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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Late in December, 1867, Charles Dickens lost his pocket diary. In a letter to his sister-in-law, he described its disappearance as something " 'which,' as Mr Pepys would add, 'do trouble me mightily.' " Dickens preferred to destroy his diaries himself rather than leave them to accident and prying eyes. The disposable books were never meant to preserve the past for future savoring, only to keep track of Dickens's busy present and immediate future, especially his endless railway travel between his mistress, Ellen Ternan, and the far-flung platforms on which he gave dramatic public readings from his work. The pocket diaries provided no secret relief, as diaries sometimes do, from the mask of rectitude; they were a hedge against slipups and contradiction.
This story of Dickens's lost diary comes from "The Invisible Woman," Claire Tomalin's 1991 study of the novelist's affair with Ternan. Now, after two subsequent biographies, one of the eighteenth-century actress Dorothy Jordan and the other of Jane Austen, Tomalin has turned to Samuel Pepys, who sprang to Dickens's mind, as he still springs to ours, whenever diaries come up. Pepys reinvented the genre, and has never ceased to be its most famous practitioner, at least in the English language. The million or so words he wrote between 1660 and 1669 revel, sometimes consciously and more often not, in the kinds of contradiction that Dickens sought to suppress. We experience Pepys as an alternating electric current: cuddling his wife before groping the housemaid; serving the king after serving the regicide; thanking God for the end of a plague year that has brought him more merriment and riches than any year before it.
Three centuries after his death, we sometimes kid ourselves with the weary, Zen-like vogue phrase "It's all good." To Pepys, it actually was, and all he wanted to do with his diary--a form previously used mostly in the pursuit of self-correction and spiritual growth--was hoard it, save up his life the way he buried his wine and his Parmesan cheese during the Great Fire of London, or had a special case constructed for the preservation and display of his surgically removed kidney stone. We've always thought of him as lucky, escaping venereal disease and the political gibbet, surviving his wife's wrath along with his operation, the plague, and the fire. We forget that his luck sometimes failed him. His own house burned down; he served a stint in the Tower; he became suddenly, and young, a widower. But all those things happened in the three decades after he gave up the diary. The Pepys we know lived for only nine years and five months. In "Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self" (Knopf; $30), Tomalin gives us the rest of the man, and also a startling new way to read him.
Born in 1633 in London above his father's tailor shop, Pepys grew up in a smoky, still medieval city of about a hundred and thirty thousand souls. As a schoolboy at St. Paul's, he became accustomed to Puritan street preachers and political...
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