And So to Bed

Was Pepys really as dead as all that? “Up this morning” is a phrase that has passed from his daily journal entries to diarists everywhere. “And so to bed” is another. In any case, from January 1, 1660 (four months before Charles II was restored to the throne of England), to May 31, 1669, the modish civil servant churned out a million and a half words, meticulously encrypted in shorthand. Pepys’s eyes and hands roved everywhere–ships’ cargoes, curb-side executions, autopsies, puppet-shows and plackets, musical and scientific instruments, actresses–for his inquisitiveness knew no bounds.

As he chronicles his private life and London’s public life with staggering copiousness, Restoration England teems before us. From the great Plague and Fire of 1665 and 1666 to his own frantic interior decorating, from affairs of state to buying pornography, from the Dutch fleet’s marauding its way up English rivers to spying upon his wife’s choice of underwear, Pepys has left us a matchless (and breathlessly jumbled) encyclopedia of a seventeenth-century city and man in dramatic flux. He never really explained why he began or sustained his epic foray into prose. It seems that overwhelmingly interesting times impelled an overweeningly curious man to jot down nearly everything.

Uppermost in few readers’ minds today is the fact that Pepys was, simultaneously, building a career at the Navy Office–where he pulled together the fleet that dominated the world’s sea lanes for the next two centuries. Compared with so much else that he records, his job can seem like filler in his dairy. Tomalin lays out the details of Pepys’s national career while she escorts us through the diary’s back alleys of playing hooky and of fantasies about the king’s whores.

Along the way, Tomalin pays perhaps less attention than she might to just how visionary Pepys was. That’s not a real complaint. She is a literary biographer, not a naval historian, and interested readers can search out monographs such as J.D. Davies’s “Gentlemen and Tarpaulins” (1991).

Still, the British navy was the largest employer in seventeenth-century England. It became the largest employer in the world during the next century, in no small part thanks to the indefatigable work of Pepys. The Navy Office was a good posting for any civil servant: Samuel and his wife Elizabeth began the 1660s with 25 between them; they ended a decade of love and fisticuffs and suspicion with L10,000. Pepys, however, did not just enrich himself. When the Dutch Admiral Michel de Ruyter sailed up the Medway in 1667 to burn Chatham dockyard and capture the Royal Charles–the pride of the British navy–it shocked the nation and produced popular demands for naval reform. And Samuel Pepys, the ambitious administrator who happened to be in a position to do something about it, rose to the challenge as few other men could or would have done.

NAVAL HISTORIANS have rightly made Pepys their administrative hero–which leaves the diary something of an embarrassment for them. What are we finally to make of his writing? Both Pepys and his diary invite superlatives. “The most unlikely thing at the heart of his long, complex, and worldly life,” Tomalin remarks in her final paragraph, “is the secret masterpiece.”

Some of the quotidian details Pepys recollected by candlelight do not make him attractive, even though pummeling a wife and servants was then the prerogative of any household’s master. But somehow–amidst his forthright descriptions of squirming at his own marital violence–Pepys retains the affection, however qualified, of most readers.

Those who dealt with the clandestine diarist professionally–and they ranged from Charles II down to ships’ carpenters–knew him primarily as a naval administrator, tireless and gifted. Other men knew him as a prodigious book-lover or as a prodigal consumer of fashionable clothes, food and wine, and the Royal Society’s “new science.”

But too many women–from Mrs. William Bagwell, a carpenter’s wife, to Peggy Penn, daughter of his colleague and neighbor, Admiral Sir William Penn–had to handle his adulterous fumblings and tumblings. The diarist was a serial chancer, although in an age of extravagant rakes like Charles II and the Earl of Rochester, he seems mostly furtive. Fearful of disease, he eschewed prostitutes, but he often enjoyed slap and tickle with actresses and trinket-sellers.

About such sprees, Pepys was somewhat shamefaced in the diary. His wife Elizabeth entertained suspicions but couldn’t confirm them until 1668, when he started making visible passes at her young companion Deborah Willett. Amidst domestic strife, Sam gave up Deb in what reads like a miniature novel, at once poignant and farcical. Samuel was also jealous (falsely it seems) of Elizabeth’s dancing master and other young men who paid her pretty compliments. Never before in Western culture had such a documentary–candid but gauche and self-involved–been essayed.

