Epilogue: In Times of Plague

Abstract

According to Daniel Defoe’s fictionalized account of the plague that struck London in 1665, its citizens reacted to the epidemic in one of two ways — they either turned to magic or sought solace in religion. As a man of the Enlightenment, Defoe regarded this as a choice between opposing positions, since it was ‘the common people’ who followed ‘mock astrologers’ while ‘serious and understanding persons thundered against these and other wicked practices, and exposed the folly as well as the wickedness of them altogether’. His narrator concludes that ‘those people who were really serious and religious applied themselves in a truly Christian manner to the proper work of repentance and humiliation as a Christian people ought to do’.²

One mischief always introduces another […] and this folly presently made the town swarm with a wicked generation of pretenders to magic, to the black art […] [I]nnumerable attendants crowded about their doors every day […] The Government encouraged their devotion […] and it is not to be expressed with what alacrity the people […] flocked to the churches and meetings, and they were all so thronged that there was often no coming near, no, not to the very doors of the largest churches.¹