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New Statesman
2 days ago
- General
- New Statesman
Samuel Pepy's diaries of a somebody
The creation of a national icon in this country is a many-faceted business. Sometimes it happens rapidly, in the midst of crisis – Nelson, Churchill. Sometimes it is a matter of steady, incremental reputation, a figure whose stature has grown unstoppably and is acknowledged even outside national boundaries – Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens. And sometimes it happens almost arbitrarily, when a person is recognised as embodying something that is imagined to be quintessentially British or (more usually) English. Some historical figure captures the imagination; their actual achievement may be small or great, but they somehow encourage the feeling that only here would a character like this emerge – Dr Johnson, perhaps, or Florence Nightingale; the historical equivalent of a national treasure. It is hard to deny Samuel Pepys's role as a minor national icon of this sort. A professional civil servant, holding a highly responsible position in the Admiralty under Charles II and his successor James II, he was also an enthusiastic amateur musician and a passionate collector of books, whose wonderfully eclectic library remains a jewel in the crown of his old Cambridge college, Magdalene. He might have been surprised to be remembered less for his labours as a dedicated and highly effective naval administrator than for the diary he kept between 1660 and 1669; but it is undoubtedly the latter that has established his role as 'treasurable'. What most readers know or think they know about his diary is its charm – quaint period phrases ('Up betimes', 'And so to bed', and all the rest), sparkling vignettes of 'real life' in the 17th century, what it felt like to witness the events of the textbooks as they happened – not least the Great Fire of London. Of course, there is also the rather problematic brand of charm conveyed for a certain kind of male reader in Pepys's knowing salaciousness, the rueful chuckles of a not very successful sensualist and henpecked husband. Kate Loveman's excellent book does not set out to rob Pepys of his charm – but she gives us a range of tools for interrogating it (and our responses to it), so that we can offset the effects of a long history of selective and rather superficial reading. As she shows, some of the most familiar phrases owe their frequency in the diary to the fact that they are very easy to write in the distinctive form of shorthand he employs. But mention of this is a reminder that until 1825 virtually no one had read the diary. Pepys was remembered gratefully at Magdalene; his reputation in the Navy had survived. But what made the difference, and set Pepys on the road to being an icon, was a confluence of factors in the early-19th century: a new interest in first-hand historical testimony, a desire on the part of both the college and the Pepys family to do better justice to his memory in this new climate of antiquarian enthusiasm, and the crucial decision by the Grenville family (the then master of Magdalene was a close relative) to pay for a full transcription of the diary by an expert who identified Pepys's 'code' as based on a pattern in a manual that Pepys had thoughtfully included in his library. The history of subsequent editions in the 19th century is complicated, though Loveman lays it out with great clarity. Initially the Grenville and Neville families retained close control of the publication process, with Richard Neville, Lord Braybrooke, overseeing the first published selection of material. It found a receptive audience, and demand grew for further extracts – especially as rumours began to circulate that what had been omitted in the published version included some material that might not sit too well with the editor's portrait of Pepys as a model of dutiful virtue. Eventually, Henry Wheatley in the 1890s produced nine volumes of selections, which would serve as the received text for many decades; it was an edition that provided far more space to display Pepys as a comic character, including much of the rather Pooterish material about minor domestic troubles and assorted purchases – but not the sexually explicit passages. Loveman stresses that the text from which all 19th-century editors worked was the transcript made by John Smith for the first edition; no one revisited the encoded text until the next major round of interest in the later 20th century. Robert Latham, of Magdalene, and William Matthews, an expert in shorthand, produced the definitive modern edition between 1970 and 1983, working from the originals, correcting earlier errors or amendments and restoring omissions. They decided, with the college's approval (supported, in a letter of rather acerbic common sense, by CS Lewis) that the censorship of Pepys's 'explicit' passages was indefensible; and