry marches and demonstrations becoming quite regular occurrences, dutifully reported on all the news outlets to lend them a spurious legitimacy—enough to generate many death threats to doctors. (The feminist

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author Naomi Wolf went so far as to describe the Covid vaccination programme as ‘mass murder’ on a GB News programme, which is precisely the sort of wild accusation that can generate online death threats against those in healthcare.4) Conspiracy theorists were not to be persuaded away from their chosen narrative by rational scientific evidence, and they would go on disrupting the official narrative wherever they could, welcoming the publicity their efforts brought since they delivered more recruits to the cause. Whatever the next major disease outbreak may be, we can be sure that anti-vaxxer zealots will trot out the same arguments questioning the treatment and government’s role in disseminating it. The official narrative is a plot against the ordinary citizen for this group and it would seem that they are impervious to whatever the relevant authorities say. One particularly imaginative explanation for the cause of the virus’s spread was that it could be traced back to the installation of the 5G communications network in the UK. The theory was that radio waves from these had the effect of weakening the human immune system, thus enabling the virus to wreak its damage all the more easily. Similar, equally dubious, health risks had been claimed for the 3G and 4G forerunners, and no doubt will be when further technological updates come on stream. To the more committed proponents of the theory this meant that the solution was to destroy the masts that were being erected around the country to carry the network. Some were cut down, others were set on fire as activists went to work as part of the campaign waged by various groups against 5G. These included ‘Stop 5G’ and ‘Destroy 5G, Save Our Children’, for example, who managed to spread their claims on Facebook, drawing many celebrity endorsements before the network belatedly took down their pages. (New anti-5G websites have kept opening up since, however, as a search on the net will quickly reveal; as long as there is a market, they will continue to do so—again, rationalists can only despair.) The fact that there was absolutely no scientific evidence whatsoever for the theory was no deterrent for its many believers, who dismissed any arguments to the contrary as proof of a cover-up. The latter is an all-too-typical response of conspiracy theorists, and one that is extremely difficult to argue against—do so, and you are merely proving that you are part of the cover-up (or incredibly naive). Theirs is a narrative to be adhered to, no matter what its opponents may say, demonstrating an almost religious sense of conviction about the rightness of their beliefs. It should not need to be emphasised that Covid is a case for science not faith, but unfortunately, it has to be—over and over again.

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Ideology and the Official Narrative For the UK government the production of the vaccine was a triumph for the capitalist system, thus a vindication of the role of the profit motive within our society. The line was that the vaccine would not have come through so quickly without that motive as a driving force to the pharmaceutical industry. The vaccine was to be enlisted in the service of an ideology, although the truth was far more complicated than that as several voices were soon to point out (one is almost tempted to regard this claim as yet another conspiracy theory, especially since none of the bad things that happen under capitalism are ever attributed to it by its ardent supporters; recessions and depressions, for example, are the fault of humanity, not the system, which must never be tinkered with). The scientific teams who so painstakingly developed the various effective vaccines saw themselves as working for the public good rather than the benefit of capitalist corporations. In fact the pandemic was notable for the spirit of public service that it generated, most notably amongst NHS staff, who worked tirelessly, and at considerable risk to their own health (fatally so in far too many instances, which should never be forgotten), to cope with the massive intake of Covid cases that resulted. (Defoe, too, praises those doctors who remained in London throughout the plague; again, often at the cost of their own health and safety.) The general public were made more than ever aware of just how important public service was, and responded particularly enthusiastically to the weekly clapping sessions that were instituted to show appreciation of the NHS staff’s efforts. Those efforts plainly did not proceed from the profit motive, and could be seen as part of yet another narrative that grew out of Covid: a renewal of the belief in the need for robust and effective central government, in opposition to right-­ wing arguments for paring this down to a minimum. For libertarians, government was to be seen as an enemy of freedom: less government was their aim, and most right-wing politicians in the West adopted this creed. To commentators on the left, the pandemic showed the limitations of this libertarian-led ideology, although the extreme right have treated it as a minor aberration that does not affect their overall faith in the little government ethos. At best, the latter are lying low until the worst of Covid has passed, at which point we can expect the same claims to be headlined in election manifestos as if they constituted the answer to all our social problems (that is already happening in fact, in both the UK and US). The pandemic suggests otherwise, as does the energy crisis and the war in

