The subject is from Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, an account of the Black Death which killed a third of London’s population in 1664/5. A comet appeared shortly before the outbreak, and visionaries prophesying doom walked the streets. One such fanatic, Solomon Eagle – a semi-crazed Quaker preacher whose real name was Eccles – saw the plague as divine retribution for the sins of the populace. Here, the preacher wears only a burning charcoal grate (to fumigate the air) on his head, and a loincloth. As he stands astride a narrow, cobbled street, with his long hair trailing down his back, he harangues a group of drinkers who lean out of an inn (‘Ye Goat’s Head’) and denounces them for their impenitence. The Civil War of the 1640s, followed by the Black Death and then the Fire of London in 1666 (the 666th year of the second millennium – 666 was the number of the Beast in the Book of Revelation) made it seem to the English that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were actually amongst them, and that the Second Coming of Christ and the Last Judgement were imminent. Society creaked and cracked; it was a time of fear, superstition and insurrection, of Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchists and Quakers.

The original drawing of 1863 of this subject was ‘considered to be one of the finest of his grand series of drawings for Defoe’s Plague of London’ (Ernestine Mills, Life and Letters of Frederic Shields, 1912, p 78), which so impressed Rossetti. The chosen design of the subject was destroyed when the wood engraver cut through it, as was the process, to illustrate a cheap edition for Laurie's Shilling Entertainment Library. While Manchester City Art Gallery and Hartlepool Art Gallery both hold earlier watercolour and oil studies of the subject, ours is Shields’s most finished version, and it was probably worked up later. Ford Madox Hueffer, in his Ford Madox Brown: A Record of his Life and Work (1896, p 252) quotes from a letter from Brown to Shields dated 11 May 1869: ‘I have not yet been to the O.W.C. but Lucy has, and says your drawing of Hide looks stunning, but it seems you have only one, so the Solomon Eagle is or was not finished.’

We are grateful to Margaretta S Frederick.