Titans of History

PEPYS

1633–1703

The greatness of his life was open, yet he longed to communicate its smallness also.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882)

Samuel Pepys was the author of one of the most vivid diaries ever written. For almost a decade Pepys—who held a senior position at the Admiralty—recorded his life and his world in engrossing detail, providing an extraordinary insight into what it was like to be alive in 17th-century London. Pepys himself comes over as a man of great curiosity, at once open-minded and skeptical, sensitive to both the comedy and the pathos of the human condition. He delights in the high life and the low and is unstintingly honest in depicting himself as a man with all-too-human needs and desires, yet beset by moral scruples and regrets.

Pepys’s diaries are all the more remarkable because during his lifetime no one knew anything about them. To the world at large, Samuel Pepys, secretary to the Admiralty, Member of Parliament and president of the Royal Society, was a highly successful naval official who had risen from humble beginnings as a tailor’s son. When he died in 1703 his contemporaries saw Pepys’s legacy as the great library he bequeathed to his alma mater, Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was also admired for a lifetime of philanthropy toward educational establishments such as Christ’s Hospital School, and for his achievements as a naval administrator who had tirelessly promoted meritocracy and efficiency. Pepys’s most priceless legacy was only discovered over a century after his death, when the authorities at Magdalene employed an impoverished undergraduate to crack the diaries’ seemingly impenetrable shorthand.

Pepys’s descriptions of the disasters that befell England in the 1660s are some of the richest historical sources in existence. He charts day-to-day life during the Great Plague of 1665–6 and, from his perspective as an Admiralty insider, gives an invaluable insight into the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1667. His almost hour-by-hour record of the Great Fire of London of 1666 is one of the finest pieces of reportage ever written.

Although Pepys largely owed his advancement at the Admiralty to royal favor, he never lets his diarist’s eye be dazzled by the court. He can be as exasperated with the king as he is with his own servants, and more than once he vents his frustration that Charles II seems incapable of taking the duties of kingship seriously.

While most contemporary diarists were exclusively preoccupied with the spiritual or political sphere, Pepys’s overwhelming interest is in more earthy matters. The diaries illuminate Pepys’s fascination with the way humans behave, their greed, rivalries, ambitions, jealousies, and their fascination with scandal. The people he depicts might well be alive today, so vividly does he bring them to life.

What makes Pepys stand out above the average gossip monger is that he also turns his unflinchingly honest gaze upon himself. He never tries to show himself in the best light, nor does he conceal his flaws. This is no exercise in self-mortification or pious humility, however; rather, it reflects an all-consuming absorption in humanity, of which he is just the most familiar specimen. He records his own behavior with almost scientific curiosity, including all the embarrassing, even mortifying, details that most diarists would leave out—for example, the occasion when his wife Elizabeth discovers him with his hand up her companion’s skirt, or the combination of grief and guilty relief he feels at the death of a maverick brother. The diaries seethe with not just glimpses of the gorgeous underwear of Charles II’s latest mistresses but of Pepy’s sexual adventures too. Pepys’s record of his tempestuous relationship with his wife, whom he married for love, remains one of literature’s most candid portraits of the Gordian knot of marriage. He writes of the blazing rows, the tearful confrontations, the nose pulling and the insults. Then there are the reconciliations, the long lie-ins spent chatting, and the sympathy for each other when sick. Pepys omits nothing: the presents he buys Elizabeth to try to assuage his guilt after yet another episode of philandering; even the details of their sexual relations, rendered problematic by a “pain in the lip of her chose.”

After almost ten years, fearing his eyesight was failing, Pepys stopped writing his diary. It was, he wrote, “almost as much to see myself go into my grave.” Although his eyes recovered, he never kept another diary like it, and none of his subsequent writings ever equaled his diaries for brilliance. Pepys lived out the rest of his life as a worthy man, who, despite his personal misgivings, remained unceasingly loyal to his royal masters through the Revolution of 1688. Much in Pepys’s public life was admirable—but it was his private, intimate work of outstanding literature and reportage, writing diaries of such immediacy, originality and searing honesty, that demands the admiration of posterity.