B V HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY DR. JOHN RATHBONE OLIVER EDITION DE LUXE THIS EDITION OF THE WORKS OF SUBSCRIBERS ONLY, IS LIMITED TO ONE THOUSAND NUMBERED SETS, OF 0. COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY D INTRODUCTION UE Preparations for the Plague, as well for Soul as Body, was published in 1722. Whether it came out before or after the Journal of the Plague Year, which appeared in March of the same year, cannot be definitely said. Though Mr. Lee accidentally omitted the Due Preparations from the catalogue of Defoe's works prefixed to the first volume of his Daniel Defoe, there can be little doubt that the book was from Defoe's pen. It was on a subject which we know, from A Journal of the Plague Year, greatly interested him; and portions of the book deal with incidents mentioned in the better known Journal. Besides, as Mr. Aitken has shown, Due Preparations for the Plague is full of Defoe's mannerisms, both in vocabulary and in narrative method. "Neither or" is an instance of the former; the use of dialogue in the second part, of the latter. There seems to be no good reason for doubting Defoe's authorship. It is commonly said that Defoe wrote Due Preparations for the Plague for the same purpose as A Journal of the Plague Year, namely to rouse people to take precautions against the plague which had 1 Introduction to Vol. XV., Romances and Narratives by Daniel Defoe, London, 1901. been raging in Marseilles in 1720 and 1721. That Defoe was actuated somewhat by public-spirited motives in writing his two works on the plague is likely, but it is even likelier that he was led to compose them by his shrewd commercial sense. He was aware that the interest in the Marseilles plague would give them a good sale. Due Preparations for the Plague reads for the most part like a continuation of the more famous Journal of the Plague Year. Showing what preparations, both spiritual and material, should be made for the disease, by instances cited from the Great Plague, it becomes very much like the Journal in tone, though it is not so evenly interesting. A reader's interest cannot but flag in the second part, when he struggles with the tedious religious cant of the sister who warns her brother to be spiritually ready for the pestilence. In some of the verbose, unnatural conversation here, Defoe appears at his worst. When a reader, however, comes to the story of the sister's taking refuge from the pestilence with her two brothers on a ship which drops down the Thames, his interest revives. And nothing in the Journal itself is better narrative than the story, in the first part of Due Preparations, of the family "in the parish of St. Alban's, Wood Street," who, in order to escape the sickness, lived shut up in their house, without once going out, from the fourteenth of July to the first of December. Immediately following Due Preparations for the Plague will be found a short history with a very long title, namely: The Dumb Philosopher: or, Great |