When the plague came to London in 1665, Londoners lost their wits. They consulted astrologers, quacks, the Bible. They searched their bodies for signs, tokens of the disease: lumps, blisters, black spots. They begged for prophecies; they paid for predictions; they prayed; they yowled. They closed their eyes; they covered their ears. They wept in the street. They read alarming almanacs: Certain it is, books frighted them terribly. The government, keen to contain the panic, attempted to suppress the Printing of such Books as terrifyd the People, according to Daniel Defoe, in A Journal of the Plague Year, a history that he wrote in tandem with an advice manual called Due Preparations for the Plague, in 1722, a year when people feared that the disease might leap across the English Channel again, after having journeyed from the Middle East to Marseille and points north on a merchant ship. Defoe hoped that his books would be useful both to us and to posterity, though we should be spared from that portion of this bitter cup. That bitter cup has come out of its cupboard.
In 1665, the skittish fled to the country, and alike the wise, and those who tarried had reason for remorse: by the time they decided to leave, there was hardly a Horse to be bought or hired in the whole City, Defoe recounted, and, in the event, the gates had been shut, and all were trapped. Everyone behaved badly, though the rich behaved the worst: having failed to heed warnings to provision, they sent their poor servants out for supplies. This Necessity of going out of our Houses to buy Provisions, was in a great Measure the Ruin of the whole City, Defoe wrote. One in five Londoners died, notwithstanding the precautions taken by merchants. The butcher refused to hand the cook a cut of meat; she had to take it off the hook herself. And he wouldnt touch her money; she had to drop her coins into a bucket of vinegar. Bear that in mind when you run out of Purell.
Sorrow and sadness sat upon every Face, Defoe wrote. The governments stricture on the publication of terrifying books proved pointless, there being plenty of terror to be read on the streets. You could read the weekly bills of mortality, or count the bodies as they piled up in the lanes. You could read the orders published by the mayor: If any Person shall have visited any Man known to be infected of the Plague, or entered willingly into any known infected House, being not allowed: The House wherein he inhabiteth shall be shut up. And you could read the signs on the doors of those infected houses, guarded by watchmen, each door marked by a foot-long red cross, above which was to be printed, in letters big enough to be read at a distance, Lord, Have Mercy Upon Us.
Reading is an infection, a burrowing into the brain: books contaminate, metaphorically, and even microbiologically. In the eighteenth century, ships captains arriving at port pledged that they had disinfected their ships by swearing on Bibles that had been dipped in seawater. During tuberculosis scares, public libraries fumigated books by sealing them in steel vats filled with formaldehyde gas. These days, you can find out how to disinfect books on a librarians thread on Reddit. Your best bet appears to be either denatured-alcohol swipes or kitchen disinfectant in a mist-spray bottle, although if you stick books in a little oven and heat them to a hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit theres a bonus: you also kill bedbugs. (Doesnt harm the books!) Or, as has happened during the coronavirus closures, libraries can shut their doors, and bookstores, too.
But, of course, books are also a salve and a consolation. In the long centuries during which the plague ravaged Europe, the quarantined, if they were lucky enough to have books, read them. If not, and if they were well enough, they told stories. In Giovanni Boccaccios Decameron, from the fourteenth century, seven women and three men take turns telling stories for ten days while hiding from the Black Deaththat last Pestilentiall mortality universally hurtfull to all that beheld ita plague so infamous that Boccaccio begged his readers not to put down his book as too hideous to hold: I desire it may not be so dreadfull to you, to hinder your further proceeding in reading.
The literature of contagion is vile. A plague is like a lobotomy. It cuts away the higher realms, the loftiest capacities of humanity, and leaves only the animal. Farewell to the giant powers of man, Mary Shelley wrote in The Last Man, in 1826, after a disease has ravaged the world. Farewell to the arts,to eloquence. Every story of epidemic is a story of illiteracy, language made powerless, man made brute.
But, then, the existence of books, no matter how grim the tale, is itself a sign, evidence that humanity endures, in the very contagion of reading. Reading may be an infection, the mind of the writer seeping, unstoppable, into the mind of the reader. And yet it is alsoin its bidden intimacy, an intimacy in all other ways banned in times of plaguean antidote, proven, unfailing, and exquisite.
Stories about plagues run the gamut from Oedipus Rex to Angels in America. You are the plague, a blind man tells Oedipus. Its 1986 and theres a plague, friends younger than me are dead, and Im only thirty, a Tony Kushner character says. There are plagues here and plagues there, from Thebes to New York, horrible and ghastly, but never one plague everywhere, until Mary Shelley decided to write a follow-up to Frankenstein.
The Last Man, which is set in the twenty-first century, is the first major novel to imagine the extinction of the human race by way of a global pandemic. Shelley published it at the age of twenty-nine, after nearly everyone she loved had died, leaving her, as she put it, the last relic of a beloved race,my companions, extinct before me. The books narrator begins as a poor and uneducated English shepherd: primitive man, violent and lawless, even monstrous. Cultivated by a nobleman and awakened to learningAn earnest love of knowledge... caused me to pass days and nights in reading and studyhe is elevated by the Enlightenment and becomes a scholar, a defender of liberty, a republican, and a citizen of the world.
Then, in the year 2092, the plague arrives, ravaging first Constantinople. Year after year, the pestilence dies away every winter (a general and never-failing physician), and returns every spring, more virulent, more widespread. It reaches across mountains, it spreads over oceans. The sun rises, black: a sign of doom. Through Asia, from the banks of the Nile to the shores of the Caspian, from the Hellespont even to the sea of Oman, a sudden panic was driven, Shelley wrote. The men filled the mosques; the women, veiled, hastened to the tombs, and carried offerings to the dead, thus to preserve the living. The nature of the pestilence remains mysterious. It was called an epidemic. But the grand question was still unsettled of how this epidemic was generated and increased. Not understanding its operation and full of false confidence, legislators hesitate to act. England was still secure. France, Germany, Italy and Spain, were interposed, walls yet without a breach, between us and the plague. Then come reports of entire nations, destroyed and depopulated. The vast cities of America, the fertile plains of Hindostan, the crowded abodes of the Chinese, are menaced with utter ruin. The fearful turn to history too late, and find in its pages, even in the pages of the Decameron, the wrong lesson: We called to mind the plague of 1348, when it was calculated that a third of mankind had been destroyed. As yet western Europe was uninfected; would it always be so? It would not always be so. Inevitably, the plague comes, at last, to England, but by then the healthy have nowhere left to go, because, in the final terror of pandemic, there is no refuge on earth: All the world has the plague!
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What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About - The New Yorker