so at last readers were able to make their own judgements on the author's morality. Loveman persuasively shows that the Pepys of popular imagination between 1825 and 1970 was, to a significant extent, a creation of his editors, who in turn depended not on the primary text but on a transcription that they at times felt free to tinker with in the cause of clarity or decency (as in Pepys's account of his almighty hangover the morning after Charles II's coronation). This is the Pepys of popular imagination, extracted in assorted books, summarised in schoolbooks, dramatised on stage (JB Fagan's And So to Bed of 1926 is still occasionally revived as a musical) and, later, television screens. And Loveman has a brilliant chapter on the popularity of Pepys, and of pastiche Pepysian diaries in the press, during the Second World War. The picture of the Ordinary Englishman – going about his business in times of upheaval and crisis, often absurd but essentially decent, brave and amusingly stoical – rang a good many bells. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The publication of the full text did not by any means overturn this picture, but it lit a slow fuse. It is harder now to see Pepys's sexual adventures as a bit of high-spirited naughtiness. He was clearly a pest and at worst a predator. Loveman reminds us that the female servants who had to put up with his groping were what we should unequivocally call children, just on the edge of puberty. Some of his accounts of escapades with adult women amount to admissions of rape, and his willingness to grant professional favours in return for the sexual compliance of other men's spouses is a nasty strand in several bits of the text. Loveman does not demonise Pepys, but she asks us to notice what icon construction can encourage us not to see, and to remember not only a bright, lively, sometimes slightly absurd social companion, but a series of young women, bewildered, frightened, resentful, for whom their employer's 'kindness' – Pepys's own term for his unwanted attentions – was not a matter for jocularity. Predictably, Pepys's involvement with enslaved persons also comes into focus here. The number of public figures and national institutions not in some way complicit in enslavement in the late-17th century is vanishingly small. And while Pepys was not a major profiteer from the trade, the evidence makes it plain that in the 1670s he had at least one enslaved young man in his service. Loveman discusses with care and insight what Pepys has to say about such persons, noting how the 'ownership' of an enslaved person had become a very clear marker of social status. The presence in a household even of a non-enslaved black person made an unmissable statement, and Pepys was obviously very happy to make use on occasion of other people's black servants, enslaved or otherwise, to reinforce his social capital. Nothing suggests that he had any qualms at all about the trade and its effects. Loveman is not inviting us to judge and cancel, but rather to follow through consistently what she sees as explaining the popularity of the diary's earliest editions. People were beginning to do history differently in the 1820s; they were more interested than hitherto in what it had felt like to be alive in another age. And Pepys himself, in leaving his diary alongside his other literary bequests, seems, so Loveman suggests, to have anticipated this. He records things, he tells us, as evidence of what people were talking about, enjoying, or fearing. The abiding significance of what he writes turns out to be just that. Reading the diary with the challenges of Loveman's closing chapter in mind is to be forced to imagine a world and a sensibility in which a moderately generous and easy-going man could instinctively have seen the slave trade first in terms of its contribution to luxury and assured social leverage – a world in which sexual consent could be assumed or ignored by a partner of higher status. Pepys, in other words, succeeds brilliantly in doing just what he says he is doing, offering a sense of 'what it's like', the irony being that the success is in proportion to the unselfconsciousness of what is written. And we also learn what his editors were unselfconsciously assuming about what was needed in a reassuring national icon – and what they either failed to see as flaws, or did see and persuaded themselves to pretend they hadn't. The problem with the past is not that it is a foreign country. It is that it is both strange and all too recognisable. A book like Pepys's diary is significant not because it provides a consoling idyll about salt-of-the-earth Ordinary Englishmen getting on with things in much the same way as the ordinary English Reader of today; nor because it uncovers a vicious pre-modern barbarism about women and racial others that we have learned to reject. It is because it reminds us that we look at the