Infectious Wit: Metaphor, Atheism and the Plague in Eighteenth-Century London

In Illness and Self in Society, Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret remark the correspondences between the "biological and the social order. Everywhere and in all periods, it is the individual who is sick, but he is sick in the eyes of his society, in relation to it, and in keeping with the modalities fixed by it. The language of the sick thus takes shape within the language expressing the relations between the individual and society." ¹ In short, illness both creates metaphor and is defined by it. Susan Sontag has revealed the matrix of metaphorical significations linking cancer and tuberculosis with the conditions of modern life. But cancer and TB are not the only diseases that have functioned historically in this metaphorical fashion. Herzlich and Pierret point out that:

at different times one specific disease was seen by everyone as the embodiment of illness itself, not only because of its frequent recurrence and the danger it represented, but also because in various ways it was the material sign of the conditions of life, of the concepts of human existence and the values of the time. In the Middle Ages the plague mowed down millions of victims, but it also embodied, better than any other scourge, the fragility of every person's existence. ²

As Barbara Tuchman argues in A Distant Mirror, it was the plague with all its attendant significations that most clearly symbolized the "calamitous fourteenth century." ³

Sontag points out how leprosy aroused a "similarly disproportionate sense of horror" in the Middle Ages. The leper was a "social text in which corruption was made visible; an exemplum, an emblem of decay." As Sontag argues, leprosy, like the plague, was hyperdetermined:

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival. ⁴

The physical conditions listed here, including pollutions, corruptions, and decay, are similar to the sources of dread identified by Mary Douglas in her study Purity and Danger. But as I suggest in this essay, not merely physical conditions but intellectual movements could so threaten the foundations of society that they also inspired writers to exploit metaphors of disease to express their sense of fear and loathing. As Mary Douglas suggests, societies depend upon such descriptions of pollution in order to protect social ritual from skepticism. ⁵

For eighteenth-century Englishmen, particularly those who equated social stability with the interests of Church and Monarch, the intellectual movement that created the greatest anxiety was the steady rise of secularism, rationalism, sexual libertinism, and anticlericalism, which had been roughly designated as forms of modern atheism. ⁶ As Douglas suggests, the preoccupation with pollution and disease can be seen as a response to the supposition that there are enemies either within or without the community who seek to undermine it. This was certainly the case with orthodox Englishmen who were convinced that England was in grave peril from the "Contagion" of atheism and infidelity. To quote the Convocation of the Church of England itself, "Infidelity, where embrac'd, cancels all the strongest Obligations of Duty, and dissolves those Religious Bands of Obedience, by which the Thrones of Princes are best secur'd." ⁷ To express their alarm at the threat posed by atheism and infidelity, later seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century writers, like the representative of the Church of England cited here, call upon the familiar iconography of infection inspired by recollections of the London Plague of 1665.

In the words of one defender of the establishment, it was time to "prepare for a Defence, when the Enemy has gain'd the Walls. When the Plague rages...