The Great Plague of London - Hardcover

The Great Plague of 1665 was a last and terrible visitation before plague finally burned itself out in north-western Europe. A direct descendant of the Black Death, in London alone it killed more than 100,000 people - perhaps a quarter of the entire population. Its horrors have been etched on our minds by the writings of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys, yet it is hard for us to imagine the sheer scale of the tragedy. Grass grew on deserted main streets while in the poorest quarters the 'dead-carts' rolled; men wielding hooked poles scooped hundreds of bodies from houses and gutters, heaping them into plague pits; people disfigured by hideous buboes fell dead in the street or were thrown, dying, over parish boundaries to avoid escalating burial costs; whole families - the living, the dying and the dead - were sealed in their homes for 40 days, at the mercy of rapacious searchers employed to root out victims of the disease. As in most disasters, there were those who behaved with shocking brutality - like the ghoulish cart driver who would take up a dead child by the leg and cry "Faggots - five for sixpence!" Others marked themselves out with enormous courage and compassion. London's Lord Mayor, Sir John Lawrence, remained at his post when almost all who could afford to had fled the city, and Dr Nathaniel Hodges tended patients throughout the epidemic - never himself catching the plague. Walter Bell's astonishingly detailed account has never been equalled. This new, re-edited edition of his book allows his scholarship and imaginative sympathy to shine through for a new generation of readers.