SAMUEL PEPYS Full of weaknesses empty of priggery

J. H. PLUMB

The Diary of Samuel Pepys a new and com- plete transcription edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews (University of California Press) Vols 1-111 (1660-62), $27.00.) For nearly one hundred years Pepys's Diary, written in seventeenth century shorthand, lay virtually unknown on the shelves of his library bequeathed to his old college, Magdalene at Cambridge. Until its publica- tion his reputation was a modest one—an ad- mirable civil servant, a friend of the virtuosi, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a benefactor of his college—and that was about all. The success of John Evelyn's Diary in 1818 stimulated interest in the few who knew of the existence of Pepys's Journal. A young scholar, John Smith, was put to work : after three years Smith made an admirable transcript which Lord Braybrooke, the editor designate, slashed to his heart's content with the lofty abandon of nineteenth century aristocratic scholarship. And so the most famous diary in the English speaking world was launched. Sir Walter Scott puffed it in the Quarterly Review, Jeffreys panned it in the Edinburgh, only Creevey damned it as 'trash': the public bought it and loved it. Three editions were rapidly consumed and throughout the century its reputation grew: more of the diary and better editions were published, until they culminated in Wheatley's edition of 1893-6, the one com- monly used by us all. By the turn of the cen- tury Pepys was a household name, famous now not for his work as a naval ad- ministrator, but as one of the great writers of English literature, a name which, without offence, could be placed alongside Chaucer, to whom he was frequently compared, for the richness of the human scene which he painted.

And naturally historians and scholars pillaged the diary to enrich the texture of their books on seventeenth century England; increasingly the 1660s in England were seen through the eyes of Pepys. Indeed the England of Charles it—the Restoration, the Plague, the Great Fire, are all now reflected in Pepys's looking glass. Selections from the Diary have been published over and over again, giving delight to millions, but always from the old nineteenth century edition and from John Smith's transcript. At last, the long-heralded complete, scholarly edition is with us—three volumes now published, and seven to go. This, the editors stress, is the whole diary for the first time. Yet the ad- ditional material is not great—ninety erotic passages, mainly very short, dealing with Pepys's sexual gropings, and five days that previous editors omitted through care- lessness (they add but little). Apart from the erotica which give a little more insight into the hot and urgent nature of Pepy's sex. uality, the most important aspect of this edi. tion is its accuracy; on every page there are a number of small changes, restitutions of Pepys's forthright language and the like, which add immeasurably to its quality. At last we have Pepys as he wrote it. Each volume includes one year of the diary and the last two will contain an index and a com- pendium of essays by the leading scholars of the seventeenth century on the major topics that interested Pepys. And so, at last, Pepys is brought finally to bed in an edition worthy of him. His pride, never in short supply, would have swelled with the sight of it. and rightly so, for it is admirably done; the pit- falls of too much scholarship have been neatly avoided, yet there is enough scholarship to elucidate where elucidation is needed. .

The editors, who have spent twenty years of their lives in the service of Pepys, deserve to be rewarded. And yet does Samuel Pepys himself deserve so splendid a monument or such enduring fame? Or did he strike a particular chord on the sensibilities of the nineteenth and early twentieth century Englishmen and Americans which reverberates less and less in our own times? Is he indeed a great writer, one of those rare and creative human beings who can, timelessly, convey not only our hopes and despairs, but also the rich and fleeting moments that make our daily lives: or is he merely a valuable historical source inflated beyond his deserts? It is not easy to decide.

Anyone going to Pepys for the first time and unfamiliar with the London of Charles it might easily think him a bore. The early entries of his diary are detailed, yet matter of fact : they contain next to no self-analysis: no description of buildings; not even descrip- tions of people—the only physical facts that Pepys tells us of Charles it are that he was over six feet tall and walked very fast. To read the first volume is rather as if one had suddenly awakened in the middle of a man's life and so was expected to know all whom one met and the places to which one needed to go. And so anyone coming to Pepys's Diary for the first time must persist for a hundred or so pages, not until then will the miracle work; like a parasite one slowly enters Pepys's blood stream and sees his world with the clarity of his own eyes. And this quality of the Diary to absorb one totally is extremely important: it heightens the sense of truth, convinces perhaps too easily of the reality of all that Pepys observes and so creates dangers for the historian, although it makes him irresistible to the general reader.

This quality to absorb, to make the reader an active participator in his daily

life cer tainly created Pepys's success and his reputa- tion in Victorian England. His preoc- cupations, so intensely felt, were those of his readers, for Pepys's life as recorded in the diary would have gratified Samuel Smiles. When the Journal opens on 1 January. 1660, Pepys was just, but only just, beginning to rise in the world. He was twenty-seven. He was of modest origins—the son of a London tailor, yet curiously well-connected, for some of his relatives were minor gentry in Caw',

bridgeshire and Huntingdonshire and one had married into the great and ever-rising family of Montague--Pepys's patrons. Pepys was well educated, but for a poor, aspiring pseudo-gentleman he made a disastrous start to life. He improvidently married at twenty- two (a phenomenally early age for the 1650s) a penniless girl of fifteen, Elizabeth de Michel, the daughter of a French Huguenot. He stayed passionately in love with her until she died in 1669. Often he Vas maddened by her quarrels, even blows, litter the diary. Her slightest flirtation provoked Pepys to a paroxysm of jealousy. Before the diary opens, they had separated for several months, only to come together again. Sometimes Pepys took great joy in her, sometimes she seems to have kept him unsatisfied. Maybe as Professor Kenyon has suggested, she was somewhat frigid, and so drove Pepys to fury, passion, jealousy and amorous intrigue. Whatever the reason, the relationship with his wife is expressed with such honest realism, with such passion linked with kindness, at times with such worries about her extravagance and sluttishness, at others with such pride in her beauty and finery that it becomes both absorbing and deeply mov- ing. There is nothing, however, to envy : most men can read Pepys (and this is partly a reason for his great success) and feel a smug sense of superiority. In spite of his tantrums and his infidelities, his wife always won: laying bare all his shortcomings keeps Pepys free from pomposity: here is no hypocrisy, only humanity common to us all.

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This fascinating relationship with his wife, with its touches of smut and eroticism, was however merely the spice, the decoration of the feast which Pepys provided for the Vic- torians. His real grip on their hearts came

from his rise from rags to riches; like all suc- cess stories, it was studded with anxieties, with ominous men of power who threatened disaster, with golden-hearted patrons, and a cautious and mildly dishonest exploitation of power by Pepys himself—a narrative about as irresistible as a Western.

When the diary opens, Pepys scarcely owned a guinea. He held a Minor post at the Exchequer and acted partly as an accountant in the household of Edward Montague, one of the leading naval figures in the Com- monwealth who, after the death of Oliver Cromwell, began to intrigue for the return of Charles 11. And Charles les Restoration, brilliantly described in the Diary—not brilliantly in fine descriptive prose, but with an almost photographic accuracy that creates a far more heightened sense of reality than any fine writing could do—made Pepys's career. When Montague went over to Holland to fetch Charles it, Pepys acted as his secretary. Deeply impressed by his efficiency, Montague obtained two posts for Pepys—the major one, Clerk of the Acts for the Navy and a more lucrative one at the Privy Seal. Within a year, Pepys had ac- cumulated over £300 in spite of spending more on his fine new house in Seething Lane. The sweet smell of success rushed to Pepys's head. He drank hard, very hard; ate wolfishly; and went to the theatre, newly opened in 1660 after the Puritan regime had ended, several times a week. The strong Puritan streak, which the Victorians themselves possessed, operated after nearly two years of riot. Pepys forsook plays and wine. He found that time for work abounded. Up at 4 a.m. without a hangover, Pepys set himself to learn how to run a navy. He mastered arithmetic, he learned the com- plex ways of timber, Ilemp and tar. He re- organised his office and its records and im- pressed two powerful allies—the King's brother, James, Duke of York and Mr Secretary Coventry. At the end of volume three, the road to success is open again and Pepys's love of its trappings is being allowed full indulgence. Like his marriage, Pepys's relationship with his office was full of minor peccadillos. He received large and handsome gifts from merchants with whom he dealt; at times, let us face it, he took bribes. If he placed a man in a job, a return was expected. As with his infidelities, these irregularities filled Pepys with fear, anxiety and elation. It was so easy for our grandfathers both to ad- mire Pepys's dedication to success, yet feel morally superior to his shortcomings. By displaying his weaknesses, Pepys breeds a sense of superiority in his reader.

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Lacking the awful moral priggery of a John Evelyn, Pepys appears in his Journal as intensely human with a rich appetite for life, love and success, yet so fissured with all the common weaknesses that he never loses our sympathy. However, I feel that these aspects of Pepys may not capture the imagination of the present generation in the way that he did our fathers'. His almost naïve delight in the acquisition of fine things—clothes, coaches, silver, pictures, books in fine bindings, may nauseate those already glutted with the world's goods. His delight in hierarchy, in being treated with deference and humility, his unbridled joy in seeing 'Esquire' written on a letter to him is unlikely to be shared amongst those who have lost all sense of status. Even if this is so, I think that the diary will still be read, and very widely, for he reveals a world that is as strangely different as he himself is familiar.

