Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Rotten Bodies examines the lingering effects of plague epidemics in eighteenth-century discourses of illness. After appearing regularly since the Middle Ages, the last British plague epidemic of 1665–66 effectively wiped out twenty-five per cent of London’s population. Britons did not know that it would be the last plague occurrence, however, and the book invokes a wealth of evidence to show how fear of another visitation exerted its influence throughout the eighteenth century. The Marseille epidemic of 1720 exacerbated English anxieties, and the resulting plague panic brought about new quarantine regulations as well as numerous works that, Siena points out, consistently looked “to past epidemics for useful knowledge” (19). As the Marseille crisis subsided, England’s plague-induced fear did not, and Siena shows how earlier epidemics continued to shape discourses of disease even as writers increasingly shifted their focus to the pestilential fevers that became plague’s successor. Regarded as “just [End Page 305] a symptom” in the twentieth century, fever took on “a dizzying variety of forms” (15) as an illness unto itself in the eighteenth century. Fever, Siena argues, became “the most amorphous, mercurial, and complicated” of afflictions, in part because its perceived causes were rooted in beliefs about its less protean but much-dreaded antecedent. Examining eighteenth-century discourses of fever, this monograph focuses particularly on the relationship of disease and social class as it highlights the many ways plague “remained a powerful ghost animating discussions of poverty and disease throughout the Enlightenment and beyond” (228).

Arguing that “by the time of the last great English plague epidemic of 1665–1666, medical constructions of the impoverished body demonstrate all of the features that commentators would recycle, reformat, and redeploy” (19) throughout the century that followed, Siena traces a “remarkable consistency in theories on urban epidemics over a very long time” (221). The book opens with an illuminating chapter on seventeenth-century plague treatises that acknowledges the work of historians who have established a clear link between plague and poverty. That link, Siena argues, became essentialized in the plebeian body as physicians invoked Galenic theories to explain plague as the product of blockages that impeded the flow necessary to humoral balance and thereby encouraged rot and putrefaction. Drawing on the work of well-known seventeenth-century physicians such as Stephen Bradwell, Gideon Harvey, and Nathaniel Hodges, Siena’s analysis points to the emergence of an economic rhetoric associated not only with plague but also with scurvy, menstruation, and sexual licentiousness, a rhetoric that effectively conflated “poor blood and plague-infested blood” in a symbiotic equation that was ultimately “a matter of degree, not kind” (48). The discourses of plague and fever worked to fashion an economically informed physiology that rendered the already corrupt plebeian body so hospitable to plague that the disease could appear even without external cause. The book carefully grounds its over-arching argument in seventeenth-century beliefs about plague and poverty, and does so with the aim of illuminating plague’s foundational role in shaping discourses of affliction whose relationship to class became no less firmly entrenched as the eighteenth century unfolded.

Tracing the ways that plague continued to serve the fashioning of a “class-specific physiology” (19) even as “pestilential fever took the baton from plague and became the principal disease on which anxieties about impoverished bodies were hung” (228), the book offers a detailed and compelling argument. In making his case, Siena invokes a wide-ranging body of evidence that is sometimes familiar and sometimes shocking. One example is found in the work of Daniel Defoe, where anxieties that remain largely implicit in his better-known A Journal of the Plague Year, a fictional account of the 1665–66 London plague, emerge as matter-of-fact [End Page 306] assertion in the slightly earlier Due Preparations for the Plague, where eight of Defoe’s thirteen proposals serve the end of “emptying London of its poor” (65). What is surprising about the...