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Product Description
HB Slipcased 2002 Folio Society Edition, in excellent condition, some very light shelfwaer / scuffing to the external plain black slipcase, otherwise unmarked.
The Great Plague of 1665 was a last and terrible visitation before plague finally burned itself out in north-western Europe. A direct descendant of the Black Death, in London alone it killed more than 100,000 people - perhaps a quarter of the entire population. Its horrors have been etched on our minds by the writings of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys, yet it is hard for us to imagine the sheer scale of the tragedy. Grass grew on deserted main streets while in the poorest quarters the 'dead-carts' rolled; men wielding hooked poles scooped hundreds of bodies from houses and gutters, heaping them into plague pits; people disfigured by hideous buboes fell dead in the street or were thrown, dying, over parish boundaries to avoid escalating burial costs; whole families - the living, the dying and the dead - were sealed in their homes for 40 days, at the mercy of rapacious searchers employed to root out victims of the disease.