“The ‘Diary’ carries Pepys to the highest point,” Tomalin concludes, “alongside Milton, Bunyan, Chaucer, Dickens, and Proust.” The secret masterpiece certainly solicits such grand comparisons (even if Tomalin skips a chronological beat), but the paradox is that Pepys did not consciously set out to rival literary Londoners like Chaucer or Milton, both of whom were also civil servants. Indeed, Pepys seems (and this is Tomalin’s savvy point) almost to blunder into the literary pantheon. Of how his diary would end, Pepys had no notion. And yet, somehow, the diary acquires a master-plot: an extraordinary man and his lucrative job and his volatile wife and their servant-problem, which his times serendipitously transmuted into narrative gold.

PEPYS MARRIED on October 10, 1655, when Elizabeth Marchant de St. Michel was fourteen and Sam twenty-two. Neither could boast economic prospects. Elizabeth was a skittish and precocious child of a French father who dabbled in perpetual-motion machines and smoke-free chimneys, and a British mother who had seen better days. Emigrés to London, the St. Michels were impecunious but loopily ambitious, and their religious history (Catholic? Protestant?) was ambiguous. Sam was an aspiring nobody, the son of John and Margaret Pepys, a semi-literate London tailor and an illiterate former laundry-maid whose religious sympathies tended towards Puritanism.

The marriage was already tempestuous before Pepys began his journal in 1660–Elizabeth returned to her parents for a while–and only Sam’s future reclaimed it for history. Not a written word from Elizabeth survives (partly because her husband tore up her papers during a violent quarrel), or from Mary Skinner, the seventeen-year-old with whom Pepys took up in 1670. The women in the life of this comsummately literate man were strangely unlettered.

Too many people assume that Pepys’s governing passion was sex. In fact, it was music. Like his father John and countless other Englishfolk of the seventeenth century, Pepys was a skilled amateur musician who enjoyed nothing better than an impromptu concert. “Music is the thing of the world that I love most,” he wrote in closing July 30, 1666, taking mental refuge from a rampant Dutch fleet and a “dissatisfied” wife. (The day had begun with lute lessons for his servant, continued with bad news on the naval front, and ended with a singalong, and harsh words, with Elizabeth.)

Tomalin astutely connects the joy Pepys took in music with his religious intimations of “Something above” and a future “State of Harmony.” The relation to sex, however, was also present. “That which did please me beyond anything in the whole world,” Pepys wrote of a performance of Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger’s “The Virgin Martyr,” “was the wind-musique when the Angell comes down, which is so sweet that it ravished me; and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife.”

Pepys continues thus for several affecting lines (“I remained all night transported”), but he does not mention that the descending angel was played by a scantily clad Nell Gwyn, the royal mistress who charmed him hopelessly. His companions at the performance included Deborah Willett, whom he had already given “a little kiss” on December 22, 1667; soon this love affair would plunge his marriage into crisis.

On May 31, 1669, Pepys finally set down his pen, fearful that his nightly travails were robbing him of his eyesight. The diary ends, “And so I betake myself to that course which [is] almost as much as to see myself go into my grave–for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me.”

On November 13, 1669, Elizabeth entered her literal grave; the application of halved bleeding pigeons to her feet had not assuaged her sudden fever. This sad collision of dates in 1669 proves almost novelistic. “Elizabeth can be seen as the ‘Diary”s muse,” remarks Tomalin perceptively, but it was the wife who expired when her husband could write no further. Pepys retained his sight, but he had forfeited his diary and his wife.

PEPYS WAS ALWAYS worried about his health, and with reason: Born in 1633 as his parents’ fifth child, he had by age seven outlived all his older siblings. He was in continual pain from bladder stones, for which he underwent perilous surgery, without anesthetic, in 1658. By 1677 his graphic itemization of physical ailments–including joint-aches, allergies, itchings, a clogged head, bowel and bladder pain–in a note headed “The Present Ill State of My Health” shows that Pepys had lost none of his candor. The man who had boozed it up with Admiral Penn and many others, who had tucked into oysters, anchovies, and lobsters, now had “very little taste” for food and wine. “It makes you wonder how he ever got out of bed at all,” Tomalin marvels, “let alone ran and reformed a government department, addressed parliament [as an MP] and attended the king wherever he happened to be.”

