(1633-1703) diarist
Samuel Pepys (pronounced “peeps”) was born in 1633, the fifth of 11 children of a tailor, John Pepys. He attended Magdalene College, Cambridge, on a scholarship, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1654. He secured a job as secretary to his relative Sir Edward Montagu, and the following year married 15-year-old Elizabeth St. Michel.
In 1660 Pepys began his Diary. He wrote in code, solely for his own enjoyment. He begins with the adventure of going to sea with his employer, Sir Edward Montagu, to escort Charles Stuart from
Holland for his coronation as King Charles II (since the execution of Charles I in 1649 England had been without a king). On the return journey from Holland, Pepys heard the king’s stories of his flight from the army that destroyed his father:
It made me ready to weep to hear the stories that he told…. As his traveling four days and three nights on foot, every step up to the knees in dirt… with nothing but a green coat and a pair of country breeches on and a pair of country shoes, that made him so sore all over his feet that he could scarce stir.
Soon after the royal party’s arrival in London, Pepys was appointed to an administrative job in the Royal Navy Dockyards; he served the navy for the rest of his working life.
In 1661 Pepys observed the coronation of Charles II. Pepys’s description of this day is so detailed that he even includes the memory of desperately needing an outhouse and of sneaking into the banquet hall to get a bit of food from the tables. Pepys admits to drinking too much that night, and vomiting as a result.
Pepys’s journal is full of accounts of parties where the wine flows freely. He is something of a womanizer, and writes of his adventures with women quite freely, yet his affairs do not alienate the reader; rather, they allow Pepys to be seen as a believable, real person. His tender regard for his wife is convincing too, as well as his pride in her beauty.
Pepys loved the theater, and the diary is an important source of information about the theatrical scene in Restoration London. He was intellectually curious and was friends with many of the important thinkers of his day, whose conversations can be reconstructed through his records.
His career was another focus of the Diary. Pepys advanced through the ranks of the navy by being a sharp observer, both of the people he worked with and what needed to be done. Pepys’s meticulous journal-keeping may have given him skills that helped him do well professionally.
In 1665 he recorded London’s terrible epidemic of bubonic plague:
This day, much against my Will, I did in Drury-lane, see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “Lord have mercy upon us” writ there; which was a sad sight to me…. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell and to chaw, which took away the apprehension.
One-fourth of the population of London was killed by the plague.
The next year another tragedy struck London: the Great Fire. Strong easterly winds and a summer drought culminated in the worst destruction the city would see until the Blitz of 1940. Pepys’s birthplace was destroyed, but his home and office were spared. He admits he was “much terrified in the nights . . ., with dreams of fire and falling down of houses.”
In 1669 Pepys discontinued his diary because he feared that his eyesight was failing. His wife died of a fever the next year, but Pepys lived for another 34 years, achieving considerable rank in the navy and winning an enviable sociable position. In 1684 he was made president of the Royal Society. His friend John Evelyn described him as “universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skilled in music, a very great treasurer of learned men.”
Pepys bequeathed his diary to his alma mater, Magdalene College, but it was not deciphered until the 19th century; an edited version was published in 1825, and the full diary of almost 4,000 pages in 1893. One of Pepys’s most famous admirers was the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94), who notes Pepys’s sincerity:
He was not unconscious of his errors—far from it; he was often startled into shame, often reformed, often made and broke his vows of change. But whether he did ill or well, he was still his own unequalled self; still that entrancing ego of whom alone he cared to write____He shows himself throughout a sterling humanist. Indeed, he who loves himself, not in idle vanity, but with a plenitude of knowledge, is the best equipped of all to love his neighbors.
Works by Samuel Pepys
Particular Friends: The Correspondence ofSamuel Pepys and John Evelyn. Edited by Guy de la Bedoyere. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, 1997.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys (Abridged). Edited by Richard Le Gallienne. New York: Random House, 2003.
Works about Samuel Pepys
Coote, Stephen. Samuel Pepys. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Taylor, Ivan E. Samuel Pepys. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
Tomalin, Claire. Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self. New York: Vintage, 2003.
