The Diary of Samuel Pepys(historytoday.com) |
The Diary of Samuel Pepys(historytoday.com) |
Pepys had many admirable qualities but these have to be placed against his extremely bad behaviour towards women. Today he would be called a "sexual predator" and he was almost certainly also a rapist. Unfortunately, women were (and still are in many places) seen as sexual objects and this view was common in the 18th Century.
I became aware of this from watching Guy de la Bédoyère's YouTube video "Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations" [1] where he discussed the good and the bad in Pepys, having just completed a new book about the diary and man. The video is good, as is the channel (he's a historian I was familar with from his Time Team appearances).
I don't like mentioning things like this usually, but for the sake of a true picture, it is worth it.
That depth of revelation is one of the things that make Pepys hard to put down, even as you find his personality increasingly disagreeable. It is a truly remarkable work.
Edit: added unabridged for clarity
A rapist is currently President of the United States of America. You likely work with and admire "sexual predators". Works like this diary serve the same purpose as SF shorts, they're holding up a mirror to our world, Sam has wasted days because telephones don't exist and so it's impossible for him to reach a person quickly if they're not where he expected - but "I'm a powerful man so I decided to have sex with a less powerful woman and she couldn't stop me" is one of the top stories in the news site I was just looking at.
Plus ça change
> In an incident that is difficult to interpret as anything but rape, Pepys recounts entering the home of a ship’s carpenter—a man very much under his control, since Pepys was a naval official—and noting that, after a struggle, “finally I had my will of her.” His only recorded regret is “a mighty pain” in his finger, which he injured during the apparent assault.
> The victim, identified only as Mrs. Bagwell, had been instructed to offer herself to Pepys by her husband, who thought it would help his advancement. “The story,” notes Tomalin, “is a shameful one of a woman used by two bullies: her husband, hoping for promotion, and Pepys, who was to arrange it. Pepys did not present it in quite those terms, but it is clearly how it was.”
> Another obvious victim of Pepys’s sexual involvements beyond his household was his wife. In 1665, he had married fifteen-year-old Elizabeth St. Michel, the daughter of a French immigrant. Loveman describes the marriage as a “love match, albeit a tempestuous one.” The diary records the couple’s arguments over Pepys’s infidelities, and there were other tensions in the marriage. In an especially heated quarrel over Elizabeth’s management of the household, Pepys gave her a black eye.
> The full record of Pepys’s mistreatment of women is too extensive to detail here. That grim record could fill a book—and, in fact, it has. In The Dark Side of Samuel Pepys, author Geoffrey Pimm explores Pepys’s predations at length, drawing on the diarist’s own accounts of his misdeeds to build the case against him. Pepys, writes Pimm, “faithfully recorded acts of moral turpitude that in later centuries might have caused his name to be blazoned across the newspapers and in some instances, most probably lead him to be arraigned in the courts.”
It's an absolutely fascinating read, and it's well worth reading, but you should not fall into the trap of thinking "well, that's just how it was back then"; Pepys was abnormally badly behaved on a number of axes even for the time.
I'd say you do like it, which is the only reason you did it, since it's not worth it since it adds nothing to the context.
Posts one diary entry a day, along with commentary from people explaining or asking what stuff means.
It's a pretty cool idea...
Works surprisingly well as a social media feed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmes%27s_Bonfire
“It seems very remarkable to me, and of great honour to the Dutch, that those of them that did go on shore to Gillingham, though they went in fear of their lives, and were some of them killed; and, notwithstanding their provocation at Schelling, yet killed none of our people nor plundered their houses, but did take some things of easy carriage, and left the rest, and not a house burned; and, which is to our eternal disgrace, that what my Lord Douglas’s men, who come after them, found there, they plundered and took all away; and the watermen that carried us did further tell us, that our own soldiers are far more terrible to those people of the country-towns than the Dutch themselves.” June 30, 1667
I don't know if the paywalled article mentions the shorthand he used to write it, but that's a fascinating topic on its own. It was called Tachygraphy, and was used from the mid 1600s through the early 1800s by Pepys, Thomas Jefferson, and Isaac Newton among others.
There's a sample on this page:
https://pepyshistory.le.ac.uk/pepyss-shorthand/
This source states Pepys learned it as part of his Navy responsibilities as it was an effective way to take notes: https://deborahswift.com/who-remembers-shorthand/
Since the diary (and so his shorthand use) pre-dates his appointment to the Navy Board, this conclusion is a bit of a reach....
"It has now been decided that the whole of the Diary shall be made public, with the exception of a few passages which cannot possibly be printed. It may be thought by some that these omissions are due to an unnecessary squeamishness, but it is not really so, and readers are therefore asked to have faith in the judgment of the editor. Where any passages have been omitted marks of omission are added, so that in all cases readers will know where anything has been left out."
When I read that I looked it up in Wikipedia [1] and it turns out that it's hilariously disingenuous and it absolutely was an "unnecessary squeamishness" (i.e. censorship of the "dirty" bits) that motivated the omissions.
I therefore picked up a cheap copy of the Latham & Matthews complete paperback edition and am rather slowly making my way through that. It's in eleven volumes - one for each year plus a supplementary overview. I'm still on 1662 but it's very entertaining in short doses. This edition, as well as including the bits that Wheatley sought to obscure, has rather nice illustration of London landmarks on the covers.
There are some other good bits in that Wikipedia page by the way - one of my favourites is the stuff about Lord Granville painstakingly deciphering a few pages of the "encoded" content while the instructions for decoding them were in the same library a few shelves away!
Some or all of this may be in the linked article, but alas it's paywalled (and archive.today didn't work) so my apologies if I'm just repeating its contents!
Pepys' writings nicely precede the stuff about Hooke [2], to whom someone linked yesterday, because Hooke collaborated closely with Christopher Wren (famously the architect of St Pauls Cathedral in London) in the rebuilding of many of the churches destroyed by the conflagarion of the city that Pepys observes and writes about in 1666.
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4200
If you ever wondered what travel was like in earlier centuries, it's a delightful account but nothing like Pepys. Pepys recorded a vast range of topics from affairs of state to the consistency of his stools (and everything in between).
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70838/70838-h/70838-h.htm
Like, look how much trouble they had with publishing Ulysses, decades later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)#Publication_hi... . And Ulysses had the benefit of being far less obscene than the diaries, and was Great Literature (TM), rather than, frankly, some pervert's private diaries which had never been intended for publication in the first place. I doubt the diaries could have been safely published in full until after the whole Lady Chatterley's Lover thing, at least not in the UK or US (France was more laid back about this sort of thing).
Wheatley _could_ maybe have been more explicit and said "I've omitted the illegally obscene bits", but honestly given the legal environment of the time this would have been asking for trouble.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree (although it would be very interesting if there was contemporary evidence of his actual thoughts and motivations).
And then, go back to the original point for a bonus, and consider what you know about the general behaviour and attitudes are of the people in England 400 years ago.
> And then say that tell me you know that 'casual sex' is the general behaviour and attitude of everyone.
I said it's normal.
> what you know about the general behaviour and attitudes are of the people in England 400 years ago.
Plenty. Pepys wasn't that weird.