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The Diary of Samuel Pepys

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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

I suspect most people who read unabridged Pepys for any length of time end up feeling very ambivalent about him as a person. His diary contains the some of the deepest introspection of a human life--both the good and the bad--in the history of literature. Rousseau was a cheap marketer by comparison.

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

How does it compare to Montaigne? Of course Montaigne wasn't writing a diary, he was writing a study about himself.

Montaigne's Essays are primarily philosophical reflections. He did write a very interesting travel diary recounting his voyage from France to visit the Pope in Rome. [0] That diary has a wealth of observations covering everything from the riches of German towns to the number of kidney stones he passed after drinking the waters at various spas along the way.

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

Montaigne also wrote much about random every day things, about food, rest, sleep, etc. Statecraft was also a common theme in his essays.

If Pepys's sex life is a secret, it's the worst kept secret in English history.

Thanks for this comment, the book also sounds really interesting https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/236044978

I mean, yeah, he's a rapist, but I dunno if you're paying attention however this century #metoo is about women generally being of the opinion that yeah, lots of men are what you're calling "sexual predators" and getting away with it.

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

He had affairs with staff and found his wife annoying. Is that what you're referring to?

From https://www.neh.gov/article/honest-fault

> 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.”

Yes, Pepys was a charming, fascinating, funny, highly intelligent man who was also a rapist.

Have you read the _unabridged_ version? (Versions published before the 80s were heavily censored). He, ah, gets up to a lot more than that.

Ah yes, "affairs" with staff. He has sex with young female servants who, if they resist him can expect to have their employment immediately terminated, it's an enormous power imbalance. It's a problem that you look at that and see an "affair".

OK but taking advantage of a "power imbalance" definitely isn't what I had in mind when reading 'he would be called a "sexual predator" and he was almost certainly also a rapist.' Which perhaps was the goal of using that kind of language.

I'm a bit skeptical. For a start, you seem not to know which century Pepys was from! The link is to a 50 minute video. Perhaps you could briefly explain what leads you to believe Pepys was a rapist.

Pepys attitudes and behaviours in that regard were unremarkable for a man of his time and class. It would have been more surprising - and more worth commenting on - if he’d anachronistically endorsed modern standards of sexual propriety.

The average man in the 17th century did not, when bored on Sunday, attempt to molest multiple random women in church. Even for his time Pepys was, well, a bit much, and he knew it, and felt guilty about it occasionally in the diary.

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.

Pepys wasn't the average man, though. That's why I specified a man of his time and class. He was a successful and increasingly powerful man on the edges of Restoration court and aristocratic culture, in which such behaviour was the norm. It's complicated by the fact that Pepys was well aware that his behaviour was wrong, but hypocrisy and a public/private moral duality was, again, pretty normal in men of his station. That conflict is one of the things that makes him such an interesting figure. What irks me is the rush to focus on his transgressions as though people need to be "warned" that he wasn't a moral paragon by modern standards. That they might somehow be tainted by their encounter with him or be embarrassed if they express interest in or admiration for a bad man. As if that makes him any less fascinating or worth reading.

I barely have a clue about the attitudes and behaviours of the people around me - and yet you think you know not only Pepys' but also his contemporaries' attitudes and behaviours, so much so that you feel comfortable making a generalised comment about people who lived 3-400 years ago. Remarkable! Perhaps you are a historian.

You could still confidently say that casual sex is normal in America currently, even without a perfect window into the soul of every American.

Can I? Is it really?

Yes, and yes. Why not quit being obtuse for the sake of disagreeing for disagreement's sake?

I'm simply considering my personal experience. It's not aligned with these general comments.

Do you live inside an amish community perhaps? Nobody who at all interacts with the vast majority of American society can say with a straight face that casual sex isn't common and normal. I'm not saying that as a moral judgement, I have no problems with casual sex, but as a basic widespread tendency of said modern, generally liberal society.

Define 'casual sex'. (Perhaps define the opposite too.) And then, think across the breadth of the American people you know and all those other people you don't - across different ages, places, religions, circumstances, etc. And then say that tell me you know that 'casual sex' is the general behaviour and attitude of everyone.

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.

OK, Jordan Peterson.

> 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.

Perhaps you should reconsider your assumption that everyone is as ignorant of history and psychology as you appear to be.

Does anyone actually aspire to be like Pepys?

> I don't like mentioning things like this usually, but for the sake of a true picture, it is worth it.

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.

IMO it adds a lot: the article is about cuts from the diary, the result being that the picture is distorted. This is half the point of the link isn't it?

you two should split the difference: it does add a lot, and he does like mentioning it, which is good because it adds a lot every time.

No difference between us there :)

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

Thank you, that is greatly appreciated.

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...

Also available as a Bluesky feed: https://bsky.app/profile/samuelpepys.bsky.social (and I think on Mastodon too; Twitter’s api changes killed the Twitter one AIUI).

Works surprisingly well as a social media feed.

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

And a few years later we invited them to rule over us, which they gladly did.

It’s pronounced peeps by the way.

The time has long passed for dry aged Pepys.

28 September 1665 is the best diary entry of all time.

This made me seek it out, and my oh my. Link for those interested - https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1665/09/28/

This made me laugh out loud

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/

Not really? "I imagine Pepys used Shelton’s Shorthand because he had to take copious notes of Navy Board meetings and take official government minutes."

Since the diary (and so his shorthand use) pre-dates his appointment to the Navy Board, this conclusion is a bit of a reach....

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

I mean, at the time that version was published, obscenity laws would likely have made publishing the full version illegal, so, yes, it was necessary.

Possibly, but an honest man would have said as much.

I mean I think his audience at the time would have, particularly given what was left in, understood it to mean that it wasn't "unnecessary squeamishness"; under the law of the time it was literally unprintable and he'd have faced serious criminal consequences if he'd tried.

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).

I still think you're doing some special pleading here. Yes, he might have meant people to infer that, but compare with Bowdler at the earlier end of the same century quite simply saying that he'd omitted passages for "propriety."

In Bowdler's case, though, he was doing _unnecessary_ censorship; you could get basically uncensored versions of Shakespeare's work at the time.

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.

He could have said that he had omitted some passages for impropriety. If Bowdler could say then then so could he - by the standards of his day or of ours. Saying nothing would have been an option too. His actual statement still seems at worst a lie and at best intentionally obfuscated.

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).

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