A Journal of the Plague Year, written by a citizen who continued all the while in London

hat it began; for though I have lived to see a fur­ther in­crease, and mighty throngs of people set­tling in Lon­don more than ever, yet we had al­ways a no­tion that the num­bers of people which, the wars be­ing over, the armies dis­ban­ded, and the royal fam­ily and the mon­archy be­ing re­stored, had flocked to Lon­don to settle in busi­ness, or to de­pend upon and at­tend the Court for re­wards of ser­vices, prefer­ments, and the like, was such that the town was com­puted to have in it above a hun­dred thou­sand people more than ever it held be­fore;

It must not be for­got here that the city and sub­urbs were prodi­giously full of people at the time of this vis­it­a­tion, I mean at the time

And I know it so well, and in so many sev­eral cases, that I could give sev­eral re­la­tions of good, pi­ous, and re­li­gious people who, when they have had the dis­tem­per, have been so far from be­ing for­ward to in­fect oth­ers that they have for­bid their own fam­ily to come near them, in hopes of their be­ing pre­served, and have even died without see­ing their nearest re­la­tions lest they should be in­stru­mental to give them the dis­tem­per, and in­fect or en­danger them. If, then, there were cases wherein the in­fec­ted people were care­less of the in­jury they did to oth­ers, this was cer­tainly one of them, if not the chief, namely, when people who had the dis­tem­per had broken out from houses which were so shut up, and hav­ing been driven to ex­tremit­ies for pro­vi­sion or for en­ter­tain­ment, had en­deav­oured to con­ceal their con­di­tion, and have been thereby in­stru­mental in­vol­un­tar­ily to in­fect oth­ers who have been ig­nor­ant and un­wary.