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Ukraine, but that will be glossed over as it recedes into history—until the next virus comes on the scene to shake us up rudely anyway. Ideologues do not give up easily, and can be as impervious to evidence to the contrary as the most zealous of conspiracy theorists. Although it was never as such acknowledged as part of the official ideology, the notion of herd immunity was bandied about in government and medical circles (especially in the hiatus before the vaccine arrived), and this certainly raised thought-provoking issues in terms of the relationship between individual and society. The assumption behind the idea is that even if some will not develop the immunity, the majority will and that will mean a gradual decrease in the level of infection. Herd immunity does develop with any infection, but it can take time and that will not always be on one’s side. There might be a nagging sense as well that the authorities could think herd immunity absolves them from responsibility for dealing with the issue, letting nature take its course instead. This can leave the individual feeling exposed and unprotected, however, which is not good for one’s state of mind. We live in a culture which emphasises individualism and herd immunity seemed to reveal our limitations on this score, as did the pandemic as well of course: we are far more dependent on each other than libertarians care to admit. Interestingly, the idea crops up in A Journal of the Plague Year, as when H.  F.’s medical friend, Dr Heath, points out that appearances to the contrary (because cases of infection are very definitely rising), the situation is actually improving: ‘you will see many more People recover than used to do; for tho’ a vast Multitude are now everywhere infected, and as many every Day fall sick; yet there will not so many die as there did’.5 That proves to be the case, as it has also with us, the Omicron variant having turned out to be notably milder in its effect than was initially feared, with a far lower resultant death toll (if, as we have to keep reminding ourselves, however, in case we become complacent, still a death toll). But having to rely on such a random process is not exactly reassuring at the individual level, because ‘many more’ may not include you. If and when you came down with the Omicron variant (as the author did), you could not know how severe it might turn out to be, a situation guaranteed to cause worry until the infection has run its course.

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Covid and Guilt Covid, too, could induce guilt, particularly in its pre-vaccine stage when nothing could be taken for granted any more. Doubts piled up inexorably as to one’s conduct and actions. Am I perhaps asymptomatic but infecting others? Am I an inadvertent super-spreader? Have I been rash in my movements or travels to the point where I could be infecting my family? Should I be testing myself more frequently before having even minimal contact with others? Should I interact with others at all? Am I washing my hands often enough and long enough? What is it reasonable to do under the prevailing circumstances? What is it patently not reasonable to do? The list of questions and doubts went on and on and had to be faced up to every day while Covid was raging; the situation not being all that different to that confronting H. F. all the way through his dismal plague year, when his every action could have fatal consequences. As with predestination theory, ultimately it all came back to the individual: somehow or other, whether justifiably or not, we were personally to blame for what was happening to us. We should not have gone out that day; we should not have tempted fate in such a reckless fashion when we were well aware of the dangers involved. Whatever we did was potentially dangerous not just to us but to anyone else we knew and had dealings with. If you had any predisposition to guilt (a not uncommon condition, especially if you come from a Northern European, traditionally Protestant country, as the author does) then Covid was guaranteed to intensify this and keep your anxiety levels well topped up. As with plague and predestination, living with Covid is living with guilt: guilt that can never truly be overcome or expiated. Covid meant that we were bound by more formal regulations than H. F. was, given that in his case, social distancing was an individual decision and mask-wearing not yet a legal requirement. Quarantining may have been even more strict during the plague (at least in principle anyway), but there was not the same sense of the authorities monitoring and controlling one’s movements overall as Covid involved. If we failed to observe the regulations, then we had the extra complication of feeling guilty at breaking the law. No doubt nearly all of us did in small ways at some point or another (if not on the scale of the notorious Downing Street parties, one hopes), thus adding to our anxiety and unease about whether we were making the situation even worse by our selfishness. Guilt could come to be an all-pervading aspect of our lives, a haunting presence that we could

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never really escape from. It is no wonder that Covid has had such a profound impact on the world’s mental health.

Conclusion Pandemics engender a host of narratives, therefore, not all of which will stand up to rational scrutiny: fear and anxiety create a market for ever wilder explanations of a phenomenon that threatens to overwhelm our entire way of life. Casting around for a narrative to help one through trying times when sickness is in the ascendancy is perfectly understandable, but not all such narratives are commendable; indeed, many of them have only succeeded in increasing the amount of prejudice and bigotry in our society. Anti-vaxxers tend to be contemptuous of those who do not share their views (they are not so much sceptics, as they are often categorised, as denialists in that respect), although it has to be admitted that they can meet the same attitude back, even from those of a generally liberal disposition. Pandemics do little to improve social relations, and pandemic narratives are all too often a major part of the problem, stirring up distrust of the beliefs and opinions of our fellow citizens and entrenching prejudices (which is never a good outcome for a liberal democracy). The vaccine narrative certainly had that effect and we may well have to live with it for quite some time, especially if Covid continues its track record of producing challenging mutations. And just because Omicron proved milder than its predecessor variants does not mean its successors will be too; there will be a period of public unease every time a new one is identified. Microbes have the disconcerting ability to sidestep even our most elaborate precautions (just give them time), meaning that the Covid narrative is constantly having to be revised. That makes countering conspiracy theories all the more difficult (they do not have to alter their line to anything like the same extent of course, they can just go on citing the same causes and culprits), but it is a task that we must never give up on no matter how frustrating it might become. Conspiracy theory is not going to check the progress of Covid, more likely to make it easier; unvaccinated individuals have to be seen as more open to infection, especially during any upturn in the rate of this, thus a potential threat to the health of others, even if anti-­ vaxxers refuse to acknowledge this. There is no meta-narrative here, just the pandemic effects facing us, which require no conspiracy at all to explain their existence.

