After several episodes in which the author has been content simply to relay incidents and anecdotes of suffering and distress, here now he draws a breath and offers his personal reflections about the experience of Londoners at the height of the plague. I believe that some of the most moving passages in the Journal are to be found in this episode. He speaks of the way in which, at the most extreme hour, the populace became heedless of the differences among them or the things they fought over so vigorously, and, because they anticipated death coming at any moment, thronged together in their churches, regardless of who was preaching, “as if their lives were of no consequence compared to the work which they came about there.” And he is eloquent in expressing the way the immanence of death removes all animosity and petty strife. But the author is no sentimentalist. He is only a faithful recorder of what he observed, and he knows that this mood, which he says possessed the city for several weeks in the late summer of the year, cannot be sustained, and that a true transformation of the human heart has not yet occurred.

[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]

Credits:
Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.
Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.
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