ABSTRACT
Another relevant context should be found on the seventeenth, a “bad century” as it has been called by modern historians, and the eighteenth centuries. Wars, religion dissent, natural disasters, climate changes and plagues, extended everywhere. At the same time two cities in Europe, London and Lisbon, were the principal emporiums of the maritime trade carried on the world between Europe and their colonies. Both metropolises suffered huge catastrophes, London a plague in 1655 and a big fire in 1666 and Lisbon an earthquake in 1755. In London the new journalism was arising and writers like Defoe, Swift, Burke, Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith were its main figures. It was Defoe who wrote about catastrophes and he was the creator of the narratives of risk. A Journal of the Plague Year (1719) was a reconstruction, thanks to a fiction, of the 1655 plague which lashed the city of London. This chapter takes this book together with The Storm (1704), another of Defoe’s works, to present the model for the modern narratives of risk.