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It is important to recognise in this case that medical science is not a grand narrative, but a little narrative that is always being expanded according to the latest round of experimenting and testing. It does not claim to have the answer to all our problems with ill-health and disease, merely the ability to keep on adding to its knowledge of these and refining its treatments through the evidence collected. Scientific theories hold only until proved otherwise, at which point they can be revised or even discarded, as has happened repeatedly throughout the modern age. Neither conspiracy theory nor ideology—certainly of the grand narrative kind, as Lyotard understands these—are as open to change as science in general is, and are more likely to stick to the position they have adopted even when faced with evidence to the contrary (they seem to have something of a herd immunity to that phenomenon). As both Covid and the plague have revealed, pandemics are quite ruthless in exposing the limitations of the prevailing grand narrative, in particular its contradictions, whether political or religious.

Notes 1. See David Quammen, Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat A Deadly Virus, London: The Bodley Head, 2022, for a detailed discussion of the development of vaccines to deal with Covid-19 (something of A Journal of the Covid Year one might say). 2. As of 23 September, 2022, the WHO puts the global death toll at 6,517,123, out of 612,724,171 recorded cases (‘WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard’, https://covid19.who.int (accessed 28 September, 2022)). 3. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), ed. Louis Landa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 2010, pp. 111–12. 4. The claim was made by Wolf on The Mark Steyn Show, GB News, 4 October, 2022 (sterilising us being another of the vaccine’s effects apparently). Ofcom subsequently launched an investigation to decide whether this constituted an infringement of the Broadcast Code. The trouble is, however, that even if Ofcom takes action over this, the claim is out there and being written and talked about in the mainstream media, thus ensuring that it reaches a wider audience. That is all conspiracy theories need to keep in circulation, there being no such thing as bad publicity where they are concerned. 5. Defoe, JPY, p. 192.

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References Defoe, Daniel, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), ed. Louis Landa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 2010. Quammen, David. Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus, London: The Bodley Head, 2022. ‘WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard’, https://covid19.who.int (accessed 28 September, 2022).

CHAPTER 5

Pandemics in Perspective

Abstract  The concluding chapter summarises the argument against uncritical belief running throughout the book, arguing that we urgently need to correct this all-too-common tendency if we are to deal with other looming crises—notably, climate change. The politics of pandemics, particularly the discrepancies it highlights in health provision between rich and poor, are also summarised. An existentialist interpretation of pandemics is encouraged, especially its insistence on the basic absurdity of human existence. A Journal of the Plague Year is a text for our times in helping us put socio-political crises in perspective, and if, like H. F., we find that survival is the best outcome we can expect from an event on the pandemic scale, we should try to see that as positively as we can. Keywords  Pandemic • Covid-19 • Plague • Climate crisis • Social justice • Existentialism • Absurd • Virus • Neoliberalism Pandemics offer us some interesting lessons therefore, such as the need to counter uncritical belief wherever we are confronted by it (as we are far too frequently in a supposedly reason-based culture), as well as to plan more carefully for how we deal with crisis—both as individuals and as societies. The many parallels between Defoe’s vision of the plague and the Covid-19 pandemic imply that we are not necessarily all that much better in dealing with crisis than our predecessors were. While there is no doubt © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Sim, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Covid-19, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31286-1_5

