"The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary" by Kate Loveman

It is now 200 years since the first extensive extracts from Pepys's diary were first published. This endlessly interesting and scholarly book tells the story of how this occurred, how subsequent fuller editions came to be published and at the different ways Pepys and his have been perceived through these two centuries - right up to the present day. Kate Loveman is one of our foremost authorities on Pepys's diary, being the editor of the Everyman Library selection that was published in 2018 which is the only edition I have ever read.

It is an extraordinary story. Samuel Pepys's kept his diary for fewer than ten years of a rather long and eventful life (1660 - 1669). He lived from 1633 until 1703, so was in his late twenties and early thirties at this time. He mainly wrote it in shorthand, using a 'polyglot' or mixed up language from different languages (French, Spanish and Greek) when he wanted to write about private matters. These included his many sexual escapades, the polyglot presumably being used to conceal these accounts from his wife or anyone else who might read the handwritten manuscripts. He then bequeathed the six quarto books containing the diary along with a substantial private library and a lot of other personal papers to Magdalene College in Cambridge where they have been preserved ever since.

Whether he ever intended that his diary should be read at all widely, let alone ever published remains a mystery. He was surely not writing it for posterity at the time, but clearly decided nonetheless not to destroy it before he died and must have made that decision in the full knowledge that it would at least be used as a historical source at some point in the future. He did, of course, go on in the 1670s and 1680s to become a royal servant of consequence, being responsible for the managing the growing British navy and probably considered these achievements to be of much more potential interest than that the scribblings of his younger days. Who knows? The upshot through is that, as a result of the bequest to Magdalene, we have a most extraordinarily valuable and very frank first-hand account of life in London and at Court in Restoration England. Pepys' friend, John Evelyn, of course, also kept an extensive diary that has survived and was published a few years beforehand. It is also a very valuable first hand account of the time, but can never have the popular literary appeal of the Pepys diary because it is frankly rather boring by comparison.

There were two main problems that the Diary's first editors ran into right from the start when preparing the first published version. First, of course, the full manuscript is very long - extending to 1.25 million words - so necessarily they needed to make a selection of what they considered to be the passages of most interest to potential readers. Secondly, a lot of the franker personal content could not be even considered for publication due to its sexual nature. The same issues were met by all subsequent editors up until the 1960s when, in the wake of the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, publishing a full unexpurgated text became legally possible. The result was a full eleven volume version edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews with extensive explanatory notes. This appeared in instalments through the 1970s and provided me with my first encounter with the diary because my uncle had the full set which I started reading one Christmas when staying with him and my aunt in Cambridge.

The Latham and Williams edition did not, however, include translations of the formerly censored passages, including them as originally written by Pepys in his ‘mixed up’ polyglot language. These have now been 'transcribed' and are presented together with a lot of commentary linking them all together in Guy de la Bedoyere's recent book 'The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations'.

In Kate Loveman's book there is extensive discussion towards the end of debates about whether Pepys should be considered to be a paedophile and violent sexual predator, rather than the loveable womaniser he has typically been presented as hitherto. This is an important section, but is to an extent speculative, resting on interpreting some of his language in ways that most would not at first sight. She argues, for example, that when he uses the term 'kind' in respect of his intentions towards women, that really means 'cruel'. In all honesty though this is not necessary, this was Restoration England which was notoriously licentious and there is no question that Pepys was very persistent when looking for casual sexual encounters and that he both forced himself on those he could and abused his official position by sleeping with the wives of men looking for promotion. By modern standards he was an appalling man. Kate Loveman also argues that he was racist in some of the things he wrote. I am sure that is true, it was the norm in his time, but there is a tendency I think to read a bit too much into some passages. Surely the following, which he wrote on 5th April 1999 suggests a rather limited tendency to racism?

'for a cook maid we have, ever since Bridget went, used a black moore of Mr Batelier's (Doll) who dresses our meat mighty well and we mightily pleased with her'

Sure he makes reference to her race, but does that really make him a raging white supremacist?

The truth is that we do not need to like Samuel Pepys or approve of him in the slightest to find his diary utterly compelling, revealing and deeply interesting in all kinds of ways. His behaviour was appalling at times, but very humane at others. He wrote very frankly and that is what gives us the insight we get from reading it into both the events and mores of the time. Kate Loveman’s book shows us how extraordinarily unlikely it is that the diary survived at all and came to be published in the forms that it has been. It is a very enjoyable account.