A Journal of the Plague Year,

London: (first published 1722) 1835

In <em>A Journal of the Plague Year</em>, a fictional account of life in London during the Great Plague of 1665, Defoe merged literary invention with fact, including actual death statistics and contemporary accounts of the epidemic, which killed over 100,000 of the city’s residents. During the outbreak, healthy individuals were quarantined in their homes along with the sick, often leading to unnecessary deaths. George Cruikshank’s frontispiece to a nineteenth-century edition of the book depicts one of the “dead carts” used to carry the deceased out of homes for burial.