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In the first place, the Lord Mayor and the sheriffs, the Court of Aldermen, and a certain number of the Common Council men, or their deputies, came to a resolution and published it, viz., that they would not quit the city themselves, but that they would be always at hand for the preserving good order in every place and for the doing justice on all occasions; as also for the distributing the public charity to the poor; and, in a word, for the doing the duty and discharging the trust reposed in them by the citizens to the utmost of their power.

These terrors and apprehensions of the people led them into a thousand weak, foolish, and wicked things, which they wanted not a sort of people really wicked to encourage them to: and this was running about to fortune- tellers, cunning-men, and astrologers to know their fortune, or, as it is vulgarly expressed, to have their fortunes told them, their nativities calculated, and the like; and this folly presently made the town swarm with a wicked generation of pretenders to magic, to the black art, as they called it, and I know not what; nay, to a thousand worse dealings with the devil than they were really guilty of. And this trade grew so open and so generally practised that it became common to have signs and inscriptions set up at doors: 'Here lives a fortune-teller', 'Here lives an astrologer', 'Here you may have your nativity calculated', and the like.

If Defoe, like the conformists, had been permitted by law to receive the traditional (classical) education of Oxford or Cambridge, he might have become merely a lesser Swift. As it was, Defoe was equipped by training, as well as by temperament, to turn into the first really modern writer, his mind disposed to independence, liberalism, and scientific inquiry, master of five languages (though Latin and Greek not among them), his interests immediate and practical, not classical and remote.

(Introduction by Anthony Burgess)

The casual reader of, or dipper into, A Journal of the Plague Year, uninformed as to Daniel Defoe's date of birth or his literary aims and methods, may be forgiven for thinking it a genuine book of memoirs. This is what it reads like and is meant to read like - a rapid, colloquial, sometimes clumsy setting-down of reminiscences of a great historical event that was lived through by a plain London merchant with a passion for facts, a certain journalistic talent, but - apart from that familiarity with the Bible to be assumed in Restoration dissenting business-men - no literary pretensions whatever.
(Introduction by Anthony Burgess)