GREAT ENGLISH DIARIST : BOOK REVIEW SNIPPET

' The Confessions Of Samuel Pepys ' : Private Revelations From Britain's Most Famed Diarist. By Guy de la Bedoyere.

Pepys [ 1633-1703 ] was the great English diarist of the 17th century. He lived in London, where he was a high ranking administrator in the navy.

His diary which contains more than a million words in six volumes, spans nine years of his life when he was in his 20s and 30s. It's been invaluable for historians.

This is in part because Pepys [ pronounced '' peeps '' ] had a front row sweat in critical events, such as the Restoration of 1660, which returned the monarchy in Britain, the plague of 1665 ; and the Great Fire of the following year.

What's best about his diary, however, is that Pepys captured so much of what it was like to be alive in London.

He wrote about food [ '' we had a calf's head ......... but it was raw '' ] colds and other illnesses, theater going, barbers, ill-fitting clothes, taverns and ale, hairpieces, managing a household budget.

[ " Since my leaving the drinking of wine, I do find myself much better, and do mind my business better, and do spend less money.'' ]

Commuting around London by waterway, toilet misadventures, threatening to throw his wife’s dog out the window because it "pist" indoors and being waked too early by his cat.

Pepys was a bit of a bumbler, and often very funny. For example an entry from January 1661 reads :

'' A lady spit backward upon me by a mistake, not seeing me. But after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all,''

He'd grown up humbly. His parents [ his father was a tailor ] were not the sort of people whose names would have been hyperlinked in blue in a 17th-century version of Wikipedia.

Pepys was vainglorious, jealous, violent, prone to hangovers, scheming and he was open about these things. The Bloomsbury figure Harold Nicolson perceived all this.

In his own diary, in November 1947, Nicolson wrote of Pepys : '' It is some relief to reflect that to be a good diarist one must have a little snouty sneaky mind.'' 

The World Students Society Dwight Garner.