Samuel Pepys lived through the Great Plague of London in 1665 and kept a diary. sullydish writes that it's been a tonic to read in lockdown — fascinating and, with the perspective of time, oddly calming
Scenes from the plague in London 1665, much like those described by Samuel Pepys. Photo: Universal History Archive/Contributor/Culture Club/Getty Images If you need a role model for life in a plague, it is hard to beat Samuel Pepys. Pepys was a man about town in the London of the late 17th century, a member of Parliament and of the Royal Society, and an official in the Royal Navy as the British were fighting the Dutch.
But Pepys is mainly interested in a new suit he’d bought, which didn’t arrive on time. He’s irritated by his wife’s dislike of it — their bad marriage is one of the subplots of the diary — and arranges for her to be shipped out of town to a friend’s place . He has dinner with relatives and dryly observes that he was “as merry as I could be in such company.” After dinner, he goes out “to show, forsooth, my new suit.
There’s a certain Monty Python Black Knight vibe to Pepys’s equanimity. Does he think he’s immune? Even when the plague reaches his own parish, with 40 suddenly dead, Pepys stays up and about, with “a pleasant going and a good discourse … But Lord! to see in what fear all the people here do live. How they are afraid of us that come to them, insomuch that I am troubled at it, and wish myself away.
In fact, in just a couple of years, the population of the city had rebounded. The massive fire had killed much of the rodent population that had been spreading the fleas behind the plague. London was rebuilt, stone replaced wood, and Christopher Wren was brought in to design and replace the old Saint Paul’s Cathedral and over a dozen other landmarks of the city to this day.
He looked, in fact, more like the classic AIDS patient from my past: His face was now skeletal, his neck shrunk, traps disappeared, eyelids half-shut as he selfied himself holding a Coke classic bottle in a hospital bed. In the fourth, there is hardly an attempt at a smile, and on his withered neck, a gauze pad is taped to his throat, following a tracheotomy.
Everything we hear about the impact of this virus is technical. All the dead are abstractions. We chart graphs. We predict curves. Our president cannot bring himself to offer anything but minimal empathy, his cold, disturbed soul only able to understand this grotesque event in so far as it might affect the stock market or his reelection chances. The numbers mount and we do not really understand what they mean.
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