The diary of Samuel Pepys

The diary by which Pepys is chiefly known was kept between his 27th and 36th years. Written in Thomas Shelton’s system of shorthand, or tachygraphy, with the names in longhand, it extends to 1,250,000 words, filling six quarto volumes in the Pepys Library. It is far more than an ordinary record of its writer’s thoughts and actions; it is a supreme work of art, revealing on every page the capacity for selecting the small, as well as the large, essential that conveys the sense of life; and it is probably, after the Bible and James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, the best bedside book in the English language. One can open it on any page and lose oneself in the life of Charles II’s London, and of this vigorous, curious, hardworking, pleasure-loving man. Pepys wanted to find out about everything because he found everything interesting. He never seemed to have a dull moment; he could not, indeed, understand dullness. One of the more comical entries in his diary refers to a country cousin, named Stankes, who came to stay with him in London. Pepys had been looking forward to showing him the sights of the town—

But Lord! what a stir Stankes makes, with his being crowded in the streets, and wearied in walking in London, and would not be wooed by my wife and Ashwell to go to a play, nor to White Hall, or to see the lions, though he was carried in a coach. I never could have thought there had been upon earth a man so little curious in the world as he is.

Pepys possessed the journalist’s gift of summing up a scene or person in a few brilliant, arresting words. He makes us see what he sees in a flash: his Aunt James, “a poor, religious, well-meaning, good soul, talking of nothing but God Almighty, and that with so much innocence that mightily pleased me”; and his sister Pall, “a pretty, good-bodied woman and not over thick, as I thought she would have been, but full of freckles and not handsome in the face.” He could describe with wonderful vividness a great scene: as, for example, the day General George Monck’s soldiers unexpectedly marched into a sullen City and proclaimed there should be a free Parliament—“And Bow bells and all the bells in all the churches as we went home were a-ringing; it was past imagination, both the greatness and suddenness of it.” He described, too, the Restoration and coronation; the horrors of the Plague; and the Fire of London, writing down his account—so strong was the artist in him—even as his home and its treasures were being threatened with destruction:

We saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruine.

Above all, Pepys possessed the artist’s gift of being able to select the vital moment. He makes his readers share the very life of his time: “I staid up till the bell-man came by with his bell just under my window as I was writing of this very line, and cried, ‘Past one of the clock, and a cold, and frosty, windy morning.’ ” He tells of the guttering candle, “which makes me write thus slobberingly”; of his new watch—“But Lord! to see how much of my old folly and childishness hangs on me still that I cannot forebear carrying my watch in my hand in the coach all the afternoon and seeing what o’clock it is one hundred times”; of being awakened in the night—

About 3 o’clock this morning I waked with the noise of the rain, having never in my life heard a more violent shower; and then the cat was locked in the chamber and kept a great mewing and leapt upon the bed, which made me I could not sleep a great while.

Pepys excluded nothing from his journal that seemed to him essential, however much it told against himself. He not only recorded his major infidelities and weaknesses; he put down all those little meannesses of thought and conduct of which all men are guilty but few admit, even to themselves. He is frank about his vanity—as, for example, in his account of the day he went to church for the first time in his new periwig: “I found that my coming in a perriwig did not prove so strange to the world as I was afeared it would, for I thought that all the church would presently have cast their eyes upon me, but I found no such thing”; about his meannesses over money, his jealousies, and his injustices—“Home and found all well, only myself somewhat vexed at my wife’s neglect in leaving her scarfe, waistcoat and night dressings in the coach today; though I confess she did give them to me to look after.” For he possessed in a unique degree the quality of complete honesty. His diary paints not only his own infirmities but the frailty of all mankind.

After the successful publication of John Evelyn’s diary in 1818, Pepys’s diary was transcribed—with great accuracy—by John Smith, later rector of Baldock, Hertfordshire.