In Search Of Daniel Defoe
I am proud to publish this edited extract from GRAVE STORIES by a graduate of my writing course. ‘The Gravedigger’ invites you to come into the graveyard, where all of human life is to be discovered.
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Come to Spitalfields and spend a winter weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches and eat cakes baked to historic recipes, and learn how to write your own blog.
Defoe’s obelisk at Bunhill Fields
A year after Lockdown I turned to Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year to compare notes. His experience was much like ours in many ways: the first signs in Holland, followed by rumours regarding possible origins in Italy or the Levant, mirrored our own experiences watching Italy and Wuhan. The gradual spread from St Giles and the West End to Cripplegate, Clerkenwell and the City reflected our monitoring of Covid hotspots.
The flight of the court and the well-heeled to their second homes was familiar. Likewise the first deaths and the sudden desolation in the streets with shops closed, Inns of Court shut up, theatres, alehouses, and taverns all dark. Attempts to control wandering beggars resembled our own government’s sudden concern to house the homeless. The sick were either sequestered and died apart from their families or whole households were shut up in their homes, as happened in our hospitals and care homes.
When Defoe bemoaned the lack of enough ‘pest houses,’ he might have been speaking of our own shortage of Covid wards leading to the construction of the Nightingale hospitals. Quack medicines appeared, just as hydroxychloroquine and the possibility of injecting bleach found favour in certain quarters in the twenty-first century.
Defoe recorded people moving onto boats in the Thames or to camp in Epping Forest and similarly, at the height of Covid, caravans and camper vans occupied green sites. Daily and weekly recording of illness and death rates confirmed that then as now, the poor, living in overcrowded conditions with inadequate ventilation and unable to avoid the breath of others, sickened more than the wealthy.
As the plague intensified, people rushed to stockpile provisions and there were shortages. Without contactless cards to replace cash, they soaked their money in vinegar. The poorest found themselves out of work, unable to purchase food or pay for their lodgings. Charity, like our food banks, supplemented Parish Relief which like our Universal Credit proved inadequate.
Servants were redeployed as nurses, sextons, gravediggers. In Defoe’s London, burials took place before sunrise and after sunset, and neighbours and friends could not attend church funerals. When people died in the streets, their bodies were removed to mass graves. In 2020, as morgues and mortuaries became overwhelmed, contract workers in hazmat suits dug mass graves in New York. When the death rate began to decline, doctors issued certificates of health to permit travel anticipating our own vaccine passports, but as people became careless the rate rose again..
There were also great differences, not least in the presence of religion in Defoe’s Britain: sects, fortune tellers, and astrologers flourished. Solomon Eagle stalked the streets, naked with a pan of burning charcoal on his head, calling on the populace to repent. Though some clergy fled, others kept their churches open and, when the plague ended, Defoe gave credit for the recovery to God. Conversely, there was less respect for the medical profession and, far from clapping for carers, Defoe wrote of nurses finishing their patients off and stealing their goods. While pet ownership increased during lockdown, Defoe’s London witnessed the wholesale killing of cats and dogs.
Defoe was only five years old in 1665 and his vivid ‘eyewitness account’ originated from his uncle Henry Foe, supplemented by Defoe’s own research. A man of many talents – merchant, spy, novelist, poet, political pamphleteer, and activist – Defoe’s life was a rollercoaster of excitement, achievements, and disasters.
In 1685, he participated in the Monmouth rebellion against James II but escaped retribution in the Bloody Assizes and, when William III came to power, he became a secret agent of the crown. His poem The True Born Englishman defended William against racial prejudice, reminding xenophobic readers that they were all descended from immigrants.
The succession of Queen Anne led to the persecution of nonconformists and Defoe’s arrest in 1703 for pamphleteering, political activity and satires directed against high-church Tories. Prior to his removal to Newgate, he was placed in the pillory for three days but his poem Hymn to the Pillory resulted in him being garlanded with flowers rather than pelted with rubbish.
Over five hundred works have been attributed to Defoe including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain and of course A Journal of the Plague Year. No stranger to the debtors’ prison during his life, he died – as he had often lived – in debt.
Defoe was buried in the non-conformist cemetery at Bunhill but his headstone was struck by lightning and broken in 1857. The editor of Christian World, a children’s newspaper, encouraged readers to donate 6d each for a new memorial, setting up two rival subscription lists, one for girls and one for boys.
Samuel Horner, a stonemason from Bournemouth who erected the obelisk, took the gravestone home with him, selling it as part of a general lot from his yard. Then it became part of the kitchen floor at Bishopstoke Manor Farm until the manager moved to 56 Portswood Road in 1883 where it remained in his front garden for over sixty years. Charles Davey acquired it in 1945 and gave it to Stoke Newington library. An appropriate resting place since Defoe lived in Stoke Newington from the age of fourteen, but by the time I arrived it had been moved to Hackney Museum where it I found it sitting beside a bust of Defoe, backed by an image of the famous pillory.
Inscription on Daniel Defoe’s obelisk
Daniel Defoe’s headstone is now in Hackney Museum
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