One of Britain’s clever and funnier columnists, Marina Hyde applies her acerbic wit to the Coronavirus pandemic by recalling the Great Plague that descended on London over three centuries ago. Noting the recollection of that grisly time in Daniel Defoe’s memoir written some five decades after the event, she reveals how his “Journal of the Plague Year” presaged our modern peril, her headline proclaiming that “. . . the British way with contagion has barely changed since 1665.”

Parallels are inevitable, given the enduring crookedness of human nature, but there are at least two very good reasons that the excesses of greed and evil back then should inspire famed diarist Samuel Pepys to complain of “the plague making us as cruel as dogs to one another.”

First, Defoe’s “plague year” was but another in a long sequence of such years going back to the Black Death of 1348 – some 40 mass outbreaks occurring in the interim and taking between 10% and 20% of London’s population each time. And second, the lack of plumbing and modern amenities such as we have today, combined with cramped and filthy streets and widespread poverty to make the brutally enforced locking in – what our more genteel age thinks of as “self-isolation” – a terrifying and often maddening experience.

Home working worked better for some than for others. Scarcely had one rather undistinguished Cambridge student collected his degree, he was compelled to retreat to his mother’s house in the country as the plague advanced. There he stayed for two years, reflecting on his interests in calculus, optics, and the cosmic implications of apples landing on his head. When he returned to Cambridge in 1867, Isaac Newton was firmly on his path to greatness as one of the greatest physicists and mathematicians of all time.

London emerged from the plague in pretty good shape too. The city of Pepys refashioned itself with particular energy in Fleet Street: it was here in the 1660s that the first retail banks appeared, underpinning the explosion in printing presses that would drive the Age of the Enlightenment and the country’s political awakening.

And it was in Crane Court, tucked up an alley off the north side of Fleet Street, that Isaac Newton, by then the president of the recently founded Royal Society, was to establish its headquarters through the golden years of the Enlightenment.

There was a catch amidst the glory of London’s rebirth following the years of Civil War and the Great Plague. Just one year after the plague subsided came the Great Fire of 1666, burning from the City of London up to the western end of Fleet Street and clearing away much of the pestilence and grime that had created the conditions in which the history of plague had festered over centuries.

It must be hoped that no similarly catastrophic event is required, as London emerges from its coronavirus challenge of the 21st century, to enlighten the modern city as to the merits of innovative community solutions.