The irrepressible Pepys.(17th century diarist Samuel Pepys)(Critical Essay)

Samuel Pepys's Diary (1660-1669) is an extraordinary document in many ways, but its most extraordinary aspect is that Pepys seems to have had no model for it. In terms of informality and naked self-revelation, it was unprecedented; the only comparable writings to precede it were Montaigne's essays (1580-1588), but Montaigne wrote principally in the interests of philosophical inquiry, which Pepys did not--and in any case Pepys had not read Montaigne when he wrote the Diary. It is true that some of Pepys's contemporaries kept journals, the best-known being John Evelyn's, begun in the 1640s. But this was a decorous (not to say dull) chronicle of travel, politics, and public affairs, unlikely to shock anyone. Another of Pepys's friends, the famous scientist Robert Hooke, also wrote a journal, but it was dry and relatively impersonal. So when the twenty-seven-year-old Pepys began his diary he was effectively creating a new genre.

Robert Louis Stevenson saw Pepys as an "unparalleled figure in the annals of mankind" for three reasons:

 
   first, because he was a man known to his contemporaries in a halo of almost 
   historical pomp, and to his remote descendants with an indecent 
   familiarity, like a tap-room comrade; second, because he has outstripped 
   all competitors in the art of virtue of a conscious honesty about himself; 
   and, third, because, being in many ways a very ordinary person, he has yet 
   placed himself before the public eye with such a fullness and such an 
   intimacy of detail as might be envied by a genius like Montaigne. 

What prompted this obscure but rising young clerk to undertake this odd project? Why did he write, and for whom? For himself alone? For posterity? Though he wrote it in shorthand and kept its existence a secret during his lifetime, he must have believed that the Diary would be read after his death, for he didn't destroy it, as he did many other papers and documents; indeed he took good care of its six volumes, binding them expensively and leaving them, along with his other books, to Magdalen College, Cambridge. How, then, does one account for an entry like the following (from 1668):

 
   Thence away to the Strand to my bookseller's, and there stayed an hour and 
   bought that idle, roguish book, L'escholle des Filles, which I have bought 
   in plain binding (avoiding the buying of it better bound) because I 
   resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in 
   the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them if it should be found. 

He destroyed this lewd volume lest it disgrace his posthumous memory; yet at the same time he recorded his reading of the book, and its destruction, in the diary he so carefully preserved. As Stevenson asks, "to whom was he posing ... and what, in the name of astonishment, was the nature of the pose?" His behavior is irrational, possibly hypocritical; but the wonderful thing about the Diary is its cheerful acceptance of the irrational and the hypocritical. Nothing human is alien to Pepys.

Pepys, middle-class, striving, intelligent without being a genius, selfish, lecherous, greedy for life and all the good things it has to offer, is a classic Everyman, surely as recognizably human to readers in China or Africa as he is to his compatriots. Yet he was also very much a man of his particular circumstances, and the remarkable nature of those circumstances has given his Diary historical as well as literary importance. Censorship during the 1660s ensured that only one newspaper was published in London, the government-controlled London Gazette. Pepys's vivid insider's account of the political turmoil of the Restoration, as well as his famous eyewitness reports of public events and panics such as the plague of 1665, the great fire of 1666, and the Dutch attack on the Medway in 1667, are uniquely detailed and informative, and have probably done more to shape our vision of Restoration London than the work of any other artist or writer of the period, including Marvell, Dryden, Milton, and the great court painter Lely.