Pepys's world was still very primitive. It lacked the amenities of modern living to an

astonishing degree, even though it was a world of constantly widening horizons. Novelties, and there were many in the Lon- don of his time, heightened the sense of won- der, of curiosity, of novelty that infused so much of Pepys's life. We derive from the diary a sense of an awakening world: primitive yet changing. Pepys's London is fascinating, but very odd by our standards; as yet it possessed no newspapers as we know them—an official gazette, a little printed foreign news, usually stale—so Pepys had to spend hours every day at the Royal Exchange or in Westminster Hall picking up the news, domestic and foreign. Rumour was more frequent than truth and to assess rumour was almost a hopeless task. Coffee houses and taverns were never mere places of refreshment; a visit was essential for news and for intellectual entertainment. There Pepys met his sea captains and learned of the wonders of the world that Europe was still discovering : credulity and fact wildly in- termingled. Indeed there were few other entertainments. After 1660 a few poor theatres came into existence: they revived year in year out English plays of the last fifty or sixty years. The acting was often poor, the scenery primitive, yet Pepys hungered for this 'most rare' entertainment. Apart from the theatre, there was nothing but fairs and puppet shows. It was natural, therefore, for men and women to meet and make music or amuse themselves by playing games that we now regard as fit only for a child, or they told each other tales—mainly fairy tales or wild romances. Entertainment in each other's houses was constant, a day scarcely passed in which people did not visit Pepys's house or he other people's. Indeed the Lon- doners of Pepys's day lived more like men and women in a village than in a great city. Also one is struck by its poverty. Pepys had never had a sirloin of beef in his own house until 'he was twenty-eight. Luxury goods were rare and expensive and this is the clue to much of Pepys's delight in finery.

s Pepys's world, therefore, was both ignorant and poor, yet one in which there was a growing sense of achievement, of ad- vance. Take books—although printing was two hundred years old by Pepys's day, it was only in his time that a man of modest in- come might acquire a small library at a reasonable cost. A great diversification with printing of books had taken place—plays, romances, travellers' tales, maps and books of self-education began to proliferate. To Pepys and his contemporaries these were marvels, to buy, to display proudly in the best bindings, and perhaps to read. And so it was with the new science, the world of curiosities and discoveries was intensely felt. it was natural for Pepys to join the Royal Society. He - possessed little scientific knowledge, but he hungered like a provincial for 'the rare and the curious'.

So much of Pepys's delight, his curiosity and his wonder, spring from the very limited, very primitive world in which he lived. -It lacked so much of what we take for granted. Even at thirty Pepys did not possess a watch. He lived by the church bells of London and the occasional sundial. And so did everyone else; so very few appointments were ever specifically made. Pepys drifted about from public place to public place, from coffee house to tavern, hoping to do business. Often Pepys went to Court to confer with the Lord High Admiral, James, Duke of York. only to find that he had gone hunting—Pepys never displays surprise or resentment. Time had a

totally different dimension to Pepys from that it has for us. Pepys, even at work, lived more like a villager than like a city-dweller today.

Pepys's London was small in another sense. The number of men and women who could afford to dress like gentry was tiny. And so, dress gave the entrée—to Parlia- ment, to the Law Courts and to the Royal Palaces themselves. Hence Pepys could go and view the Court at play, watch the Queen or the King at supper and eye Lady Castle- maine, the King's mistress, with delight. Never has a court been so accessible as Charles It's was in the 1660s—so the gamb- ling, the whoring, the drinking, the general air of fecklessness and extravagance was common gossip. And this rightly worried Pepys. He had seen Charles 1 executed. He remembered all too well during the humilia- tions of Charles Ifs reign (the Dutch in the Medway : the sycophancy towards France) the pride that Englishmen had felt in Oliver's success, and fears of a renewed civil war thread the pages of his journal. In this, as in so much else, Pepys conveys the feeling of his age to perfection.

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So public and private are wonderfully intertwined. In the midst of domestic detail—a lip-smacking appreciation of a dish of udders—in strolls, as it were, Charles it and the great people and events of Pepys's day : the significant and the trivial, all viewed with the delight, the curiosity, the wonder of a child.

And so, if one has patience with the first hundred pages, one enters through Pepys's diary into a world which at first deceives us, because Pepys himself, in his interests, in his tastes, in his personal and social ambitions, seems so like ourselves, but the realisation quickly comes that in fact he lived in a Lon- don and in an age totally different from our own—odder, more primitive, and far, far removed from the city life that we know. Once realised, this gives a fascination, a depth of interest, that no other diary of the time possesses. Add to this that Pepys himself was a natural writer of the highest clas, and it is easy to appreciate that this is, perhaps, the greatest diary of all time. Robert Latham and William Matthews have edited the complete diary with the high scholarship that it deserves: a memorial fit for our greatest diarist.