Held on the first Thursday of the month, the Folger’s virtual book club is free and open to all. To spark discussion, speakers provide historical context, throw in trivia, and speak to relevant items from the library collection in a brief presentation to participants before small-group discussion begins.
Here, we revisit the presentation by Beatrice Bradley, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Minnesota and a current long-term fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where she is working on a book project that charts the literary aftermath of an early modern plague known as the Sweating Sickness. Discussion questions for the novel can be found here.
We would like to thank the Junior League of Washington for its generous support of this program.
In the novel Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks charts a representation of early modern village life during the particularly bad outbreak of the bubonic plague that afflicted England in 1665 – 1666. Brooks takes the framework for her plot from, in her words, “the true story of the villagers in Eyam, Derbyshire,” villagers who maintained a strict quarantine throughout the year and, as a result, suffered a high mortality rate.1 According to the village’s register, 257 villagers out of an estimated total population of 700 died over the span of fourteenth months.2 The novel is narrated by the fictional character of Anna Frith, a widow serving as household staff to the rector and his wife. Across the difficulties of the year, Anna provides medical care—from plague-time remedies to childbearing—for the dwindling and increasingly-desperate population of the town, while also recording her own experiences of loss.
Brooks not only models the novel’s plot on historical accounts of the plague but also adopts its title from a late seventeenth-century literary text: John Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis, The Year of Wonders, 1666. An excerpt from the long poem appears as an epigraph to Brooks’ novel. The quotation, spoken from the perspective of King Charles II, is a direct address to God that laments the plague and pleads for deliverance from sickness:
O let it be enough what thou hast done,
When spotted deaths ran arm’d through every street,
With the poison’d darts, which not the good could shun,
The speedy could outfly, or valiant meet.
The living few, and frequent funerals then,
Proclaim’d thy wrath on this forsaken place:
And now those few who are return’d agen
Thy searching judgments to their dwellings trace. 3
This invocation of the divine, coupled with the poet’s representation of the plague as “spotted deaths” that evidence godly “wrath,” chimes with the religious thinking of many of Brooks’ characters. Anna notes, for example, that the village’s previous rector Mr. Stanley “believed that sickness was sent by God to test and chastise those souls He would save” (Brooks, 39). Given this epigraph, one might imagine that Dryden’s poem constitutes a narrative of the plague, and it is true that plague writing was a popular genre in early modern print. 4 However, the bulk of Annus Mirabilis, which runs for over 1200 lines, focuses on the ongoing second Anglo-Dutch War—a trade war fought predominantly at sea followed by a shorter discussion of the Great Fire of London that devastated the city in September 1666. As Mingna Cheng observes, “Dryden almost completely ignores [the plague] when composing the poem.”5
Reading Brooks and Dryden together, as the epigraph prompts, illuminates several points of contact between texts. The early modern poet offers a view of what transpires beyond the insulated and claustrophobic confines of Eyam (or, in Brooks, simply “plague village”): his focus is on England as a colonial power and on London, its economic center. Dryden, in fact, dedicates Annus Mirabilis to the city itself, addressing London directly in his prefatory materials,
“To you therefore this Year of Wonders is justly dedicated, because you have made it so. You who are to stand a wonder to all years and Ages, and who have built your selves an immortal Monument on your own ruines. You are now a Phoenix in her ashes, and as far as Humanity can approach, a great Emblem of the suffering Deity.”6
In this formulation, the poem’s titular “wonders” are not the events of the year but rather the Christ-like strength with which the people of London withstood such trials. Brooks shares with Dryden, I think, an understanding of what makes the year “wondrous” in her attention to human suffering and resilience. The novel’s characters are presented, like the inhabitants of London in Dryden, as a “Monument” for readers and thus for subsequent generations. However, Brooks’ narrative also details that which Dryden absents. She demands readerly attention to individual accounts of daily provincial life that might otherwise be overlooked while the nation as a broader concept was consumed with the potential of colonial expansion. Dryden’s celebration of England’s naval capacity in a year that was also decimated by the plague gestures toward the interlinking forces of scientific advancement, globalization, and disease: trade contact between countries—contact also suggested in Brooks’ epilogue that relocates Anna to Algeria—participated in the spread of the plague across Europe, Asia, and North Africa (Brooks, 300).7
The Folger’s archives, a selection of which are pictured throughout this post, further enrich an understanding of the “Great Plague” of 1665 – 1666 in their varied accounts as to how health and disease were conceptualized and managed in early modern England.8 Such materials—like the writing of Dryden and Brooks—demonstrate the impact of the plague at different scales. The Folger’s collection includes objects, such as the aromatic pomander, that evoke individual sensory experience, as well as those that speak to government process during the plague: for example, the text London’s Dreadful Visitation assembles the 1665 bills of mortality, broadsides that circulated weekly and listed London’s deaths, into a collection for the year. These wide-ranging records of disease and its spread resonate with the narratives of Dryden and Brooks to suggest multiple modes of thinking through illness—from the first-person to the collective—and they provide a dynamic understanding of early modern approaches to health.9
Join us for an upcoming event!
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- Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders (New York: Penguin Random House, 2001), 305.
- For number of plague deaths in Eyam, see Lilith Whittles and Xavier Didelot, “Epidemiological analysis of the Eyam plague outbreak of 1665 – 1666,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2016): 1 – 9.
- Brooks, Year of Wonders, epigraph. For an early modern edition in the Folger’s collection, see
John Dryden, Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, M. DC. LXVI (London, 1668), F2 v , Folger
Shakespeare Library, D2239. - See, for example, Rebecca Totaro, The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures, 1603 – 1721 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).
- Mingna Cheng, “Master or Handmaid?: Dryden’s view of the New Science in Annus
Mirabilis,” The Seventeenth Century 38.4, 676. - Dryden, Annus Mirabilis, A3r .
- For a discussion of the ongoing impact of “colonization, slavery and war” on “the global spread of infectious diseases,” see Rachel E. Baker, Ayesha S. Mahmud, Ian F. Miller, et al, “Infectious disease in an era of global change,” nat Rev Microbiol 20.4 (2022): 193 – 205. Figure 1a, which depicts “human connectivity and infectious disease outbreaks” in premodern times, is of particular interest (195).
- London’s Dreadful Visitation (London, 1665), Folger Shakespeare Library, L2926; Mary Lyford, Medical and Cookery Recipes, ca. 1665, Folger Shakespeare Library, v.a.657; and A silver pomander – temp. Queen Elizabeth, Folger Shakespeare Library, H – P no. 68. For early modern discussion of pomanders, see Certain Necessary Direction, as well For the Cure of the Plague, as for preventing Infection (London, 1665), C1 v – C2 r , Folger Shakespeare Library, 31932000777408.
- For further reading, see Kristen Heitman, “Of Counts and Causes: The Emergence of the
London Bills of Morality,” https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/counts-causes-london-bills-mortality/, and Kathleen Miller, “Isaac Marion’s ‘Warm Bodies’: Containing and Curing Plague,” https://www.folger.edu/blogs/folger-spotlight/collection-connections-warm-bodies/.
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