The narrator suggests that the initially slow spread of the plague according to the Bills of Death was, in fact, a result of attempts to cover it up, both by families who didn’t want their houses shut up by, as well as by government officials who wanted to prevent public panic. The narrator-and all Londoners-looked to these bills and tried to interpret them to foretell the spread of the plague. However, in the early months of 1665, there were only a few officially reported plague deaths in the weekly Bills of Death. There was a rumor of the plague in the Netherlands, and in late 1664, a reported death in London. The narrator begins by describing the initial outbreak of the plague: as newspapers had not yet begun to circulate in London, news of the plague spread via gossip. Most of these anecdotes are less than a paragraph long, although a few span pages. These anecdotes are not necessarily presented as facts but as vignettes that give a sense of the city’s desperation regardless of their veracity. The narration is roughly chronological, although it loops back and forth between events, and combines the narrator’s own experiences with numerous heard and overheard anecdotes about victims and survivors of the plague.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |