Personal life
The diary gives a detailed account of Pepys' personal life.
He liked wine, plays, and the company of other people. He also spent time
evaluating his fortune and his place in the world. He was always curious and
often acted on that curiosity, as he acted upon almost all his impulses.
Periodically, he would resolve to devote more time to hard work instead of
leisure. For example, in his entry for New Year's Eve, 1661, he writes: "I
have newly taken a solemn oath about abstaining from plays and wine…" The
following months reveal his lapses to the reader; by 17 February, it is
recorded, "Here I drank wine upon necessity, being ill for the want of
it."
Pepys was one of the most important civil servants of his
age, and was also a widely cultivated man, taking an interest in books, music,
the theatre and science. He was passionately interested in music; he composed,
sang, and played for pleasure, and even arranged music lessons for his
servants. He played the lute, viol, violin, flageolet, recorder and spinet to
varying degrees of proficiency. He was
also a keen singer, performing at home, in coffee houses, and even in
Westminster Abbey. He and his wife took
flageolet lessons from master Thomas Greeting.
He also taught his wife to sing and paid for dancing lessons for her
(although these stopped when he became jealous of the dancing master).
He was known to be brutal to his servants, once beating a
servant Jane with a broom until she cried. He kept a boy servant whom he
frequently beat with a cane, a birch rod, a whip or a rope’s end.
Pepys was an investor in the Company of Royal Adventurers
Trading to Africa, which held the monopoly in England on trading along the west
coast of Africa in gold, silver, ivory and slaves.
Sexual relations
Propriety did not prevent him from engaging in a number of
extramarital liaisons with various women that were chronicled in his diary,
often in some detail, and generally using a cocktail of languages (English,
French, Spanish and Latin) when relating the intimate details. The most
dramatic of these encounters was with Deborah Willet, a young woman engaged as
a companion for Elisabeth Pepys. On 25 October 1668, Pepys was surprised by his
wife as he embraced Deb Willet; he writes that his wife "coming up
suddenly, 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...." Following this event, he was
characteristically filled with remorse, but (equally characteristically)
continued to pursue Willet after she had been dismissed from the Pepys
household.[44] Pepys also had a habit of fondling the breasts of his maid Mary
Mercer while she dressed him in the morning.
"Mrs. Knep was the wife of a Smithfield horsedealer,
and the mistress of Pepys"—or at least "she granted him a share of
her favors". Scholars disagree on
the full extent of the Pepys/Knep relationship, but much of later generations'
knowledge of Knep comes from the diary. Pepys first met Knep on 6 December
1665. He described her as "pretty enough, but the most excellent, mad-humored
thing, and sings the noblest that I ever heard in my life." He called her
husband "an ill, melancholy, jealous-looking fellow" and suspected
him of abusing his wife. Knep provided Pepys with backstage access and was a
conduit for theatrical and social gossip. When they wrote notes to each other,
Pepys signed himself "Dapper Dickey", while Knep was "Barbry
Allen" (that popular song was an item in her musical repertory).
Text of the diary
The diary was written in one of the many standard forms of
shorthand used in Pepys' time, in this case called tachygraphy and devised by
Thomas Shelton. It is clear from its content that it was written as a purely
personal record of his life and not for publication, yet there are indications
that Pepys took steps to preserve the bound manuscripts of his diary. He wrote
it out in fair copy from rough notes, and he also had the loose pages bound
into six volumes, catalogued them in his library with all his other books, and
is likely to have suspected that eventually someone would find them
interesting.
Simplified Pepys
family tree
This tree resumes, in a more compact form and with a few
additional details, trees published elsewhere in a box-like form. It is
meant to help the reader of the Diary and also integrates some biographical information’s
found in the same sources.
After the diary
Pepys' health suffered from the long hours that he worked
throughout the period of the diary. Specifically, he believed that his eyesight
had been affected by his work. He
reluctantly concluded in his last entry, dated 31 May 1669, that he should
completely stop writing for the sake of his eyes, and only dictate to his
clerks from then on, which meant that he could no longer keep his diary.
Pepys and his wife took a holiday to France and the Low
Countries in June–October 1669; on their return, Elisabeth fell ill and died on
10 November 1669. Pepys erected a monument to her in the church of St Olave's,
Hart Street, London. Pepys never remarried, but he did have a long-term
housekeeper named Mary Skinner who was assumed by many of his contemporaries to
be his mistress and sometimes referred to as Mrs. Pepys. In his will, he left
her an annuity of £200 and many of his possessions.
Member of Parliament
and Secretary to the Admiralty
In 1672 he became an Elder Brother of Trinity House and
served in this capacity until 1689; he was Master of Trinity House in 1676–1677
and again in 1685–1686. In 1673 he was
promoted to Secretary to the Admiralty Commission and elected MP for Castle
Rising in Norfolk.
In 1673 he was involved with the establishment of the Royal
Mathematical School at Christ's Hospital, which was to train 40 boys annually
in navigation, for the benefit of the Royal Navy and the English Merchant Navy.
In 1675 he was appointed a Governor of Christ's Hospital and for many years he
took a close interest in its affairs. Among his papers are two detailed
memoranda on the administration of the school. In 1699, after the successful
conclusion of a seven-year campaign to get the master of the Mathematical
School replaced by a man who knew more about the sea, he was rewarded for his
service as a Governor by being made a Freeman of the City of London. He also
served as Master (without ever having been a Freeman or Liveryman) of the
Clothworkers' Company (1677-8).
At the beginning of 1679 Pepys was elected MP for Harwich in
Charles II's third parliament which formed part of the Cavalier Parliament. He
was elected along with Sir Anthony Deane, a Harwich alderman and leading naval architect,
to whom Pepys had been patron since 1662. By May of that year, they were under
attack from their political enemies. Pepys resigned as Secretary to the
Admiralty. They were imprisoned in the Tower of London on suspicion of
treasonable correspondence with France, specifically leaking naval
intelligence. The charges are believed to have been fabricated under the
direction of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury. Pepys was accused, among other things, of
being a papist. They were released in July, but proceedings against them were
not dropped until June 1680.
Though he had resigned from the Tangier committee in 1679,
in 1683 he was sent to Tangier to assist Lord Dartmouth with the evacuation and
abandonment of the English colony. After six months' service, he travelled back
through Spain accompanied by the naval engineer Edmund Dummer, returning to
England after a particularly rough passage on 30 March 1684. In June 1684, once more in favour, he was
appointed King's Secretary for the affairs of the Admiralty, a post that he
retained after the death of Charles II (February 1685) and the accession of
James II. The phantom Pepys Island, alleged to be near South Georgia, was named
after him in 1684, having been first "discovered" during his tenure
at the Admiralty.
From 1685 to 1688, he was active not only as Secretary for
the Admiralty, but also as MP for Harwich. He had been elected MP for Sandwich,
but this election was contested and he immediately withdrew to Harwich. When
James fled the country at the end of 1688, Pepys' career also came to an end.
In January 1689, he was defeated in the parliamentary election at Harwich; in
February, one week after the accession of William III and Mary II, he resigned
his secretaryship.
Royal Society
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1665 and
served as its President from 1 December 1684 to 30 November 1686. Isaac
Newton's Principia Mathematica was published during this period, and its title
page bears Pepys' name. There is a probability problem called the
"Newton–Pepys problem" that arose out of correspondence between
Newton and Pepys about whether one is more likely to roll at least one six with
six dice or at least two sixes with twelve dice. It has only recently been noted that the
gambling advice which Newton gave Pepys was correct, while the logical argument
with which Newton accompanied it was unsound.