past – of a culture or an individual – and really recognise and warm to some things, and then encounter an absolute moral brick wall with others. Pepys's geniality and gossipy vigour, the evident liking and indulgence of his contemporaries, do not remove the shadows. Shadows are what happens in a three-dimensional world – not everything is clear and continuous. Theologically speaking, icons are meant not to be three-dimensional (they have to open up to a depth that is not human). Non-theological icons are a problem because of what they encourage us not to see in terms of shadows, literal and metaphorical. If we shrink the three-dimensionality of the past for the sake of an iconic smoothness, we may shrink the present too. We are still not out of the shadows. That is why we both recognise – even like – Pepys and also worry about his blind spots. We too may still be in the process of moral maturing. If one were to read an unselfconscious diary of 2025 a century from now, it would be every bit as uncomfortable (if we are still reading by that point). Kate Loveman has written a book that knows exactly what it is about. It is written with complete clarity, it is organised intelligibly, and it keeps us turning the pages with its skilful and thorough storytelling, while leaving us with some searching unfinished business. At Magdalene College, we still drink to the Immortal Memory of Samuel Pepys once a year. I don't think Loveman would want this to stop, but she would want us to remember a rather less two-dimensional figure than we have sometimes become used to. The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary Kate Loveman Cambridge University Press, 254pp, £22 Related
The Mainichi
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Mainichi
Edging Toward Japan: Samuel Pepys and Sei Shonagon - the ultimate love match
A few weeks ago, I attended a rather unusual concert in Cambridge, England. All the pieces of music dated from the time of the famous English diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). My knowledge of the pop songs of the 1660s is not what it should be and I didn't have a particular strong conception of what music from this period actually sounds like. We are talking here about going back to a time before virtually all the famous classical composers -- before Beethoven, before Mozart, even before Bach. As it turns out however, the music of the 17th century gets on perfectly well without all of them and is teeming with beautiful pieces and charming songs played to the accompaniment of the strangest of instruments. We started off with some songs played on the spinet, a kind of early harpsichord, and then the musicians produced an extraordinary instrument called a "theorbo," which is an extravagantly oversized lute. Pepys himself loved music and probably owned the very spinet on which the songs were performed, and ordered the making of a "theorbo" which he proudly declared in his diary to be as good as any in the country. When not writing his diary or helping to run the British admiralty (his day job), he even composed songs himself. Of late, I've found myself getting more and more interested in Pepys and his world. Years ago, I listened to actor and director Kenneth Branagh reading extracts from the voluminous diary (which covers the years 1660-69) and recently I've been reading Claire Tomalin's prize-winning biography of Pepys, "The Unequalled Self". What is fascinating about Pepys is partly the turbulence of the time he lived -- the nine years of the diary cover the chaos and anxiety in England following the death of Oliver Cromwell, the initially jubilant restoration of Charles II, the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the war against the Dutch amongst many other happenings. But amidst all these mammoth events, there is the even greater fascination of being immersed in the domestic minutiae of Pepys' daily life, sharing with him his passions and disappointments, his surreptitious affairs and ambitions, his bowel movements and flatulations, his moments of anger, grief and joy. Tomalin recounts that Pepys was an astoundingly good diarist because for him every day of life was an adventure in human consciousness, filled with the sheer thrill of being alive, of being able to sense and enjoy everything the world had to offer -- its food, its music, its voluptuous women, its poetry, its conversation and company, its seasons and heats and frosts, and, not least, his cherished books. All these things were part of his all-consuming embrace of life that makes him a thrilling literary companion. These days, if I feel like disappearing for a while into an alternate universe, then I might turn to Pepys and transport myself back into the 1660s. Yet Pepys is not the only explorer of consciousness that I have turned to of late. On recent trips to Japan I wanted to introduce my two daughters to a writer who might capture their interest and so began listening with them to a reading (in English) of "The Pillow Book" by Sei Shonagon. As we had our breakfasts every morning in Japan, we would be transported to Sei Shonagon's world of the Imperial Court in Kyoto around the year 1,000 where Shonagon was a courtier. We would enjoy her sometimes caustic and always beautiful observations on the men and women around her, the changing colours of the mountains, the preferred etiquette of her lovers, the seasonal colours of the mountains, the sound of the flute in the night air... I must admit that I am a fairly recent covert to Sei Shonagon. In my younger days, I had a far greater appreciation of Shonagon's contemporary and rival, Murasaki Shikibu, the author of the monumental "The Tale of Genji". Shonagon seemed to me much the inferior of the two. But rediscovering "The Pillow Book" with my daughters, I now see that Shonagon is a much more fascinating, individualistic personality than I first appreciated. She is never less than her own woman and, like Pepys, is an admirably honest and perceptive contemplator of the sights, sounds and flavours of her own existence. Unlike Pepys, she was not keeping a day-to-day journal, but rather a compendium of observations on diverse subjects that cumulatively add up to an almost cubist portrait of a world now vastly lost in time. Sitting in an autumnal chapel in Cambridge, England, listening to the music of the 1660s, I found myself strangely thinking about Sei Shonagon and about how fundamentally similar she and Samuel Pepys were. In their professional lives, they were robust and worldly, but in their private lives they were seekers of (sometimes illicit) joy and things of beauty, candid in their assessments of themselves and others. I was thinking that this strange linkage of Samuel Pepys and Sei Shonagon was a whimsical idea all my own, when my daughter surprised me at breakfast the next morning by suddenly saying, "Last night I dreamt of Sei Shonagon and Samuel Pepys..." When I responded that I had been thinking about them too and that they would have made a great couple, my 14-year-old daughter recoiled in distaste at the idea. "Ugh!" And yet I'm still thinking it could have been a match made in heaven, or in hell, to put two such quick-witted, intelligent and highly opinionated minds together. We live in a world in which, to a tiresome degree, people are compartmentalised according to their nation, their race, their gender, their sexuality. Yet sometimes, people from vastly different cultures at completely different historical periods can appear profoundly similar in their thrilling engagement with the sheer mystery of being alive. We make a mistake, I suspect, when we keep Sei Shonagon cloistered in a room called "Heian Court Literature", alongside (to her probably insufferable) companions like Murasaki Shikibu. Pepys himself, I suspect, would have found boundless joy in the colours and beauty of the Heian court, stealing through the nighttime garden of a Heian lady, intent on begging entrance for a moonlit tryst. While Sei Shonagon longs, I think, to burst into a wider world, to explore Pepys' library of Western books, to smoke a pipe and drink some wine, and sing songs of love while Samuel flirtatiously accompanies her on the theorbo. @DamianFlanagan (This is Part 59 of a series) In this column, Damian Flanagan, a researcher in Japanese literature, ponders about Japanese culture as he travels back and forth between Japan and Britain. Profile: Damian Flanagan is an author and critic born in Britain in 1969. He studied in Tokyo and Kyoto between 1989 and 1990 while a student at Cambridge University. He was engaged in research activities at Kobe University from 1993 through 1999. After taking the master's and doctoral courses in Japanese literature, he earned a Ph.D. in 2000. He is now based in both Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, and Manchester. He is the author of "Natsume Soseki: Superstar of World Literature" (Sekai Bungaku no superstar Natsume Soseki).
BBC News
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The elegance and eccentricity of Easter bonnets on parade
Traditionally, Easter was a time to wear new clothes. After the self-denial of Lent, it was a chance to celebrate in style - and represented the emergence of a new, reborn, Pepys wrote in his diary in 1662 about getting new clothes for his wife "against Easter" and Shakespeare's Mercutio asks, "Didst though not fall out with a tailor for wearing his new doublet before Easter?"It was considered lucky to first wear new clothes to church, and many people would proudly display their new garments by taking a promenade afterwards through town - hence the Easter if a new outfit is beyond the budget - a newly trimmed hat would this was a sentiment indulged by the then London Tourist Board which obligingly ran annual Easter Bonnet take a look.