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that we are technologically more advanced than they were (as very obviously in the area of medical science), whether we are psychologically as well is much more debateable. The possibility of dystopian social collapse hovers tantalisingly on the horizon in each case, triggering a rise in anxiety amongst the general public that can leave individuals feeling helpless and isolated. Add in the climate crisis, increasingly forcing itself on our attention through ever more extreme weather events occurring all over the world (floods, droughts, heatwaves), and that feeling is magnified very considerably: ‘dystopian’ hardly does it justice in terms of possible outcomes. When such a situation occurs political extremism tends to flourish, its leaders expertly preying on those feelings by plying us with misleading narratives, with all the adverse effect this has on our social existence. Conspiracy theories never solve any problem, they merely divide us further from each other in trying times, and there is no doubt that the last few years qualify as that. Authoritarian politicians internationally have shown themselves to be only too adept at turning the pandemic to their ideological advantage, using it as an excuse to crack down on dissenting voices, for example, claiming that an emergency demands a suspension of normal political life—and, crucially, accountability for their actions, one of the supposed bedrocks of democratic society.1 Take that away, and extremism has a free hand; and it is not slow to exercise it. Such emergencies are a gift to those in search of absolute, unchecked power, and there is no shortage of figures around at the moment with ambitions to achieve precisely this objective: the strong leader principle, so popular in the 1920s and 1930s and with such disastrous results, has come back to trouble us again. The afterlife of pandemics can leave us with some complex socio-political problems, therefore, and this chapter will try to put these in perspective. The notion that we can just put such extreme experiences behind us and go on as we did before they struck, is wishful thinking: pandemics leave a mark on society that never fades entirely. The rise in authoritarianism internationally, which had been going on for some years prior to the pandemic, as noted by various concerned commentators, was accelerated by it quite dramatically, changing the character of the political landscape for the worse for those of us of a liberal democratic disposition.2 That is a legacy of the pandemic with the potential to haunt us for quite some time yet, as will the rise in incidence of uncritical belief that authoritarianism invariably fosters. The last century or so is stocked up with examples of this, which we ignore at our peril; it has the disturbing tendency to creep up on us and

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become the norm unexpectedly quickly, spreading like a virus. It would be a tragedy indeed, if the pandemic were to leave us with a legacy of autocracy and dictatorship.

The Politics of Pandemics One of the critical aspects of pandemics is the way that it reveals the failings in our system of social justice. The poorer classes in all societies suffer far more in such episodes than those at the upper end of the income scale, having a less healthy lifestyle and thus markedly less resistance to disease in general, never mind a deadly virus such as Covid, skilled at targeting the weakest and least prepared. That is something that comes across in the three pandemic novels we have explored in this study, A Journal of the Plague Year, The Plague, and Nights of Plague, as well as in Pepys’s Diary. Defoe makes the particularly pertinent point that the poor had no option but to take on dangerous jobs such as tending the infected or taking them to the pest-house, if they were not to starve, as most other employment had dried up. In non-Western countries, access to healthcare is also much more problematic for those at the lower end of the social scale, to the point of being almost non-existent in extreme cases. (Countries such as these are also far less likely to put preventative measures in place to minimise the impact of future outbreaks, which compounds the problem with infection rates and thus the threat of further transmission to the rest of the world. Mark Honigsbaum’s The Pandemic Century has numerous examples of just such official short-sightedness and the problems that inevitably followed on from these.3 It is imperative to realise that we really are all in this together, and that the existence of Covid anywhere is a threat to us all.) The effects of such socio-economic differences become ever more apparent during a pandemic, where, in the West anyway, records of infection are kept in detail by the authorities and regularly reported on in the media, keeping them firmly in the public eye. For all that Western societies pride themselves on being egalitarian in principle, in practice, there are some quite glaring discrepancies to note in how this applies across the social scale. Unless it is regulated to some significant extent by government (which has become less and less the case in the last few decades under the spell of neoliberal economics and its bias towards a minimalist, non-interventionist, state), capitalism is geared towards increasing wealth at the top of society and with that, those discrepancies also. (The current energy crisis, which has seen household electricity bills double or triple over the course of 2022  in the UK, has been a boon to the energy

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companies and their shareholders who have seen record-breaking profits roll their way, in a classic example of how those discrepancies are generated. Capitalism is notoriously short on social conscience, and only too happy to be left to its own devices, as the laissez faire principle bluntly declares.) Poverty is always going to be a liability in a pandemic; it was in Defoe’s time and it still is now. At the very least pandemics ought to give us a sense of proportion about the limits of human power and our ability to exercise control over the environment, as well as of our own individual vulnerability in the face of crises. The victims of Covid, in their millions worldwide, stand as desperate testimony to that, and deserve better than to be thought of as just a blip in our history. It was our plague moment, our rude encounter with the ‘Absurd’ if you like (an existentialist outlook seems particularly appropriate to the experience of a pandemic, a point I will expand on below), and we need to take stock of what it has told us of our belief systems, as well as our political systems. If either of these is badly found wanting by a pandemic, as they patently have been in the case of Covid, then they need reconsidering, and most likely significant changes to be made both to their content and their claims. The relationship between economics and pandemics certainly invites close analysis. As a case in point, neoliberalism has widened the wealth gap across the world very substantially indeed over the last few decades and the pandemic has made this ever more visible given the much higher infection, and then, predictably, mortality rates amongst those at the lower end of the socio-economic scale than those in the richer classes. It is worth noting that economic theory can determine one’s fate just as harshly as nonconformists believed predestination did. Guilt does not, however, seem to play much of a part in neoliberal ideology; as in predestination theory, you are held to be responsible for your choices, given that you are assumed to have free will, so must have, in effect, chosen to fail by not trying hard enough to succeed economically.4 Not being entrepreneurial is practically regarded as a sin by the neoliberal community, for whom the world primarily exists to be monetised, exploiting whatever it offers in order to achieve that aim for oneself. Callous individualism is the name of the game here: guilt is for losers. While the virus could infect absolutely anyone, its impact has been far more pronounced on the poor than the wealthy, and that surely has to stand as an indictment of our culture. Neoliberalism plus a pandemic has been a lethal combination for far too many of the world’s citizens, who have little to fall back on to protect themselves if governments offer scant help, as all too many of

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them are ideologically disposed to do. The corporate sector has no incentive to become involved in such instances either. They do not see that as ever being part of their remit, which remains the maximisation of profit. Pandemics soon expose the shortcomings in public attitudes to social justice, their reach inescapably revealing inequalities that generally pass by unnoticed in normal times. Even right-wing governments have to acknowledge this to some extent, although they will rarely follow through all that thoroughly on any promises they may make to address the issue (the sad fate of the UK Conservative Party’s ‘levelling up’ agenda, rhetoric rather than action). Admissions of guilt ought to come through from the leaders involved, but they so rarely do; politicians, especially on the right, are averse to apology, which they regard as akin to weakness. It is in that vacuum that conspiracy theorists can go to work, offering false solutions to what are very real and pressing problems and rendering political change even more difficult to bring about, which is to the advantage of political extremists everywhere, who can go to work on a disaffected population. That is a cycle that desperately needs to be broken. What pandemics also do is to put politics in general into perspective. The various crises of the past few years, from the credit crash of 2008 through the Brexit referendum of 2016, rapidly accelerating global warming, to the outbreak of Covid in late 2019, have made political debate increasingly fractious. Ill-tempered wrangling between parties in Parliament and on election campaigns, although hardly new to the political scene, has become noticeably worse over this period, with accusations of treason during the Brexit campaign against those opposed to leaving the EU marking something of a low point (calling your opponents ‘enemies of the state’ being yet another spur for the posting of death threats). No one expects political life to be all sweetness and light, but there is little doubt that it has deteriorated significantly of late, and not just in the UK. The USA under Trump’s presidency sounds out a warning of where that trend can lead a liberal democracy if it goes unchecked, and we are still dealing with the aftermath of that. Then came the pandemic, bringing home to us just how little most of this mattered when our existence is reduced to a matter of survival (as things stand, the climate emergency will most likely create an even more advanced stage of this process). Much of what takes place in Parliament can seem like pointless game-playing under the circumstances. We can sense the same reaction in H. F. as the plague intensifies, his life dwindling to often aimless walks around the stricken city that only succeed in depressing him by emphasising his personal

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helplessness. Politics becomes a matter of observing what measures the London Mayor and aldermen are taking to deal with the desperate situation the city finds itself in. Their initial unpreparedness notwithstanding, he is in the main complimentary of their efforts, which he feels show an appropriate seriousness about what is happening and a sincere concern for the public’s welfare. In sharp contrast, the Court distances itself from the problem by its removal to Oxford for the duration, and H. F. has little good to say of them in consequence, dismissively remarking that, ‘really the Court concern’d themselves so little, and that little they did was of so small Import, that I do not see it of much Moment to mention any Part of it here’.5 (Even Pepys, a loyal government official, can sound critical of the Court for being ‘away from the place of business, and so all goes to wrack as to public matters, they at this distance not thinking of it’.6) It is not hard to identify contemporary politicians who concerned themselves as little as they could with Covid as well. President Bolsonaro of Brazil all but refused to believe that there was a pandemic, for example; neither did Donald Trump exactly go out of his way to support his health officials or encourage mask-wearing or social distancing by the general public (his campaign rallies were notorious for the lack of either).

Pandemics and the Absurd As I suggested above, I feel that pandemics are very conducive to an existentialist interpretation, particularly its emphasis on the essential absurdity of human existence and the lack of any overall meaning or destiny to it. It is the antithesis to a religious interpretation in that it insists we cannot ascribe any metaphysical explanation to such an event. There is no reason for a pandemic, it just happens, and it has to be dealt with on that empirical basis. Scientifically, we can identify all the causal sequences behind it and the impact it goes on to have, but not the rationale for that taking place, because there is none. Existentialism is a philosophy that undercuts all universal theories and their claims to be able to explain everything in logical terms, as part of God’s master plan, for example, or a stage in human evolution—possibly on the road to a utopia where we have conquered nature, as in the Marxist schema. Perhaps we should be thinking of history not so much as a struggle between classes as a struggle between humanity and microbes? A struggle, moreover, that is never going to end; any apparent victory won by humanity can only ever be temporary (in that respect it is a struggle that recalls yet another existentialist classic, Camus’s

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The Myth of Sisyphus; we have no alternative but to keep starting the process over and over again, and to meet the repeated challenge as bravely as we can7). We just have to accept that we can explain microbes in scientific terms but not metaphysical ones. A virus simply does what it does, it is not part of any larger purpose or scheme, and it is of no help to anyone to search for that, or ‘particular Providences’ to interpret. What is crucial about recognising the fact of the absurd is that it forces us to make sense of our lives through our actions. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is a dilemma that existentialists understand only too well. It is a philosophy, after all, that was developed over the course of the rise of fascism in the 1930s, and then through World War II: political turmoil on the grand scale that severely disrupted the lives of a whole generation. Existentialists regard that condition as something we have to face up to and work our way through, since being in the wrong place at the wrong time seems to be a fair description of the human condition in general. When it comes to a pandemic that means to judge our conduct by how we respond to the problems it confronts us with, including our response to what it reveals about our belief systems. I have made a point throughout this project of drawing attention to the social inequalities that the pandemic has made so glaringly visible, and that certainly do call out for concerted political action to tackle them. If we are going to look for a cause to construct out of our coronavirus experience that would be one that anyone with a social conscience should be glad to support. Health should not depend on wealth, as it is all too clear it does for a majority of the world’s population. We do not need organised religion or any grand ideological theory to tell us that there is something wrong in that being allowed to occur; action against the social and economic theories that have generated such wealth discrepancies, with neoliberalism a prime sinner, is long overdue. It is neither God’s will nor the iron laws of economics so beloved of capitalist apologists that dictate this outcome; it is uncritical belief in such theories, and a concomitant refusal to consider alternative viewpoints and political policies. For libertarians, profit conquers all; it is the answer to all human problems and is not to be questioned as a goal. The absurd renders all such claims to a universal truth to be meaningless; actions using that line of reasoning as justification are flawed at source and to be avoided. The pandemic ought to make us highly aware of the crucial significance of the absurd in our lives, although we should always bear in mind the existentialist insistence that this does not absolve us from responsibility for our actions and the effect they have on others. We still have

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choices to make in terms of relations to others and our behaviour in general, even if these are more restricted than we would ideally prefer them to be. There is still a narrative to construct, even if we have no ‘master narrative’ to fall back on as an authoritative point of reference. To opt out of this process is to fall into bad faith, and the pandemic ought to have brought home to us how vital it is not to allow that to happen.

A Text for Our Times I return to my opening contention that JPY has become a text for our times, one that helps us to recognise deep-seated failings in our ideology that call out for action to be taken to correct them as best we can. Inequality in particular is still all too common a feature of our society, which means the poorer classes suffer disproportionately from any calamity that happens to afflict us. It is a narrative as well that speaks to our insecurities, the vulnerability that all of us can experience, especially when caught up in a crisis that goes far beyond our ability to control. The feeling of being isolated that H.  F. has to endure over such a harrowingly long period is something almost any of us can identify with, knowing how events such as disease and ill-health can profoundly affect our psychological state—not to mention the natural disasters and wars that anyone can find themselves stuck in, just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time (as in Ukraine since the recent Russian invasion there). Normal life is something that can fall apart far more suddenly than any of us wants to believe, as H. F. finds out when the plague accelerates in its progress through London’s various boroughs, moving threateningly closer to his own neighbourhood by the day. One minute you think yourself safe, the next you discover you are not; a line has been crossed and your survival put seriously at risk. What was yesterday a few streets away is now at your very door, and you too are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even though H. F. believed that his survival was a decision that lay with God, he had to go through all the despair and anxiety that such insecurity inevitably induces in the individual mind: even religion cannot remove that entirely. JPY often reads like a gothic horror story in that respect—a nightmare that one unexpectedly finds oneself in. The risk may have been lower in our pandemic than in H. F.’s, but the nagging fear that one might be next in line to succumb to the virus, all the more worrying as its reign drags interminably on, is not so easily excised from our thought. Nor can the dread that accompanies it, the disquieting uncertainty about what might lie around the next corner

