From thearticle.com
Kate Loveman’s The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary (Cambridge UP, 2025, 237p, £22), a handsome book with small print, written in a clear and vivid style, displays on the spine a symbol of a golden lock to which she has the key. Her work belongs to a fairly new genre, the biography of a book, including Michael Gorra on Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady (2012) and Zachary Leader on Richard Ellmann’s Joyce (2025).
Loveman writes that for ten years “in the 1660s Samuel Pepys kept a secret diary whose contents, had they become known, would have destroyed his marriage, ended his career and quite possibly seen him arrested. Today this is the most famous diary in the English language.” Pepys was a “naval administrator, gossip, clotheshorse and routinely unfaithful husband. . . . In his diary, the diligent, honest, munificent gentleman and loyal servant of the king was revealed as a pleasure-loving, adulterous tailor’s son, involved in some distinctly shady dealings and with plenty to say about the monarch’s failings.”
An eyewitness to major historical events and court intrigues, Pepys (pronounced “Peeps”) vividly described momentous episodes, such as the London plague of 1665 and the Great Fire in 1666, when he famously dug a pit and buried “my parmezan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things.” His Diary has been called “an incomparable masterpiece, an historical and literary work of outstanding character”, as well as an obscene book too gross to print.
Using Thomas Shelton’s Tachygraphy (“swift-writing,” 1691), Pepys wrote it in shorthand with a system of symbols that hid its sexual contents. Breaking the code had the same mysterious fascination as Sherlock Holmes interpreting the figures of the puzzling dancing men, experts in Bletchley Park breaking the German codes and scholars deciphering the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls in modern times. The secret nature of Pepys’ diary has attracted millions of readers.
Robert Louis Stevenson called Pepys (1633-1703) “our little sensualist in a periwig” and the diarist confessed that he “esteemed pleasure above all things.” When he acquired a new pocket watch, he said “to see my childishness, I could not forebear carrying it in my hand and seeing what o’clock it was an hundred times.” He also had a morbid fascination with public executions and decomposing corpses: “I rode under the man that hangs upon Shooter’s Hill, and a filthy sight it was to see how his flesh shrunk to his bones. . . . I went to see the body of a lusty fellow, a seaman, that was hanged for a robbery. I did touch the dead body with my bare hand; it felt cold, but methought it was a very unpleasant sight.”
The Diary—recording Pepys’ interest in food, fashion, finance and fornication—both preserves and disguises its content. Driven by vanity and egoism, self-absorption and self-examination, his aide-mémoire is amusing, intimate and alive. It expresses his curiosity about himself and his world, and captures immediate moments for all time. Pepys’ emotion recollected in emotion imposes order on chaotic experience, relives the thrill of illicit pleasure by recording it and ponders an alternate reality about what could or should have happened. Sometimes serious, always honest and frank, he wrote the Diary for his own satisfaction, and left the leather-bound volumes to Magdalene, his Cambridge College, to be deciphered and published in the future.
Pepys began the Diary on January 1, 1660 when he was 26. He had witnessed and rejoiced at the execution of Charles I in January 1649. Always on the scene, in May 1660, as a naval administrator, he sailed to collect the new king, Charles II, from The Hague in Holland. When Charles spoke about his harsh life and penury in exile, “it made me weep to hear the stories that he told me of his difficulties that he had passed through.” Ironically, their ship the Naseby was named after a Parliamentarian victory over the Royalists in the Civil War. In April 1661 Pepys sneaked into Westminster Abbey and saw the coronation of Charles II: “with a great deal of patience I sat from past 4 till 11 before the King came in.” On this solemn occasion he comically combined high content and low diction: “I had so great a desire to pisse, that I went out a little while before the King had done all his ceremonies.” No wonder, after a seven-hour wait, that he had to relieve himself.
In 1665 rats, attracted to the garbage that filled the streets of London, carried the fleas that brought the plague. The victims of the Apocalyptic Pale Horse of Death suffered headache, fever, chills and painfully swollen lymph nodes. While everyone who could afford it fled to the country, Pepys bravely remained at his post in the Naval Office. After two months of the plague, his heart hardened and “he barely registered a corpse being carried by him: ‘but Lord, to see what custom is, that I am come almost to think nothing of it.’ ” The epidemic also halted the fashionable craze for periwigs: “nobody will dare to buy any haire for fear of the infection—that it had been cut off of the heads of people died of the plague.”
