The full title of this book is The Great Plague: The Story of London’s Most Deadly Year. And boy, is that some truth in advertising. For those not aware, in 1665 — the year before central London burned down in the Great Fire — approximately one hundred thousand of the London metropolis’ five hundred thousand inhabitants died in a horrifying plague epidemic. At the height of the outbreak, the week of September 12th-19th, between one and two thousand people were dying every day.

Not cheerful stuff, but very, very interesting. And I can’t imagine a better pair of people to write about it than this husband-and-wife team. A. Lloyd Moote is a political historian with a seventeenth-century focus whose interests eventually broadened to include socio-cultural history; Dorothy C. Moote is a microbiologist with a special interest in disease epidemics. Is that perfect or what?

Even better is the approach they took. The epilogue describes the eventual disappearance of bubonic plague from Europe (but its persistence in Asia), through the early days of microbiology and the discovery of the Yersinia pestis that causes the plague, to modern scientific interpretation of just what was going on in the various plague pandemics broadly and the 1665 outbreak specifically. But that’s the epilogue: for the body of the book, while they apply historical methods to understanding the events of 1665, they restrict their medical discussion to the views and understandings of the period. Which is exactly what I need. I like knowing the modern explanation, but I’m glad I don’t have to strip it out to write from the contemporary perspective.

The book isn’t flawless. It somewhat awkwardly combines a chronological approach with a topic-centered one, dropping in discussions of the medical community’s response or the crash of London’s economy at the points in the plague’s progress that they seem most relevant. (The economy, for example, gets its moment in the spotlight around the description of October, when it hit its nadir.) Possibly as a consequence, it tends to repeat certain things in places, like telling me about how John Allin in St. Olave Southwark was a dissenting minister, or the Guildhall manipulated economic mechanisms to try and keep parish relief afloat, or Pepys was profiteering off his naval contracts in a kind of despicable way while a third of the population that didn’t or couldn’t flee the city dropped dead around him. (He started the year with £1300 in net worth, and ended with £4400, and very proud he was of it, too.) I also could have used more attempt to recreate the experience of living in London while everything fell apart, though I recognize that such descriptions weren’t really what the Mootes were aiming for. Defoe, I assume, will be the place to look for that. But overall, very good indeed.

Four more books arrived today. The research marathon has begun . . . .

My book reports for Midnight Never Come proved useful to me in the longer run, so you’ll have to put up with them again, I’m afraid. I won’t motivate myself to write them if I can’t pretend they don’t have an audience.

Restoration London, by Liza Picard

What can I say? It’s Liza Picard. Who is awesome. She does a great job of presenting the details of lived experience in historical London, and her commitment to primary sources is great. I also love that she considers things like home decoration and female health just as interesting (or moreso) than the usual topics of history. I don’t think she positions herself actively as a feminist scholar, but her attention to otherwise neglected areas like that would certainly get a thumbs-up from that perspective.

By Permission of Heaven, by Adrian Tinniswood

This was the second book I read for AAL only because I had to wait for it to be shipped to me; I already had Restoration London on the shelf. It was recommended to me by Tyler of Pandemonium Books in Cambridge, and it’s a godsend: a detailed account of the Great Fire, including a chapter devoted to each day, telling me what was burning when, and what people were trying to do about it. I could not possibly write my novel without it.

But he also goes further afield, starting with a bit of the context leading up to the fire and the efforts to deal with it afterward; the latter plays better than the former. I understand why he felt we needed information about the Dutch wars, given religious tensions and also the question of when to recall General Monck, but it felt less than entirely relevant. The after-the-fact material is probably less useful to me, mind you, since I don’t expect the book to go past 1666, but it’s still good to know, especially for future installments in the series. (It’s honestly fascinating, comparing the aftermath of the Great Fire to, say, Hurricane Katrina. Seventeenth-century Englishmen did a remarkably good job of putting their city back together again in a fair and even-handed fashion.)

I’ve got a book on the Great Plague to read next, and a bunch more on the way.