A Journal of the Plague Year: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

A Journal of the Plague Year, credited to Daniel Defoe, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

A LibriVox recording of A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe. Read by Denny Sayers. April 15th 2013: missing sections of this book have been recorded, and the whole book recatalogued. Daniel Defoe's 'A Journal of the Plague Year' (1722) is a fictionalized account of the bubonic plague epidemic that struck London in 1665 which Defoe witnessed as a five-year old, the year before the Great Fire of London. This work is among the first English novels. Like 'Robinson Crusoe', 'Moll Flanders' and several other of his novels, Defoe published this work as though it were based on primary sources and was not, so he pretended, a novel at all. This was Defoe's way of developing an audience among the reading public for fiction writing. The work is remarkable in its abundant use of "telling detail" to create an impression of verisimilitude, and for nearly two hundred years it was widely considered a pioneering work of journalism rather than a novel. Indeed, it is still assigned as required reading in journalism courses. (Summary by Dennis Sayers).

Recording facts

• Recording title: A Journal of the Plague Year
• Author credits: Daniel Defoe
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 25
• Listed recording duration: 12:04:55

Catalogue topics

• historical
• london
• 1665

Opening tracks: first 24 of 25

1. Part 01 — 36:32
2. Part 02 — 32:27
3. Part 03 — 27:34
4. Part 04 — 32:57
5. Part 05 — 31:14
6. Part 06 — 33:31
7. Part 07 — 28:57
8. Part 08 — 23:28
9. Part 09 — 27:47
10. Part 10 — 23:20
11. Part 11 — 28:50
12. Part 12 — 21:09
13. Part 13 — 32:21
14. Part 14 — 35:30
15. Part 15 — 25:32
16. Part 16 — 31:07
17. Part 17 — 31:22
18. Part 18 — 29:12
19. Part 19 — 26:24
20. Part 20 — 33:12
21. Part 21 — 27:17
22. Part 22 — 23:59
23. Part 23 — 26:56
24. Part 24 — 31:23

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.