Compassion in Daniel Defoe’s a Journal of the Plague Year

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Compassion in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year Born as Daniel Foe in 1660, later he added the aristocratic-sounding "De" to his name, was an English trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer, and spy, now attributed with writing the first English novel Robinson Crusoe, in 1719. His later work A Journal of the Plague Year is written as a “journalistic novel” with emphasis on plain style, veracity, and instruction. Defoe signed HF at the end and claims to have been an eyewitness for the 1665 plague that hits London to emphasize accuracy of his account to his audience although it is based on historical records and perhaps stories of his uncle Henry Foe, a sadler who survived the plague. Throughout the plague, character development of compassion for the poor and suffering grows within HF. His use of anecdotes of the man in a brown cloak, the boatman and his family, and the two brothers and their kinsman illustrates HF’s rising compassion during the plague. Through HF’s curiosity, he came across a man in a brown cloak while he was surveying the pit of the dead “came up to the pit they saw a man go to and again, muffled up in a brown Cloak, and making motions…as if he was in great agony, and the buriers…supposing he was one of those poor delirious or desperate creatures…to bury themselves…he walked about…groaned very deeply and loud, and sighed as he would break his heart…he was neither a person infected and desperate…but one oppressed with a dreadful weight of grief indeed, having his wife and several of his children all in the cart…he followed in an agony and excess of sorrow” (54). Having gone home after following the man in the brown cloak to a tavern for care, HF’s growing concern and compassion for the man’s state compelled him to return to the tavern, “I must go out again…to the Pye-Tavern…to inquire what became of him…the poor gentleman was

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