Complete and unabridged, with 59 full-page plates by Thomas Gainsborough, Richard Wilson and J. M. W. Turner. London, 1665: a saddler stays in the city while the bills of mortality climb, and records what he sees parish by parish — the shut houses, the watchmen, the carts, the rumours. Defoe was five years old in the plague year and wrote this in 1722 from documents and family talk, so exactly that historians used it as a source for two hundred years. It is the first modern reporting, and its narrator survives, as such narrators do, by walking towards what everyone else is fleeing. Fifty-nine plates by painters including Hogarth and Grimshaw follow the plague year through London streets, elections, and northern coasts, matching the book's parish-by-parish survey of a city under siege.