The Great Plague - Hardcover

Porter, Stephen

3.18

62 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 075091615X ISBN 13: 9780750916158

Publisher: Sutton Pub Ltd, 2000

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The Great Plague of 1665-6 is the best known epidemic in English history. Carried by fleas, the bubonic plague decimated the population of England in a little over a year. The disease had never been absent in England since the Black Death in 1348, but there had been ten virtually plague-free years from 1655. People thought that perhaps the scourge had gone for ever. But in 1665 it returned with a vengeance. The total number of deaths attributable to that one outbreak is estimated at up to 130,000. In London alone 100,000 out of a total population of 500,000 died.

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About the Author:

Stephen Porter is Assistant Editor with the Survey of London section of English Heritage.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A well-documented and well-illustrated account of the bubonic-plague epidemic that struck England in 166566, killing some 20 percent of Londons inhabitants. Before examining the Great Plague, disaster specialist Porter (The Great Fire of London, not reviewed, etc.) describes the impact of earlier epidemics that had repeatedly swept across Europe in the previous three centuries, affecting not just social and economic life but beliefs, literature, and art. In London, weekly Bills of Mortality reporting the number and cause of deaths had been issued since the early 1600s to provide warning of an impending outbreak and encourage measures to check its progress: quarantining incoming ships, isolating the sick, lighting fires in the streets, fumigating houses, and killing stray cats and dogs. Many of those with the means to do so fled to the countryside; the poor, however, stayed in the city, and it was they who suffered the most. Porter shows how individuals and families endured illness, enforced isolation, and loss of employment; how London and some provincial towns suffered a ruinous loss of trade; and how the government was severely hampered in its war efforts against the Dutch by the ensuing economic recession and reduced revenues. He also depicts how rapidly London recovered, with the population returning to its former size within two years after the epidemic. While Porter's text does not emphasize individual human-interest stories, some of the 70 illustrations he has includedgrim pest-houses where the sick were confined, and dead bodies lying on the street, being loaded onto a cart, or dumped into a mass gravegive a vivid sense of the personal tragedy and horror of the Great Plague. Porter's close, clear look at one epidemic's impact on its culture will be of obvious interest to a world still threatened by the capability of biological weapons to spread smallpox or anthrax to millions. (History Book Club selection) -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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