There is a darker side to Samuel Pepys unfortunately. Either unknown, glossed over or ignored.
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.
Posts one diary entry a day, along with commentary from people explaining or asking what stuff means.
It's a pretty cool idea...
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dr_dshiv
The British had invaded the Netherlands and burned 130 merchant ships and killed a few old ladies. This was shockingly uncivilized — no one benefits from the burned goods. During war, one may kill soldiers and burn warships, but to burn goods and kill old women? Horrible! So, the Dutch shamed the British by invading in response— and while they destroyed their warships, they very carefully did not hurt anyone or plunder. And here Pepys expresses his shame.
“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
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emblaegh
It’s pronounced peeps by the way.
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bediger4000
28 September 1665 is the best diary entry of all time.
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ilamont
Such an important diary from a social and historical perspective. When reading about other topics relating to 17th-century Britain (such as the Fire of 1666 and the development of the British Navy) it is frequently cited.
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.
How does nearly every entry have like 30 comments on it??
dcminter
A few years ago I downloaded some of the Gutenberg version [0] of Pepys' diary which is a transcription of the Wheatley edition which contains this rather odd paragraph in the introduction:
"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.
There is a darker side to Samuel Pepys unfortunately. Either unknown, glossed over or ignored.
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.
[1] https://youtu.be/uxaPbPm7sMk?si=W9vIJ_JD-BynAlOp
If you want it as a free ePub I did a public domain production for Standard Ebooks a while ago: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-pepys/the-diary
https://www.pepysdiary.com/
Posts one diary entry a day, along with commentary from people explaining or asking what stuff means.
It's a pretty cool idea...
The British had invaded the Netherlands and burned 130 merchant ships and killed a few old ladies. This was shockingly uncivilized — no one benefits from the burned goods. During war, one may kill soldiers and burn warships, but to burn goods and kill old women? Horrible! So, the Dutch shamed the British by invading in response— and while they destroyed their warships, they very carefully did not hurt anyone or plunder. And here Pepys expresses his shame.
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
It’s pronounced peeps by the way.
28 September 1665 is the best diary entry of all time.
Such an important diary from a social and historical perspective. When reading about other topics relating to 17th-century Britain (such as the Fire of 1666 and the development of the British Navy) it is frequently cited.
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/
I found this video ages ago with some scholarly background on Pepys, including some beautiful antique volumes of the diary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VccalarFTU&t=1640s
How does nearly every entry have like 30 comments on it??
A few years ago I downloaded some of the Gutenberg version [0] of Pepys' diary which is a transcription of the Wheatley edition which contains this rather odd paragraph in the introduction:
"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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pepys
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44232699