![]() In fact, Crusoe itself straddles generic boundaries that hardly existed then when it was published in 1719 it was received as a travel book written by a real person called Crusoe. We think of Defoe as a novelist, because of Robinson Crusoe, but he wrote in a wide range of genres. Part of that memory is due to the fact that it was memorialized in 1722 by Daniel Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year. It killed a quarter of London’s population over an 18-month period, and it lived in memory as the last major epidemic of plague to strike England. So now let’s turn our attention to a much later outbreak of the bubonic plague, the Great Plague of London in 1665-1666. ![]() ![]() Just as the gilded youth of the Decameron told tales to alleviate the tedium of their self-imposed quarantine, I find writing these blogs really makes the time fly. Read the first post on Boccaccio’s Decameron. This is the second of a series of blog posts about books in the Library Company’s collections about contagion and confinement, epidemics and quarantines. ![]() ![]()
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