London: The Biography полностью

The plague had begun, in the parish of St. Giles, at the close of 1664. It is understood now that the infection was carried by the black rat, known also as rattus rattus, otherwise called the ship rat, or the house rat. These rats are old inhabitants of London, their bones being discovered in excavations of fourth-century Fenchurch Street. It is likely that they arrived from South Asia in Roman ships, and they have remained ever since. The severe cold of the early months of 1665 prevented any spread in the infection for a while, but from the beginning of spring the bills of mortality began to rise. By July the plague had entered the city from the western suburbs. It was a dry, hot summer without any wind. Grass grew in the abandoned streets.

John Allin, a clergyman, stayed in the city and sent many letters to those at a safe distance; they are reprinted in W.G. Bell’s Unknown London. On 11 August he wrote: “I am troubled at the approach of the sicknesse neerer every weeke, and at a new burying place which they have made neer us.” “They,” indicating some indeterminate authority all the more pressing for being so vague, has always been part of the London vocabulary. Thirteen days later: “I am, through mercy, yet well in middest of death and that, too, approaching neerer and neerer: not many doores off, and the pitt open dayly within view of my chamber window.” In the following week, at the beginning of September, he described “the dolefull and almost universall and continuall ringing and tolling of bells.” So this was the noise that broke the silence. In the same letter he mentioned that his brother had left the house one morning and, on his return from the streets, had found “a stiffness under his eare, where he had a swelling that could not be brought to rise and breake, but choacked him; he dyed Thursday night last.” Five days later Allin wrote of the distemper: “it is at the next doore on both hands of mee, and under the same roofe … These 3 dayes hath bene sea cole fyres made in the streets about every 12th doore, but that will not do the worke of stopping God’s hand.” His anxiety is palpable. It was not until the middle of September that some rain mitigated the appalling heat, but after that modest abatement the plague raged again.

John Allin told the story of six physicians who, believing that they had found a remedy, opened up an infected body-“it is said that they are all dead since, the most of them distractedly madd.” Six days later there came report of “that word spoken by a child here concerning the increase of the Plague, until 18,317 dye in a weeke.” The child died. Yet the rates began to fall. In the last week of February 1666, there were only forty-two deaths reported, whereas more than eight thousand died each week of September 1665.

Within the texture of Defoe’s prose London becomes a living and suffering being, not the “abstract civic space” of W.H. Auden’s poem. London is itself racked with “fever” and is “all in tears.” Its “face” is “strangely altered,” and its streets circulate “steams and fumes” like the blood of those infected. It is not clear whether the whole sick body of London is an emanation of its citizens, or whether the inhabitants are an emanation or projection of the city. Certainly its conditions were responsible for much death. In the great centre of trade and commerce, the process of buying and selling itself destroyed the citizens-“this necessity of going out of our houses to buy provisions was in a great measure the ruin of the whole city.” The people “dropped dead in the very markets” in the act of trading. They would “just sit down and die” with the tainted coins still in their pockets.

There is another melancholy image which issues from the pages of Defoe. It is of a city where there “were so many prisons in the town as there were houses shut up.” Metaphors of incarceration are persistent throughout London writing, but during the Great Plague there emerged vivid and literal examples of urban imprisonment. The symbolism of the red cross and the words “Lord have mercy on us” has not been wasted on mythographers of the city, but the measure of societal control has perhaps not been fully recognised. Of course many people escaped, often by the expedient of going over a garden wall or travelling along the roofs-even with some “watchmen” murdered to ensure liberty-but, in theory, each street and each house became a gaol.