One day in December 1659, a young civil servant and Cambridge graduate named Samuel Pepys went to the shop in Cornhill in the City of London, where the stationer John Cade sold paper and pens, and bought himself a paper-covered notebook too fat for his pockets and took it home to his lodgings in Westminster. There, having ruled in red ink a left-hand margin down some 282 pages, he was ready. Thus it was that on 1 January 1660 the 27-year-old Pepys made his first diary entry:
“Blessed be God, at the end of the last year, I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain [in 1658, he’d endured an operation for the removal of a stone], but upon taking of cold. I lived in Axe Yard, having my wife and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three.”
Soon, however, this sober narrative became transformed by the diarist’s exuberant character and his enthusiastic discovery of his “unequalled self”. Pepys’s determination to place himself – in all his contradictory and intoxicating vigour – at the centre of his own life, with its splendour, shame, variety and vanity, had taken over. For the next nine and a half years, Pepys’s diary, the greatest in English literature, became the seething receptacle for its author’s loves and hates, anxieties, frustrations and expectations, triumphs and disasters, as well as a faithful record of everyday life:
“This morning Mr Sheply and I did eat our breakfast at Mrs Harper’s, (my brother John being with me,) upon a cold turkey-pie and a goose. From thence I went to my office, where we paid money to the soldiers till one o’clock, at which time we made an end, and I went home and took my wife and went to my cosen, Thomas Pepys, and found them just sat down to dinner, which was very good; only the venison pasty was palpable beef, which was not handsome. After dinner I took my leave, leaving my wife with my cozen Stradwick, and went to Westminster to Mr Vines, where George and I fiddled a good while, Dick and his wife (who was lately brought to bed) and her sister being there, but Mr Hudson not coming according to his promise, I went away, and calling at my house on the wench, I took her and the lanthorn with me to my cosen Stradwick, where, after a good supper, there being there my father, mother, brothers, and sister, my cosen Scott and his wife, Mr Drawwater and his wife, and her brother, Mr Stradwick, we had a brave cake brought us, and in the choosing, Pall was Queen and Mr Stradwick was King. After that my wife and I bid adieu and came home, it being still a great frost.”
As well as giving the language the catchphrase “And so to bed”, Pepys also paints an unforgettable portrait of a society putting itself back together after the Puritan experiment:
“I went out to Charing Cross, to see major-general Harrison [a regicide] hanged, drawn and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.”
Pepys was a government servant and a man of business who liked to regulate his life. The diary was Pepys’s informal system: tidying up the chaos of personal experience and reducing it to a meticulous shorthand. (You can still see the manuscript in Cambridge, the crown jewels of the Magdalene College library.) Later, when the cipher – Shelton’s shorthand – was broken in 1825 and a full transcript completed, something very far from a system emerged: a portrait of an extraordinary Englishman at an extraordinary moment of English history.
Pepys was a man of his time who revelled in its politics, its opportunities and its adventures. He loved music and women, taverns and good wine, metropolitan pleasures and the boisterous company of the new generation coming to prominence around Charles II.
We don’t know what it was that prompted Pepys to pick up his pen and keep a daily record of his life and times, but it was, in the words of one scholar, the “by-product of his energetic pursuit of happiness”. Keeping the diary intensified his enjoyment of the present moment, giving him first the experience, then his account of it, as well as, eventually, the chance to recollect his experiences in tranquillity. Not the least of the diary’s numerous qualities is its joie de vivre: the reader gets nothing but vicarious pleasure, even joy, from its pages:
“We went towards Westminster on foot, and at the Golden Lion, near Charing-cross, we went in and drank a pint of wine, and so parted; and thence home, where I found my wife and maid a-washing. I sat up till the bell-man came by with his bell, just under my window as I was writing of this very line, and cried, ‘Past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty, windy morning.’ I then went to bed and left my wife and the maid a-washing still.”
Pepys’s timing was good, too. By chance, he was writing at a pivotal moment in English history. On 25 April 1660, the new parliament demanded by public opinion had met, then General Monck and the exiled court had reached a secret agreement. On 11 May, the fleet sailed to Holland to bring Charles Stuart back to his throne as Charles II.
Pepys’s career prospered. His job as clerk of the acts to the Navy Board put him at the centre of the second Dutch war (1665-1667). Living in Westminster, close to the seat of government, he had first-hand experience of the 1665 plague:
“I saw a dead corpse in a coffin lie in the close unburied – and a watch is constantly kept there, night and day, to keep the people in – the plague making us cruel dogs to one another… In the height of the plague bold people there were to go in sport to one another’s burials. And in spite to well people, would breathe in the faces of well people going by.”
Then, in September 1666, Pepys witnessed the Great Fire, a celebrated set-piece in the diary, describing how he had gone to the Tower of London to get a better view of the unfolding disaster:
“I down to the water-side, and there got a boat, and there saw a lamentable fire. Poor Michell’s house, as far as the Old Swan, already burned that way, and the fire running further, that in a very little time it got as far as the Steeleyard, while I was there. Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down. Having staid, and in an hour’s time seen the fire: rage every way, and nobody, to my sight, endeavouring to quench it, but to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire, and having seen it get as far as the Steele-yard, and the wind mighty high and driving it into the City; and every thing, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches...”
Pepys’s diary, however, is more than just an invaluable record of stirring times. It’s a vivid portrait of an ambitious young man becoming a great public official (“one of the most important naval administrators in England’s history”, according to one biographer).
And then again, it’s an enthralling account of one man’s life, from the inside out. Vanity must be one motivation for the diarist. Pepys translated his vanity first into intimate reportage and then into art. Yes, he places himself at the centre of events, but not in a self-important way. He gives himself no airs or special dignity. He is as frank about his frailties as he is about every other aspect of the world around him. Famously, he reports his sexual adventures with impressive candour, using a mix of the English vernacular and Latin to report his sexual exploits. His seduction of Deborah Willet, a young woman engaged by his wife for company, is probably the most dramatic. On 25 October 1668, Pepys was surprised at home as he embraced Miss Willet. He describes his wife coming upon them “suddenly” while in flagrante delicto:
“She did find me embracing the girl con [with] my hand sub [under] su [her]coats; and indeed I was with my main [hand]in her cunny. I was at a wonderful loss upon it and the girl also...”
Deborah Willet was sacked; Pepys fell into deep remorse; he did not, however, entirely give up his dalliances. Elizabeth, his long-suffering wife, died in 1669. Fearful for his failing eyesight, or so he claimed, he closed his diary on 31 May 1669, but it’s clear that something had changed. His life had reached a turning point – he no longer had the same appetites. He would live to see in the new century, dying in 1703, having happily resisted the temptation to destroy his youthful masterpiece. As a unique literary figure, he always remained, in the fullest and deepest sense, an artist open to the rare mysteries of everyday life. His diary is the work of a special kind of English genius: mundane, humble, brilliantly improvised and profound.
A Signature Sentence
The new Common Council of the City doth speak very high; and hath sent to Monke their sword-bearer, to acquaint him with their desires for a free and full Parliament, which is at present the desires and the hopes and expectation of all – 22 of the old secluded members having been at the House door the last week to demand entrance; but it was denied them, and it is believed that they nor the people will not be satisfied till the House be filled.
Three To Compare
John Evelyn: Diary (1818)
Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Diary (1953)
Claire Tomalin: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2002)
• The Diaries of Samuel Pepys: A Selection is published by Penguin Classics (£18.99). To order a copy for £16.14 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
