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 A Journal is both a fascinating historical document and a supreme work of imaginative reconstruction.This edition, based on the original 1722 text, contains a new introduction, an appendix on the plague, a topographical index and maps of contemporary London, and includes Anthony Burgess's original introduction.

8vo. LIMITED SIGNED EDITION, one of 1500 copies SIGNED by the illustrator. Slight tanning to spine cloth. A bit of wrinkling and a few chips along edges of plastic d.j. Some shelfwear and scuffing to extremities of black slipcase. VG/VG in VG slipcase.

The authoritative text has been fully annotated and makes available aperennially popular novel, one that has often been mistaken for anactual eyewitness account of the last great plague in England."Backgrounds" encourages comparison of 1665 documents with those of theearly 1720s, when England feared a new outbreak of the plague.Included are official government orders and newspaper accounts as wellas writings by Defoe, John Graunt, the College of Physicians, andothers."Contexts" includes eight comparative pieces united by the theme of acommunity in crisis.From Thucydides to Boccaccio to modern accounts by Albert Camus, MichelFoucault, and Susan Sontag, this collection represents some of the mostcelebrated observers and critics in western civilization who have seenwhat plagues reveal about human nature."Criticism" reprints seven of the best essays on the novel, includinginterpretations by Sir Walter Scott, Maximillian E. Novak, John J.Richetti, and John Bender, among others.A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.