Managing Viral Information and Being at Risk in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year
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During his lifetime Defoe had been inured to the vicissitude of things, such as insolvency, bankruptcy, factionalism, and even recurring natural disasters. Not only did he brave out multiple forms of uncertainty—both personal and national—through his ingenuity, Defoe also proposed a model subject against the backdrop of the South Sea Bubble and the Marseille Plague, which I term in this essay the information manager. By foregrounding an enlightened subject capable of collecting, compiling, and discerning a range of data sets and information in his plague tract A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Defoe suggests nuanced ways of imposing order against the unruly. With a focus on the hybridity of information contained in the novel and on the lack of rigid narrative structure, I argue that A Journal can be viewed as a merchant’s ledger—a printed material resonant with the ideal of English tradesmanship that Defoe posits elsewhere. It should also be noted that the author spells out specific social relations that incur the so-called modern risks facing a majority of eighteenth-century Britons through his configuration of the information manager.
Abstract
During his lifetime Defoe had been inured to the vicissitude of things, such as insolvency, bankruptcy, factionalism, and even recurring natural disasters. Not only did he brave out multiple forms of uncertainty—both personal and national—through his ingenuity, Defoe also proposed a model subject against the backdrop of the South Sea Bubble and the Marseille Plague, which I term in this essay the information manager. By foregrounding an enlightened subject capable of collecting, compiling, and discerning a range of data sets and information in his plague tract A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Defoe suggests nuanced ways of imposing order against the unruly. With a focus on the hybridity of information contained in the novel and on the lack of rigid narrative structure, I argue that A Journal can be viewed as a merchant’s ledger—a printed material resonant with the ideal of English tradesmanship that Defoe posits elsewhere. It should also be noted that the author spells out specific social relations that incur the so-called modern risks facing a majority of eighteenth-century Britons through his configuration of the information manager.
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