Samuel Pepys his Journall
For the last couple of years I’ve been preoccupied with autobiographies, memoirs, and journals—especially African memoirs and the Journal of Thoreau. I’ve been curious for years about the diary of Samuel Pepys, and after signing up for a Twitter feed of bits from the diary, on my last visit to the Dove & Hudson I picked up the Modern Library abridged edition.
Pepys was an official of the British navy, and kept his diary from 1660, the year he turned 27, to 1669, when his deteriorating eyesight prevented him from keeping a private record. Since the diary included disparaging remarks about powerful people, and many accounts of flirtations (and more) with maids, servants, and the wives of other people, he could not very well dictate his entries.
Pepys is worth reading not because he was a great prose stylist but because of his insatiable curiosity and his childlike enthusiasm for the everyday pleasures of life. As he said of himself, “I am in all things curious” (September 30, 1661) and “with child to see any strange thing” (May 14, 1660). He was an avid theatergoer and attendee of executions, and describes running and shoving to be in the best spot to observe whatever was going on.
On the other hand, he was a terrible husband. Not only was he an incurable womanizer, but he was tight-fisted and even violent with his wife, a French woman who was apparently thought attractive and interesting by other men. Though he loved her and was distressed when they fought, his behavior toward her was often appalling.
On October 13, 1660, “I was angry with my wife for her things lying about, and in my passion kicked the little fine basket which I bought her in Holland, and broke it, which troubled me after I had done it.”
On January 9, 1663, she presented him with a copy of a letter she had written, “of the retiredness of her life, and how unpleasant it was.” She had given him another copy earlier which he had burned without reading, and he demanded that she tear this one up. When she refused, he took it from her, along with “the letters of my love to her, and my Will wherein I had given her all I have in the world,” tore them up and burned them.
On April 5, 1664, “she answering me some way that I did not like I pulled her by the nose, indeed to offend her, though afterwards to appease her I denied it, but only it was done in haste. The poor wretch took it mighty ill, and I believe besides wringing her nose she did feel pain, and so cried a great while, but by and by I made her friends, and so after supper to my office a while, and then home to bed.” ("Poor wretch” was the way he often referred to her.)
On July 4 of that year he found that his wife had spent 25 shillings “upon a pair of pendantes for her eares.” He threatened to break them or make her sell them for whatever she could get, though once she submitted and sent her servant out to sell them, he relented.
On June 19, 1668, Pepys’ wife summed up his attitude: “that I loved pleasure and denied her any.”
The charge is undeniable, and is probably the most unpleasant thing about Pepys. Over the next few days I will turn to some of the more attractive aspects of his personality and his diary.