Retirement and death
He was imprisoned on suspicion of Jacobitism from May to
July 1689 and again in June 1690, but no charges were ever successfully brought
against him. After his release, he retired from public life at age 57. He moved
out of London ten years later (1701) to a house in Clapham owned by his friend
William Hewer, who had begun his career working for Pepys in the admiralty. Clapham was in the country at the time; it is
now part of inner London.
Pepys lived there until his death on 26 May 1703. He had no
children and bequeathed his estate to his unmarried nephew John Jackson. Pepys
had disinherited his nephew Samuel Jackson for marrying contrary to his wishes.
When John Jackson died in 1724, Pepys' estate reverted to Anne, daughter of
Archdeacon Samuel Edgeley, niece of Will Hewer and sister of Hewer Edgeley,
nephew and godson of Pepys' old Admiralty employee and friend Will Hewer. Hewer
was also childless and left his immense estate to his nephew Hewer Edgeley (consisting
mostly of the Clapham property, as well as lands in Clapham, London,
Westminster and Norfolk) on condition that the nephew (and godson) would adopt
the surname Hewer. So Will Hewer's heir became Hewer Edgeley-Hewer, and he
adopted the old Will Hewer home in Clapham as his residence. That is how the
Edgeley family acquired the estates of Samuel Pepys and Will Hewer, Sister Anne
inheriting Pepys' estate, and brother Hewer inheriting that of Will Hewer. On
the death of Hewer Edgeley-Hewer in 1728, the old Hewer estate went to
Edgeley-Hewer's widow Elizabeth, who left the 432-acre (175-hectare) estate to
Levett Blackborne, the son of Abraham Blackborne, merchant of Clapham, and
other family members, who later sold it off in lots. Lincoln's Inn barrister
Levett Blackborne also later acted as attorney in legal scuffles for the heirs
who had inherited the Pepys estate.
Pepys Library
Pepys was a lifelong bibliophile and carefully nurtured his
large collection of books, manuscripts, and prints. At his death, there were
more than 3,000 volumes, including the diary, all carefully catalogued and
indexed; they form one of the most important surviving 17th-century private
libraries. The most important items in the Library are the six original bound
manuscripts of Pepys' diary, but there are other remarkable holdings,
including:
· Incunabula by William Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde,
and Richard Pynson
·
Sixty medieval manuscripts
·
The Pepys Manuscript, a late-15th-century
English choirbook
·
Naval records such as two of the 'Anthony
Rolls', illustrating the Royal Navy's ships c. 1546, including the Mary Rose
· Sir
Francis Drake's personal almanac
·
Over 1,800 printed ballads, one of the finest collections
in existence.
Pepys made detailed provisions in his will for the
preservation of his book collection. His nephew and heir John Jackson died in
1723, when it was transferred intact to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where it
can be seen in the Pepys Building. The bequest included all the original
bookcases and his elaborate instructions that placement of the books "be
strictly reviewed and, where found requiring it, more nicely adjusted".
Publication history
of the diary
Motivated by the publication of Evelyn's Diary, Lord Granville
deciphered a few pages. John Smith
(later the Rector of St Mary the Virgin in Baldock) was then engaged to
transcribe the diaries into plain English. He labored at this task for three
years, from 1819 to 1822, unaware until nearly finished that a key to the
shorthand system was stored in Pepys' library a few shelves above the diary
volumes. Others had apparently succeeded in reading the diary earlier, perhaps
knowing about the key, because a work of 1812 quotes from a passage of it. Smith's transcription, which is also kept in
the Pepys Library, was the basis for the first published edition of the diary,
edited by Lord Braybrooke, released in two volumes in 1825.
A second transcription, done with the benefit of the key,
but often less accurately, was completed in 1875 by Mynors Bright and published
in 1875–1879. This added about a third
to the previously published text, but still left only about 80% of the diary in
print. Henry B. Wheatley, drawing on
both his predecessors, produced a new edition in 1893–1899, revised in 1926,
with extensive notes and an index.