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just waiting to catch us: our personal wrong place at the wrong time, our personal gothic horror story poised to envelop us. Our personal limitations are ruthlessly exposed by the situation, by the absurd one might say. Normal life can come to seem like a distant dream under those circumstances and our sense of agency a mere illusion, a dispiriting situation to find ourselves in, tragic in its implications. Yet, like Sisyphus, we just have to get on with it even so. Whether infection is a sign of the divine at work or the absurd would barely seem to matter if one were to be struck by that disaster however. Once again, the precariousness of human existence declares itself all too forcefully; the brute fact that any of us can be one of the unfortunate to be singled out and that we are powerless if that happens. The absurd is never very far away in that regard. Perhaps that is the most important lesson we have to learn from pandemic literature? Not a very comfortable perspective to arrive at I agree, but one whose relevance over time would nevertheless be hard to deny. No matter how much human bravery and resilience there is in evidence (and these are always to be applauded when they are), we just have to accept that whatever narrative we put together to make sense of a pandemic is going to have a sombre, indeed often very sombre, element to it; with so much death and disaster around, that is inevitable. JPY still repays our close attention because it never loses sight of that fact, picturing life on the edge—of chaos we might say—all too vividly. We should be awaiting the next stage of the climate crisis with the same sense of trepidation, and this time around there is no question as to the collective guilt involved, with our continued commitment to capitalist economics and its obsession with technological progress well to the fore in the villainy stakes: we did not cause Covid, but we most certainly did the climate crisis. Nor is this a phenomenon that we can simply flee from: it is the climate version of a pandemic, from which there is no hiding place (no ‘Planet B’ as the slogan has it). The summer of 2022, with record-­breaking temperatures across all the countries of the UK that brought various parts of the system’s infrastructure temporarily to a standstill, has already sounded a grim warning of what is in store for us on that front. The UK, after all, is traditionally classified as a cool country with a temperate climate, but that may be yet another line we have crossed into uncharted territory, where temperatures of 40°+ can be expected, and possibly on a very regular basis. Countries where such temperatures are already the norm (places like the Australian subcontinent, for example, plus large swathes of equatorial Africa) could face the even tougher prospect of soon

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becoming unfit for human habitation altogether. It is a depressing thought to wonder if pandemics might turn out to be mere dress rehearsals for something far more disastrous for humanity—perhaps the ultimate expression of the sublime (as well as the death-knell of ‘western infallibility’). A Journal of the Climate Tipping-Point Year does not really bear thinking about.

‘Yet I Alive’ At least until the latter situation actually materialises (and no doubt we all have our own particular nightmares about that prospect), there are still some positive messages to be gleaned from H.  F.’s travails. His defiant closing statement sums these up: A dreadful Plague in London was,   In the Year Sixty Five, Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls   Away; yet I alive!8

There is a palpable sense of relief to this ‘sincere Stanza’, as H. F. dubs it, yet also an edge.9 The plague may have receded, but H.  F., and every other London citizen, knows it will return, that it is only a matter of time. It has never been brought under human control, and indeed, there is no method as yet available to combat it in a scientifically medical way; merely a catalogue of evidence-free wild conjectures and old wives’ tales: gunpowder and tar fumes, for example, can hardly disperse a pandemic, no matter how many London residents choose to believe they will (H. F. also reports how one woman’s remedy was to wash her head regularly in vinegar). All those such as H. F. can do is wait it out when plague strikes and hope for the best—which in his case would merely amount to a growing herd immunity and thus reduced death rate throughout his city. There is a Beckettian quality to all this of the ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ variety.10 As the plague rages on, the individual keeps reaching a point when he feels he has not the strength of will to go on, given that the odds of survival are becoming worse by the day (that dread ‘Hundred Thousand Souls’), but somehow or other he does. Some of his peers cannot cope with this grim realisation, even going to the lengths of throwing themselves into plague pits to die (constituting some of the grislier episodes in the narrative). So, for H. F. to have seen this through, temporarily only as it might prove to

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be, is to be considered an act of bravery (for M. E. Novak, he ‘is unique among Defoe’s narrators’ for the degree of courage he shows11). You can get through the toughest of times, although it will come at a considerable psychological cost; but it can be done, and most of us would agree that, yes, it must be done. That is what Camus is telling us as well—to pay heed to our ‘inner Sisyphus’, as it were. If we are trying to put the Covid pandemic in perspective, that is how we need to view the overall experience; the most basic requirement is just to get through it. Although that always comes with the proviso that getting through one crisis does not mean you will make it through the next; that is the darker meaning lurking within Defoe’s narrative, and one that we just have to learn to live with, recognising that there will be many grim details to be faced up to along the way. Whether surviving a climate change disaster would, or could, generate a similar ‘sincere Stanza’, remains to be seen. That may not sound like the most positive of conclusions to draw from our engagement with JPY, but in the spirit of existentialism, it will have to do. JPY’s metaphor lives on.