In 1666 the devastating fire in London began in a baker’s oven and quickly spread through the city, destroying 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall and St. Paul’s Cathedral . Pepys watched the conflagration from across the Thames and “saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from here to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill, for an arch of above a mile long. It made me weep to see it.” It also became personally dangerous when the wind carried burning particles ahead of the main blaze: “With one’s face to the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of fire-drops.” He added images of sight and sound to his vivid descriptions: “the churches, houses, and all on fire, and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the crackling of the houses at their ruin.” As useful as ever, he carried the news of the Great Fire to King Charles.
In Pepys’ lifetime the British and Dutch fought three wars over trade and colonial expansion, and some of the naval battles were painted by the marine-landscape artists Willem van de Velde and Jacob van Ruisdael. A major naval crisis occurred in June 1667 when “the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway and burnt the great ships anchored at Chatham. After this national humiliation, peace was made.”
Famous for his brilliant and responsible work as Chief Secretary of the Admiralty and creator of the modern British navy, Pepys wrote of his official role, “Chance without merit brought me in, diligence only keeps me so.” The historian John Hearsey explains that Pepys “was responsible for the sea-and-battle worthiness of the Fleet, for keeping the dockyards in efficient working order and seeing the sailors were properly looked after.” His achievements included clamping down on corruption, overseeing naval construction and instituting an exam for seaborne lieutenants. Pepys was considered “the ablest man in the English admiralty”. But he also took bribes of money, goods and sex. When a woman and “her husband approached Pepys seeking his patronage, he subsequently approached her seeking sexual gratification as advance payment”.
Pepys observed conduct at sea that ranged from depraved and violent to sacrificial and idealistic. A captain told him of a cunning scheme, like the one in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, about how to earn extra money by listing dead men as sailors and collecting their wages. He must “have five or six servants on board as dead men, and I to give them what wages I pleased, and so their pay be mine.” After impoverished sailors were discharged from service and given tickets for future payment instead of the cash they had earned, they rioted, robbed and even joined the Dutch navy.
Yet seamen were also capable of great heroism. When a brave captain died of his wounds in battle, 12 poor sailors who “have long known and loved, and served our dead commander”, offered to sacrifice themselves by ramming a Dutch ship and dying in a blaze of glory: “all we have is our lives; if you will please to get his Royal Highness to give us a fire-ship . . . we will, if possible, do that which shall show our memory of our dead commander, and our revenge.”
Pepys loved the stage, went to the theatre several times a week and described farcical scenes like those in Restoration comedies by Congreve or Wycherley: “Lady Castlemaine, the king’s chief mistress, staged a mock marriage with another mistress, culminating with the king’s taking Castlemaine’s place in the bridal bed.” The king, who welcomed all women, approved the jest. Another scene could have come from the Earl of Rochester’s obscene play Sodom. Pepys recorded how Sir Charles Sedley had appeared naked on a tavern balcony in Covent Garden, “acting all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined.”
His English-born, half-French wife Elizabeth (1640-69), married Pepys when she was 14, and died of typhoid aged 29 soon after he stopped writing the Diary. His sight was failing and he had to give it up for continuing would be “to undo my eyes”. He was flattered when men paid attention to his pretty, well-dressed wife, but alarmed at her potential response. He was so jealous of Elizabeth that he even checked the bed sheets after her dancing master had visited for a lesson.
Pepys had sex with any available woman, with or without their consent or his payment, and took advantage of the fact that 17th-century ladies were innocent of underwear. All attractive women were a source of potential pleasure, especially when he politely forgave their bad manners. In a tavern “I sitting behind in a dark place, a lady spit backwards upon me by mistake not seeing me, but after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all.” This contretemps emboldened his approach to her.
After a rare and fortunate encounter, he employed thinly disguised French, which his wife could read: “at the cabaret at the Cloche in the street du roy je l’ay foutée sous de la chaise deux times” (“at the tavern at the Bell in King Street I fucked her under the chair two times”). While seated near a window in a wine-house he “so far forgot himself in an ecstasy of fondling that a passer-by threw a stone at the glass, and shouted at him to stop it.” On another occasion, “I did kiss her and touch her thing, but she was against it and yet at last I did make her hold my thing in her hand.” Hearsey notes that despite his promiscuity, his puritanical “inhibitions were so deep-rooted that his love-making often went no further than a little indelicate fumbling.”