All of these editions omitted passages (chiefly about Pepys'
sexual adventures) which the editors thought too obscene ever to be printed.
Wheatley, in the preface to his edition noted, "a few passages which
cannot possibly be printed. It may be thought by some that these omissions are
due to an unnecessary squeamishness, but it is not really so, and readers are
therefore asked to have faith in the judgement of the editor."
The complete, unexpurgated, and definitive edition, edited
and transcribed by Robert Latham and William Matthews, was published by Bell
& Hyman, London, and the University of California Press, Berkeley, in nine
volumes, along with separate Companion and Index volumes, over the years
1970–1983. Various single-volume abridgements of this text are also available.
The Introduction in volume I provides a scholarly but
readable account of "The Diarist", "The Diary" ("Th
e
Manuscript", "The Shorthand", and "The Text"),
"History of Previous Editions", "The Diary as Literature",
and "The Diary as History". The Companion provides a long series of
detailed essays about Pepys and his world.
The first unabridged recording of the diary as an audiobook
was published in 2015 by Naxos AudioBooks.
On 1 January 2003 Phil Gyford started a weblog, pepysdiary.com
that serialized the diary one day each evening together with annotations from
public and experts alike. In December 2003 the blog won the best specialist
blog award in The Guardian's Best of British Blogs.
Adaptations
In 1958 the BBC produced a serial called Samuel Pepys!, in
which Peter Sallis played the title role. In 2003 a television film The Private
Life of Samuel Pepys aired on BBC2. Steve Coogan played Pepys. The 2004 film
Stage Beauty concerns London theatre in the 17th century and is based on
Jeffrey Hatcher's play Compleat Female Stage Beauty, which in turn was inspired
by a reference in Pepys' diary to the actor Edward Kynaston, who played female
roles in the days when women were forbidden to appear on stage. Pepys is a
character in the film and is portrayed as an ardent devotee of the theatre.
Hugh Bonneville plays Pepys. Daniel Mays portrays Pepys in The Great Fire, a
2014 BBC television miniseries. Pepys has also been portrayed in various other
film and television productions, played by diverse actors including Mervyn
Johns, Michael Palin, Michael Graham Cox and Philip Jackson.
BBC Radio 4 has broadcast serialized radio dramatizations of
the diary. In the 1990s it was performed as a Classic Serial starring Bill
Nighy, and in the 2010s it was serialized as part of the Woman's Hour radio
magazine programme. One audiobook
edition of Pepys' diary selections is narrated by Kenneth Branagh. A
fictionalized Pepys narrates the second chapter of Harry Turtledove's science
fiction novel A Different Flesh (serialized 1985–1988, book form 1988). This
chapter is entitled "And So to Bed" and written in the form of
entries from the Pepys diary. The entries detail Pepys' encounter with American
Homo erectus specimens (imported to London as beasts of burden) and his
formation of the "transformational theory of life", thus causing
evolutionary theory to gain a foothold in scientific thought in the 17th
century rather than the 19th. Deborah Swift's 2017 novel Pleasing Mr Pepys is
described as a "re-imagining of the events in Samuel Pepys's Diary".
Biographical studies
Several detailed studies of Pepys' life are available.
Arthur Bryant published his three-volume study in 1933–1938, long before the
definitive edition of the diary, but, thanks to Bryant's lively style, it is
still of interest. In 1974 Richard Ollard produced a new biography that drew on
Latham's and Matthew's work on the text, benefitting from the author's deep
knowledge of Restoration politics. Other biographies include: Samuel Pepys: A
Life, by Stephen Coote (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000) and, Samuel Pepys
and His World, by Geoffrey Trease (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972).
The most recent general study is by Claire Tomalin, which
won the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year award, the judges calling it a
"rich, thoughtful and deeply satisfying" account that unearths
"a wealth of material about the uncharted life of Samuel Pepys".
No comments:
Post a Comment