The Confessions of Samuel Pepys by Guy de la Bédoyère review – sex and the city

The Guardian

a day ago

Samuel Pepys's diary, which covers 1660 to 1669, is regarded as one of the great classic texts in the English language. Words spill out of Pepys – 1.25m of them – as he bustles around London, building a successful career as a naval administrator while navigating the double trauma of the plague and the Great Fire of London. Historians have long gone to the diary for details of middle-class life during the mid‑17th century: the seamy streets, the watermen, the taverns and, as Pepys moves up the greasy pole, the court and the king. Best of all is his eye for the picturesque detail: the way, for instance, on the morning of 4 September 1666, as fire licks around his house, Pepys buries a choice parmesan cheese in the garden with the intention of keeping it safe.
Not all of the diary is in English, though. Quite a lot of it is in French (or rather Franglais), Latin, Spanish and a curious mashup of all three. Pepys increasingly resorted to this home-brewed polyglot whenever the subject of sex came up, which was often. Indeed, sex – chasing it, having it, worrying about getting it again – dominated Pepys's waking life and haunted his dreams, many of them nightmares. Putting these anguished passages in a garbled form not only lessened the chance of servants snooping, but also served to protect him from his own abiding sense of shame. As an extra layer of concealment, Pepys wrote 'my Journall' using tachygraphy, an early form of shorthand.
Pepys's diaries were published in bowdlerised form in the 19th century, and it was not until the 1970s that they became available in 11 unexpurgated volumes. Even then, explains Guy de la Bédoyère, there were many transcription errors and, crucially, no attempt was made to translate the coded passages into English. Historians knew about them, of course, not least because all you needed was a bit of classroom French and Latin to work out their meaning. On 25 March 1668, Pepys records that he has given 'Mrs Daniels' eight pairs of gloves 'for tocar my prick con her hand', which is hardly likely to keep anyone guessing for very long.
All the same, it has been easy to lose sight of the sexual thread of Pepys's diary amid all the chatter about navy ships and expensive cheese. Which is why, for the first time, De la Bédoyère has gone back to the original manuscript and translated all of Pepys's coded entries, publishing them end-to-end with only a minimum of contextual information. The result is an extraordinarily detailed snapshot of life seen through the eyes of a man for whom no day was complete unless he had managed to fondle at least one woman's 'mameles' (breasts) on his way to or from work.
In the past, people have blamed Pepys's bad behaviour on the Restoration. These were the years when the dour pieties of Oliver Cromwell had been replaced by Charles II's permissive libertarianism. But there is much more – and much worse – to the occluded parts of Pepys's diary than mere bawdiness. On 3 February 1664, for example, he is travelling in a carriage down Ludgate Hill when he witnesses three men raping a woman and wishes he could join in. On 1 December 1660, he beats his maid Jane savagely with a broom, though it is clear that he is eyeing her up for a future assignation. He often uses the words 'towsing' and 'tumbling' to describe what he is doing with women which sounds jolly and bucolic until De la Bédoyère explains that these terms are euphemisms for violence.
The only occasion on which Pepys might hold back was if he knew a woman was single, which would make any pregnancy impossible to explain away. (It was a mercy that he didn't realise that an earlier operation for a bladder stone had probably left him sterile.) For that reason, he badgered any girl he wanted to sleep with regularly to get married, so he could carry on regardless. As news of his behaviour got around, so others would try to exploit it. On 11 August 1665, an old waterman called Delkes presented Pepys with his daughter-in-law, who was willing to sleep with him in return for a guarantee that her husband would not be pressed into naval service.
And then there was his marriage. Pepys had wed Elizabeth when she was just 14. He was proud of her beauty, congratulating himself on how much prettier she was than the many grand ladies at court whom he encountered on his way to becoming secretary to the navy. Everything else about her frustrated him. He grumbled about her untidiness, extravagance, moodiness and the fact that her heavy periods and a recurrent labial abscess meant that she often wasn't available for sex. Most of all, he resented the way that she had taken to hiring plain maidservants in the hope that he would leave them alone (it didn't work). Inevitably he took out his frustrations with his fists: on 19 December 1664 he gave Elizabeth such a black eye that she was unable to go to church on Christmas Day for fear of what the neighbours would think.
While Pepys's dark side has long been known, it is something else to be confronted with the evidence laid out quite so starkly. The man who emerges from De la Bédoyère's meticulous filleting is no Restoration roustabout but a chilling embodiment of male entitlement. This newly explicit view of Pepys does not negate the continuing value of his diary – which remains a magnificent historical resource – but from now on it will be impossible to go to it in a state of innocence, let alone denial.
Sign up to Bookmarks
Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you
after newsletter promotion
The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations by Guy de la Bédoyère is published by Abacus (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.