'Books Frighted Them Terribly': The Perils of Propagating Fear and the Ethics of Writing about Disease in Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year

摘要

Scholars have persistently claimed that Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) foregrounds or exaggerates the horror of bubonic plague. Maximillian E. Novak states that "the central effect of the work bears some similarity to the works of Gothic horror at the end of the eighteenth century ... a combination of curiosity and terror," while John Richetti opines that Defoe contrived "a heightened, melodramatic version of life during the plague."1 Margaret Healy affirms that Defoe supplemented the horror of the plague, but redeems him from accusations of opportunistic sensationalism by couching A Journal as the "last in a line of English plague writings . . . emergent from sermon writing," in which "the aesthetic production of 'horror' and fear is actually crucial to the religious design," serving as "a warning to readers to amend their wicked ways" lest they incite future epidemics.2 David Roberts takes the more cynical view that Defoe exploited the plague for "every ounce of sensationalism he could get" to compete in the "crowded market" for plague writing (texts written about or during the plague) that emerged alongside contemporary fears that the Plague of Marseille (1720-1722) would reach Britain.3