The Diary of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys

Mrs Pepys certainly comes off better here than in earlier Pepys biographies. If we don't have first-hand accounts of the sexual activities of young men-about-town in the 1650s, here's a book of advice on The Arts of Wooing and Complementing, written by Milton's nephew in 1658.Īs we would expect from the author of The Invisible Woman, she brings some sympathetic guess-work to the voiceless heroines of Pepys's story: his patron's courageous, charming and stoical wife, Jemima Montagu, Lady Sandwich his much-despised sister 'Pall' the 'intelligent, merry and discreet' servant-girl Jane the disastrously attractive, and exploited, Deb Willet, who caused all the havoc in the Pepys marriage the obscure figure of Pepys's companion Mary Skinner, whom Tomalin portrays as an artist and an independent woman and, above all, Elizabeth Pepys, the beautiful, penniless French girl whom Pepys married when she was nearly 15.Įlizabeth's flirtatiousness, raging temper, ill-health, hedonism ('she liked long mornings in her dressing-gown'), companionability and loneliness, are vividly extrapolated from the Diary. If we don't know how Pepys was brought up, here's a contemporary manual of manners for children from 1577. The other is that outside the Diary - years, she has constantly to resort to guess-work (lots of 'must haves', and 'it may be too much to imagine' and 'it is hard not to think'.) She often has to proceed by ingenious analogies. One is that the Diary provides so much material it is sometimes overpowering. She has faced two almost insuperable difficulties. Tomalin has done a mighty labour of research and made it look light. But it also involves much 'obscurity and guesswork'. This silence is filled by a vast mass of materials: thousands of letters, Pepys's work-papers and trial documents, naval histories (including Pepys's own), Admiralty papers, contemporary diaries and memoirs, and many histories and biographies. The 27-year story that precedes it - of Pepys's family, childhood, education, professional advancement and marriage, in the context of the civil war - and the 34 years that follow it, when the death of his wife and public disgrace were followed by rehabilitation, distinguished years of naval administration, an active retirement after 1688, and a second long relationship, all have to be tracked without the Diary.

But the Diary, which begins on Januand ends (because of Pepys's eye problems) on May 31 1669, covers only nine years out of a 70-year life.

The unpublished 19th-century transcription ran to 54 volumes the definitive edition by Latham and Matthews is in 11 volumes. His famously candid, minute and inexhaustibly vigorous account of every detail of his daily life filled six leather-bound books written in shorthand. Pepys is remembered, of course, for his Diary, and that alone might be enough to make a biographer feel redundant.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys