Defoe and the Contagion of the Oral: Modeling Media Shift in A Journal of the Plague Year

Abstract

This essay contributes to a history of evolutionary models of media shift through a reading of Daniel Defoe. Published in 1722 but depicting events of 1664–65, A Journal of the Plague Year represents temporal distance in terms of shifts in modes of communication. Modes that in reality are coexistent and interdependent are here represented as parts of a linear, progressive development. Defoe helped shape an emergent hierarchy of media forms with print at its apex. A key structuring binary of this text opposes a backward past associated with orality to a new, print-oriented modernity linked to the collection and reproduction of accurate statistics and true report. The essay first examines Defoe's handling of the “Women-Searchers”–agents employed to search bodies to determine cause of death, whose oral reports formed the basis for the printed bills of mortality–then considers the depiction of rumors and an oral street culture that is associated with old women, error, and contagious superstition. (PMcD)