The housemaids were live-in temptations and he was once discovered in flagrante: “My wife, coming up suddenly, did find me imbracing the girl with my hand under her skirts; and endeed, I was with my hand in her cunny. I was at a wonderful loss upon it, and the girl also.” During a bitter quarrel with Elizabeth he tore up all his love letters to her while she pleaded to save them. He once gave Elizabeth a black eye in a quarrel and, mightily vexed, she retaliated by biting and scratching. The compromising situations became more dangerous in January 1669 when Elizabeth had a sudden fit of jealousy and appeared at his bedside with fire “tongs red hot at the ends, and made as if she did design to pinch me with them.”
The notorious Diary was first published in 1825. Victorian editors had to “accommodate scholarly conventions, commercial requirements and popular enthusiasm for Pepys,” and the fascination with what had not been published. It was shockingly enjoyable for the respectable editors to read about the depths to which Restoration society had sunk. Defending Pepys, they agreed that he could claim only “comparative purity”, as against the very low standards of his time. Readers were urged to unite the admirable and deplorable aspects of his character and “see the greatness of the man”.
Kate Loveman gives a lively account of how the two modern editors, Robert Latham in Cambridge, England and William Matthews at UCLA in California, worked distantly and together, then quarreled bitterly about payment for and recognition of their work. Their monumental scholarly edition came out soon after the trailblazing appearance of Nabokov’s unexpurgated Lolita (1958) and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1959). The complete transcription of the Diary was published in 11 volumes between 1970 and 1983, three centuries after it was written.
Loveman does not mention the illuminating similarities between Pepys, James Boswell and James Joyce. Boswell’s best-selling London Journal, written in 1762-63 exactly a century after Pepys, was suppressed for almost 200 years until it was finally published in 1950. Boswell also used Thomas Shelton’s shorthand system to disguise the frank and detailed contents, which rose to exalted company and descended to sexual debauchery. Both curious and precise observers were energetic and gregarious men who loved high-spirited and gossipy talk. Like Pepys, Boswell was pleased with his achievements, and recorded how he just sat and hugged himself in his mind when well satisfied. They liked to dress up in expensive clothes, and to attend public hangings. (Lawyer Boswell sometimes watched the swing of his own convicted clients.) Both had salacious entries about frequent sexual encounters with many available women, but also included a strong element of guilty confession and repentance.
Pepys and Joyce both loved singing and music, and had serious eye problems.
The scandalous Ulysses (1922) was finally published in America after the landmark trial of 1933. Joyce used Pepys’ stream of consciousness technique and cryptic content, and boasted, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”
Pepys paved the way to the cloaca and licensed Joyce’s descriptions of excreta. In the late Ithaca chapter Bloom and Stephen stand side by side and piss together: “their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition.” In a numerical account Pepys records, “I begun to break six or seven small and great farts.” At the end of the musical Sirens chapter Bloom uses the sound of a passing tram to disguise his sonorous fart: “Pprrpffrrppffff.” Pepys notes that he “rose and shit in the chimney piece.” In the early Calypso chapter Bloom, “Midway, his last resistance yielding, allowed his bowels to ease themselves.”
Joyce subtly imitated and refined Pepys’ sentimental and sympathetic style in his description of Mina Purefoy’s protracted labour. He writes of the maternity hospital in the Oxen of the Sun chapter: “Mistress Purefoy there, that got in through pleading her belly, and now on the stools, poor body, two days past her term, the midwives sore put to it and can’t deliver.”
Pepys’ distinctive style inspired a wide range of parodic writing from children’s magazines to illicit reading. Loveman defines it as, “drop the first-person pronoun, insert lots of periphrastic verbs (‘did sing,’ ‘do hate’), include some of his recognizable phrases (‘mightily,’ ‘with much delight,’ ‘But Lord!,’ ‘But strange’)—and end with ‘to bed.’ ”
Robert Louis Stevenson summed up Pepys’ talent: his “indefatigably lively, telling and picturesque style deals with the whole matter of a life, and yet is rarely wearisome, condescends to the most fastidious particulars, and yet sweeps all away in the forthright current of the narrative.”
