Samuel Pepys (1633-1703)

I’ve wanted to read the diaries of Samuel Pepys for many years.   Famous for their frankness and the vivacity of Pepys himself, they cover the period from January 1660 to around 1670, and describe major events such as the Great Fire of London in 1666.  But after several attempts, I’ve decided the diary is destined to be the greatest book I never read. It’s far too easy and enjoyable to read about the book instead. Or to get snippets of it from the wonderful diary site, www.pepysdiary.com, which features a new entry every day, and a summary of “The story so far”. When I checked it today, we were up to Sunday, 18 March 1665 — “Lord’s Day” – a day on which the temperature was 6 degrees celsius:

Up and my cold better, so to church, and then home to dinner, and so walked out to St. James’s Church, thinking to have seen faire Mrs. Butler, but could not, she not being there, nor, I believe, lives thereabouts now. So walked to Westminster, very fine fair dry weather, but all cry out for lack of rain. To Herbert’s and drank, and thence to Mrs. Martin’s, and did what I would with her; her husband going for some wine for us.

Two things in particular fascinate me about the diary.  It was written in a very obscure form of shorthand that was not decoded until hundreds of years after Pepys’s death.  I like to think of his million words of intrigue and explicit sexual adventures languishing on the shelves of a dusty old college library in Cambridge for all that time.  And then there’s his relationship with his wife, the beautiful, tempestuous Elizabeth, whom he married when she was 15:

I walked homeward still doing business by the way, and at home I find my wife this day of her own accord to have lain out 25s upon a pair of pendances for her eares which did vex me and brought me and her to very high, and very foul words from her to me, such as trouble me to think she should have in her mouth …

One of my favourite reviews of last year was about Pepys.  It was written by Maurice Earls in the Dublin Review of Books, April 2008 edition.  Following is the first couple of paragraphs of the review, with a link at the end to the full text.

*****

History Is To Blame
Maurice Earls: The Life and Times of Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys was, near enough, London’s Leopold Bloom – intelligent, curious, diligent and decent, with an abiding interest in music, food, women and the life of the city and people around him. Both individuals, the historical and the fictional, were bourgeois gentlemen who provide what are among the most honest records of human, and in particular male, thinking available. They told the truth about themselves, a simple enough matter, but also a rare phenomenon and one which separates them from the bulk of memoir writers who are always, to some degree, engaged in personal propaganda. There are differences of course; Joyce shone his light on the involuntary sequences of Bloom’s thinking, whereas Pepys simply wrote down what he was aware of thinking about and what was happening in the world around him. The result in both cases was a compelling and brilliant literary work.

Samuel Pepys, most unusually for his time, believed that his everyday doings would interest posterity, and this inspired him in January 1660 to embark upon what is one of the most fascinating diaries of all time. He went to great pains to ensure his journal would survive, thinking, correctly as it turned out, that it would be read at some time in the future. His belief that his writings would not be read during his lifetime no doubt emboldened him and in part explains the remarkable frankness with which he presents himself: whether arguing with his wife, singing in his garden or making advances (successful) towards Diana, the daughter of his neighbour Mrs Crisp. He was, however, fully aware of the danger inherent in his frankness and he ensured that he would not be compromised if some member of his household – in particular his wife – happened upon the journal. The entries were written, almost entirely, in an obscure form of shorthand understood by only a tiny percentage of the population.

In his will Pepys bequeathed his library to Magdalene College Cambridge, and among his three thousand books he placed the six leatherbound volumes of his diary. In a message to posterity, elsewhere on his shelves, he placed a guide to the form of shorthand he had used when writing them. The diaries rested in Cambridge until they were translated and published in the nineteenth century. However, some passages, including those with a sexual content, did not conform to Victorian publishing standards and as a result about one fifth of the entries were omitted …

To read the full review, click here.