Before 1660, none of the latter would have seemed a plausible future for the humble son of a London tailor. But England’s class system could be surprisingly permeable. The family retained some good connections–Sam’s great aunt Paulina had married Sir Edward Montagu–and during the plague of 1643 John and Margaret sent their oldest son off to the Montagus’ big house in Huntingtonshire.

There Sam attended the same grammar school as had Oliver Cromwell, whose name was becoming a household word for military prowess. Upon his return to London, Sam attended St. Paul’s School (Milton’s alma mater, but not as classy as Westminster School where John Dryden, John Locke, and Christopher Wren were then pupils). On January 30, 1649, Pepys witnessed the execution of Charles I. In the diary entry for November 1, 1660, he records that an old school chum had that day reminded him how he had been “a great roundhead” as a boy, and the diarist became “much afeared that he would have remembered the words that I said the day that the King was beheaded (that were I to preach upon him, my text should be: ‘The memory of the wicked shall rot’).”

In 1651, helped by family connections, Samuel went up to Magdalene College, Cambridge, at the relatively late age of eighteen. Pepys was no prodigy like such Cambridge contemporaries Dryden and Newton. Upon graduating in 1654, he could find employment only as a dogsbody–servant, clerk, fixer–for Edward Montagu, his cousin from Huntingtonshire who was working, alongside Milton, for Cromwell in Whitehall Palace.

Montagu genuinely was a prodigy. Friend and neighbor to Cromwell, he had proved an outstanding general during the Civil War of the 1640s. Under Cromwell’s government, Montagu became one of England’s most dashing admirals in an era of naval triumphs. After Cromwell died in 1658, Montagu sagaciously switched his allegiance to Charles II. In May 1660 he took Pepys to greet the returning monarch in the English Channel. During these heady days, the factotum was promoted to a clerkship at the Navy Board and suddenly found himself “Samuel Pepys, Esquire” (“of which, God knows, I was not a little proud”) with a generous salary (and kickbacks) to match. “If he changed, he changed with the nation,” Samuel Johnson explained of the Cromwellian poet Dryden’s becoming Charles II’s poet laureate. The same was true of Admirals Montagu and Penn and of the lowly Pepys.

Who remembers Montagu anymore? The newly created “Earl of Sandwich” went on to bungle his official accounts, his court politics, and some of his battles. In 1672, at the age of forty-six and in full regalia, he perished on his flagship, the Royal James, in savage fighting with the Dutch. Pepys’s patron was brave, sanguine, and honorable, and his wife Jemima was the only woman for whom the diarist expressed unfeigned admiration. But the pen really is mightier than the sword, and now the admiral survives as a footnote to the diary of his seasick scrivener.

PEPYS HAD THE KNACK of being in the vanguard: from meeting the king in the Channel to making one of the first references in English literature to a “Cupp” of “Tee,” from being among the first Englishmen to wear a francophile periwig to seeing actresses (rather than boys dressed as women) on the public stage.

Pepys didn’t lose that knack after 1669. In 1677 Montagu’s protégé spearheaded the momentous proposal that naval appointments should be made by competitive examination rather than by family connection. In 1682 Pepys was among the first to call himself a “Tory,” embracing as a badge of pride the epithet (meaning “Irish highwayman”) with which the party’s opponents had slanged conservatives.

The tide had already turned, alas, for the Catholic Stuarts by about 1670. By 1673 Pepys himself was accused of being a “Bluddy Papist” rather than an “old roundhead.” The aesthetic penchant that he had shared with Elizabeth for Catholic ritual provided his enemies with ammunition. Parliamentary accusations of “Piracy, Popery, and Treachery” landed him in the Tower in 1679, where, amidst furious plotting, he briefly feared for his life. Released, he would eventually be imprisoned twice more.

Through it all, Pepys worked away (when he could) for kings and country. Eschewing political dogfights whenever possible, he became secretary to the Admiralty in 1684 and streamlined the operation of the navy. James II was deposed in 1688. Pepys remained loyal to the last, worrying about the future of the navy. The accession of the Protestant duo William and Mary saw Pepys out of government. He became a non-juror when he refused to take the new oath of allegiance, thereby incurring double taxation.