Notes 1. I discuss this trend in detail in Stuart Sim, A Call to Dissent: Defending Democracy Against Extremism and Populism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 2. See, for example, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future, London: Viking, 2018; and Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends, London: Allen Lane, 2020. 3. Mark Honigsbaum, The Pandemic Century: A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19 (2019), revised edition, London: Penguin, 2020. 4. Lest that seem to be over-critical, it is worth pointing out that at the Conservative Party Conference in 2022, the party chair said that if lower-­ income families were having difficulties paying their bills during the cost of living and energy crises, then they should simply get out there and find a higher-paying job. Compassion would not appear to be a particularly notable libertarian characteristic either. 5. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), ed. Louis Landa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 2010, p. 200. 6. Samuel Pepys, The Diary Of Samuel Pepys, I–XI, eds Robert Latham and William Matthews, London: Bell and Hyman, 1972, VI, p. 342.

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7. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), trans. Justin O’Brien, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. 8. Defoe, JPY, p. 212. 9. Ibid. 10. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953), ed. Steven Connor, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, p. 134. 11. M. E. Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man, London: Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 149.

References Applebaum, Anne, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends, London: Allen Lane, 2020. Beckett, Samuel, The Unnamable (1953), ed. Steven Connor, London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), trans. Justin O’Brien, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Defoe, Daniel, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), ed. Louis Landa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 2010. Honigsbaum, Mark, The Pandemic Century: A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19 (2019), revised edition, London: Penguin, 2020. Novak, M.  E., Defoe and the Nature of Man, London: Oxford University Press, 1963. Pepys, Samuel, The Diary Of Samuel Pepys, I–XI, eds Robert Latham and William Matthews, London: Bell and Hyman, 1972. Sim, Stuart, A Call to Dissent: Defending Democracy Against Extremism and Populism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. Levitsky, Steven and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future, London: Viking, 2018.

Index1

A Absurd, 43, 68, 70–73 AIDS, 17, 19, 57 Anglicanism, 26 Anti-vaxxers, 1, 57, 58, 62 B Beckett, Samuel, 74 Bible, 39, 52 Birch, Brian, 17 Black Death, 10, 20 Bolsonaro, Jair (President), 70 Brexit, 69 Bunyan, John, 28–30, 36, 37, 39 Grace Abounding, 29, 30 The Pilgrim's Progress, 28–30

C Calvin, John, 33 Camus, Albert, 5, 16, 70, 75 Capitalism, 59, 67, 68 Climate crisis, 11, 66, 73 Conspiracy theory, 3, 4, 18, 27, 32, 50, 51, 54–56, 59, 62, 63, 63n4, 66 D Dachez, Hélène, 31, 34 Defoe, Daniel, 1, 3, 5, 7–9, 16, 17, 20, 22, 26–29, 45n7 Moll Flanders, 16, 29 Robinson Crusoe, 16, 29 Roxana, 8, 16, 30

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Sim, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Covid-19, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31286-1

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INDEX

E Epidemics, 10–11 Existentialism, 43, 70, 75 F Fascism, 5, 71 5G, 51, 52, 58 Flu, 4, 5, 10, 19, 57 G Grand narrative, 9, 51, 63 Great Fire (of London), 7 Guilt, 30, 37–38, 61–62, 68, 69, 73 H Herd immunity, 60, 63, 74 Honigsbaum, Mark, 4, 67 I Islam, 30, 50 Ivermectin, 32 L Lateral flow test, 6, 22 Liberal democracy, 2, 3, 62, 69 Libertarians, 4, 53, 54, 59, 60, 71, 75n4 Little narrative, 9, 39, 51, 54, 63 Lockdown, 19, 52, 54, 56 Lyotard, Jean-François, 6, 9, 63 M Mask-wearing, 41, 53, 61, 70 McCarthy, Patrick, 43 McMillen, Christian W., 31 Monkeypox, 57

N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 5, 10 Nazis, 2, 46n46 Neoliberalism, 68, 71 NHS, 59 Nonconformism, 5, 28, 39 Novak, M. E., 17, 75 P Palmeri, Frank, 42 Pamuk, Orhan, 8, 34 Pepys, Samuel, 5, 26, 40–42, 67, 70 Post-truth, 27, 55 Predestination, 26, 28–38, 44, 54, 61, 68 Providence, 26, 33–35, 49, 71 Providentialism, 26 Q QAnon, 52 Quammen, David, 16, 22n3 Quarantining, 32, 61 R Roberts, David, 38 S SARS, 19 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 40 Scott, Sir Walter, 9 Social distancing, 6, 35, 36, 41, 53, 61, 70 Spanish flu, 2, 19 Spinney, Laura, 2, 3, 9, 11n2 Spiritual autobiography, 26, 28, 29 Sublime, 35, 57, 74 Super-spreader, 20, 34, 61

 INDEX 

T Trump, Donald (President), 18, 27, 32, 50, 56, 57, 69, 70 V Vaccine, 5, 10, 20, 50, 52–54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63n4

W Wolf, Naomi, 58 World Health Organisation (WHO), 10 World War I, 2 World War II, 8, 43, 71 Wuhan, 18, 56

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