‘It was a most surprising thing, to see those Streets, which were usually so thronged, now grown desolate’

In 1665 the Great Plague swept through London, claiming nearly 100,000 lives. In A Journal, written nearly sixty years later, Defoe vividly chronicled the progress of the epidemic. We follow his fictional narrator through a city transformed: the streets and alleyways deserted; the houses of death with crosses daubed on their doors; the dead-carts on their way to the pits. And he recounts the horrifying stories of the citizens he encounters, as fear, isolation and hysteria take hold. A Journal is both a fascinating historical document and a supreme work of imaginative reconstruction.

This edition contains a new introduction, an appendix on the Plague, a topographical index and maps of contemporary London, and reproduces Anthony Burgess’s original introduction.