In Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year," the character H.F. is a fictional narrator who goes into the city of London during the outbreak of the bubonic plague in 1665 in order to observe and document the events of the time. He risks infection in order to gather information about the outbreak and how people are coping with the disease. The book is a historical fiction, written as an account of one man's experiences during the plague, and is not written by Defoe himself.