Defoe was educated first in Dorking by the Rev.

dissenting from the official state religion of the Church of England. Another major crisis followed in 1667, during the Dutch Wars, when the Dutch Fleet sailed up the Medway to attack the docks and town. Only Defoe's house and two others were left standing in his area. His father was a tallow merchant and a member of one of the London Guilds, the Worshipful Company of Butchers.ĭuring his childhood there was the Great Plague of 1665, which killed 70,000, then the next year the Great Fire of London that largely destroyed the medieaval London of timber framed houses. Later in life he added the prefix De to his name to sound more aristocratic. Thus he was a child at the time of the Great Plague in 1665. He was born in England as Daniel Foe in 1659 or 1660, probably in Fore Street in the parish of St. The Wikipedia article describes him as a trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer and spy. We are accustomed to think of Daniel Defoe solely as the author of Robinson Crusoe but he was a prolific writer. Brief Biography of Daniel Defoe (c.1660 to 24 April 1731) I have added below, the instruction of the Lord Mayor of London for managing the plague, which have many similarities to those announced by the British Government for managing the Coronavirus on 23 March 2020. It can be downloaded and printed but not edited. The book, with 148 pages of A4 size, has no chapters, subheadings or index and is written as a continuous narrative. It has been reformatted in part to put data into tables. The full text of Defoe's book A Journal of the Plague Year, is found in the attached pdf file. Journal of the Plague Year A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR By Daniel Defoe The Full Text

Diary of a plague year