The Historical Sources Of Defoe S Journal Of The Plague Year

Excerpt from The Historical Sources of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year: Illustrated by Extracts From the Original Documents in the Burney Collection and Manuscript Room in the British Museum At the outbreak of the Great War, and for some years prior to that world catastrophe, I was working in the British Museum, the Public Record Office, and the Lord Chamberlain 's Office in London, pursuing certain investigations pertaining to the history of the English Drama and Stage. Throughout my quest among the documents of the years 1664 and 1665, I was again and again impressed with numerous strik ing resemblances between contemporaneous details of the Great Plague and Defoe 's account in his Journal of the Plague Year. With a piqued curiosity I fol lowed these clues until I had amassed overwhelming evidence of the complete authenticity of Defoe 's masterpiece of the imagination. These proofs were then submitted to a few scholars in England and America, and the unanimous and emphatic judgment of these critics was, that I had established beyond cavil the historical character of Defoe 's famous Journal, hitherto not merely accepted, but acclaimed and declaimed, as fiction. However, to make assur ance doubly sure, I pursued the investigation still further, and, in more than two hundred instances (not to mention the scores of statistical figures), re corded in the following pages, traced to their sources statements made by Defoe in the Journal of the Plague Year. In most cases the word-for-word originals have been quoted (or cited), and, added to these, equally convincing parallels have multiplied. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Defoe's "Journal of the Plague Year" which had hitherto been classified as fiction & been discounted as a "masterpiece of the imagination" is here proven, by the aid of extracts from original documents in the Burney collection & manuscript room of the British Museum, to be a faithful record of historical facts & to have been so intended by the author. It is as nearly correct as it was humanly possible to make it from the sources & time at his command.

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