The narrator debates who should be blamed for the spread of the plague: the careless sick people themselves, or the government whose practice of shutting up houses is so ineffective? He never arrives at a conclusion. The narrator rarely explains the source of these rumors but relies on them for his sense of the plague’s intensity. As houses were shut up, he began to hear rumors of watchmen being killed, and of families escaping and leaving their servants or relatives to die alone in their homes. He remarks that Astrologers, Oracles, and other “Quacks” (30) preyed on the poor, suggesting erroneous cures as well as spreading panic. The narrator provides his eyewitness account of London, as well as relays the gossip he has heard while walking to and from his brother’s house and getting provisions. Convinced that God willed him to stay and would protect him, he decided to remain.Īlthough London was at its highest population ever before the plague, the city emptied considerably by early August. However, he relays that as the death toll by the plague and other plague-adjacent illnesses increased throughout the spring, Londoners began to fear for their lives, and those who could afford to flee the city-the narrator excluded-did so. The narrator suggests that the initially slow spread of the plague according to the Bills of Death was, in fact, a result of attempts to cover it up, both by families who didn’t want their houses shut up by, as well as by government officials who wanted to prevent public panic. The narrator-and all Londoners-looked to these bills and tried to interpret them to foretell the spread of the plague. However, in the early months of 1665, there were only a few officially reported plague deaths in the weekly Bills of Death. There was a rumor of the plague in the Netherlands, and in late 1664, a reported death in London. The narrator begins by describing the initial outbreak of the plague: as newspapers had not yet begun to circulate in London, news of the plague spread via gossip. Most of these anecdotes are less than a paragraph long, although a few span pages. These anecdotes are not necessarily presented as facts but as vignettes that give a sense of the city’s desperation regardless of their veracity. The narration is roughly chronological, although it loops back and forth between events, and combines the narrator’s own experiences with numerous heard and overheard anecdotes about victims and survivors of the plague.
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