Still, Pepys found plenty to do. During the 1690s, he hobnobbed learnedly with dons and scientists and with other non-jurors and Jacobites like Dryden who strove to keep the memory of James sweet. He had always been active outside government. He was a generous patron of Christ’s Hospital school, whose department of mathematics prepared boys for the navy. Pepys was the reformist president of the Royal Society in 1688 when Isaac Newton’s earth-shaking “Principia Mathematica” was published (which is why Pepys’s name also appears on the title page). With some odd exceptions–not talking to his parents-in-law, for example, during the period of the diary–Pepys took good care of his family, employees, and friends. He also found time to write the sole work published during his lifetime, “Memoires Relating to the State of the Royal Navy” (1690). No masterpiece, the “Memoires” simply afforded Pepys a soapbox from which he could lambaste inimical commissioners.

MORE IMPORTANT, during the early 1690s, he readied his diary for posterity, by preserving it with the rest of his library. What doubts crossed Pepys’s mind when he reread the diary, probably in 1692, after the complex and worldly life he had negotiated since finishing the diary and since Elizabeth’s death? He completed two short (but bloodless) diaries after 1669. There was a mound of other papers to tear or to sort. Fortunately for us, Pepys’s gargantuan message-in-a-bottle remained untorn.

The story of how Pepys achieved unexpurgated publication enriches the fascination of the diary itself. In 1703 Pepys died famous (if politically sidelined), and he bequeathed his collection of books–which included the six volumes of his shorthand diary–to Magdalene College. Not recognized for the full range of its holdings, this “bibliotheca pepysiana” began more than two centuries of humdrum peregrinations around Magdalene’s quadrangles, finding at last, in the 1950s, a splendid home in the folksiest of the college’s seventeenth-century buildings.

Only between 1819 and 1822 was the shorthand code of the diary assiduously deciphered by a starving student and patchily published by a boorish aristocrat. (Tomalin captures the attendant “tragi-comedy” with feeling.) The Edinburgh Review welcomed Lord Braybrooke’s grotty edition as “a treasure-box of new detail,” while Sir Walter Scott tut-tutted over the “man of pleasure.”

Between 1893 and 1899, Henry Wheatley published a more complete edition, well-annotated but still bowdlerized, in ten volumes. In the “Dictionary of National Biography,” Leslie Stephen celebrated Pepys’s naval career, but of the diary Stephen opined that “it seems to be highly improbable that he thought of publicity.” Robert Louis Stevenson disagreed. Comparing this “unparalleled figure in the annals of mankind” with Montaigne and Rousseau, Stevenson declared, “Pepys was not such an ass, but he must have perceived, as he went on, the extraordinary nature of the work he was undertaking.”

The first entry in the diary was not published, fully and in sequence, until 1970. Editorial squeamishness about that entry had been occasioned by Pepys’s reference to his wife’s menstrual difficulties (and their childlessness). Between 1970 and 1983, however, Robert Latham and William Matthews finally edited Pepys’s diary, unbuttoned and magnificently glossed, in eleven volumes. The weird macaronics to which, even in shorthand, Pepys consigned his sexual follies were fully presented for the first time. Several paperback anthologies, based upon this edition, have brought him, whether naked or periwigged, to a new generation of readers.

Every biographer of Pepys is faced by daunting challenges. How does one paraphrase the details of the decade he so profligately recorded? How does one connect the quick of the diarist with the public man in the years after? Did bodily indisposition check his philandering? In 1687 Pepys wrote to William Bagwell (whose young wife’s availability in 1663 had helped the complaisant ship’s carpenter to a promotion) asking him to keep his middle-aged spouse away from the office. The diarist would have told the story; now we can only guess at the administrator’s meaning.

Most of us feel, somehow, that we have always known Pepys the diarist–and Tomalin distills the diary for those whose acquaintanceship may be shaky–but she also reintroduces us to the aspiring young nobody and the dogged, courageous, and brilliant middle-aged administrator. In “Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self,” Claire Tomalin shows why Pepys is “both the most ordinary and the most extraordinary writer you will ever meet.”

Hugh Ormsby-Lennon teaches English literature at Villanova University.