Excerpt from The Historical Sources of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year: Illustrated by Extracts From the Original Documents in the Burney Collection and Manuscript Room in the British Museum

At the outbreak of the Great War, and for some years prior to that world catastrophe, I was working in the British Museum, the Public Record Office, and the Lord Chamberlain 's Office in London, pursuing certain investigations pertaining to the history of the English Drama and Stage. Throughout my quest among the documents of the years 1664 and 1665, I was again and again impressed with numerous strik ing resemblances between contemporaneous details of the Great Plague and Defoe 's account in his Journal of the Plague Year. With a piqued curiosity I fol lowed these clues until I had amassed overwhelming evidence of the complete authenticity of Defoe 's masterpiece of the imagination. These proofs were then submitted to a few scholars in England and America, and the unanimous and emphatic judgment of these critics was, that I had established beyond cavil the historical character of Defoe 's famous Journal, hitherto not merely accepted, but acclaimed and declaimed, as fiction. However, to make assur ance doubly sure, I pursued the investigation still further, and, in more than two hundred instances (not to mention the scores of statistical figures), re corded in the following pages, traced to their sources statements made by Defoe in the Journal of the Plague Year. In most cases the word-for-word originals have been quoted (or cited), and, added to these, equally convincing parallels have multiplied.

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