The Great Plague. The Story of London\'s Most Deadly Year

196 • The Abyss

Three centuries later, Albert Camus tried to make sense of plague’s chal-

lenge to the human spirit in a novel set in twentieth-century North Africa.

Setting the scene of unspeakable destruction, he pictured the charnel house

of ancient Athens “reeking to heaven,” putrefying pallets stuck in the mud

floor of a converted Turkish leper house, and “the carnival of masked doctors

at the Black Death.” Not least of all he told of the “cartloads of dead bodies

rumbling through London’s ghoul-haunted darkness.” The protagonist of

Camus’s 1947 novel,The Plague,is Dr. Rieux, a worthy fictional successor to

the Great Plague’s Boghurst and Hodges. As the bodies pile up around his

Table 7.Total Burials in Representative London Parishes,

December 20, 1664–December 19, 1665

Suburban Parishes Total City Parishes Total

outside the Walls Burials inside the Walls Burials

Stepney (northeast; highest 8,598 Christ Church (by Newgate 653
metropolitan mortality) exit; highest city mortality)

St. Giles Cripplegate (north; 8,069 St. Stephen Coleman Street 560
second highest mortality) (bordering the northern wall)

St. Olave Southwark (south; 4,793 All Hallows Barking 514
John Allin’s parish) (bordering the Thames River)

St. Mary Whitechapel (east) 4,766 St. Gregory by the cathedral 376
(Alderman Turner’s shop)

St. Margaret Westminster 4,710 St. Olave Hart Street 237
(southwest) (Samuel Pepys’ parish)

St. Giles in the Fields (west; 4,457 St. Helen (Mayor Lawrence’s 108
William Boghurst’s parish) parish)

St. Bride (west of the Fleet 2,111 St. Mary Woolchurch (first 65
River) city plague burial)

St. Paul Covent Garden 408 St. Stephen Walbrook (Dr. 34
(west; Rev. Patrick’s parish) Hodges’ parish)

All 33 suburban parishes 82,099 All 97 city parishes 15,207

source:A General Bill for this present year, ending the 19 of December 1665.