Excerpt from A Journal of the Plague Year: Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London Unable to obtain access to a copy of the exceedingly rare first edition of the Journal of the Plague Year, I have been forced to content myself with reproducing the com mon text, frequently, and, it is to be feared, carelessly, re printed during the present century. No alterations have been made except by the correction of obvious misprints, slight changes (for the sake of clearness and uniformity) in Defoe's erratic punctuation, the omission of a few passages inappropriate for school use, and the rough division of the work into something like chapters. For this last proced ure there is no warrant but necessity. N 0 boy of to-day can be expected, undriven, to find his way through the mazes of Defoe's narrative without some such aid. The method of annotation is very simple. I have merely at tempted to explain such words, phrases, or allusions as might puzzle a young reader. Defoe's style I have not at tempted to correct, but I have frequently indicated the points at' which his usage differs from the accepted usage of to-day. Defoe's original title, The Journal of the Plague Year, has been restored in this edition. The current title of the work, The History of the Plague, comes from the second edition, published after Defoe's death, and, to all appearances, without any previous authorization by him of the change in name. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.