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The dark side of Samuel Pepys
00:38:21
Samuel Pepys is one of the most famous diarists in history, but as Guy de la Bédoyère suggests, he also had a disturbingly dark side
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- [00:04]
David Musgrove
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Guy Dillaburn Hoyer
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Podcast Host/Announcer
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. Samuel Pepys is well known for his brilliantly evocative diary which gives an unsurpassed insight into daily life in restaurants restoration London. However, it seems that Pepys also had a dark side. Something that's been overlooked or ignored in his diaries for centuries is that Pepys was a self confessed sexual predator and an abuser of women. Biographer Guy de la Bedoyer explains all to David Musgrove.
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David Musgrove
Today I am delighted to be joined by Guy de Bedouer, who is a Roman historian by trade but also maintains a keen interest in the diarist Samuel pepys. The famous 17th century diarist Samuel Pepys. So Guy, welcome back to the podcast. How are you?
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Guy Dillaburn Hoyer
Very well, thank you. Nice to see you Dave.
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David Musgrove
Yeah, and you. Okay. So Pepys. Here's a few things about Pepys. He was a great diarist. He was corrupt. He was a Domestic abuser, he was a groomer, he was a groper, he was a serial adulterer, he was a rapist. Is that a fair assessment?
- [03:12]
Guy Dillaburn Hoyer
It's only part of the story. And let's not forget that everything you've just said there is by his own personal testimony from the diary. That's where that evidence comes from. But it also demonstrates that this was a man who was enormously esteemed by his contemporaries, who was a brilliant naval administrator, he was an extraordinarily curious and interesting man who had a great love of life. And although he was appalling in some of his treatment of women, it would be a complete misrepresentation not to point out that he also adored the company of women, too, and delighted in them. So he is absolutely a man of paradoxes, and I think we'd all be liars if we didn't admit that. To some extent that's true of ourselves, although I certainly hope that we wouldn't fall into the trap of most of his serious misdemeanours.
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David Musgrove
Now, look, his diary. Tell us a little bit about the diaries, why they're famous, why do we still talk about them today?
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Guy Dillaburn Hoyer
By the middle of the 17th century, the diary is really something of a novelty. You have to remember that if you're looking at the overall period of British history, history all the way back to the Anglo Saxon period or before that to the Romans, there's relatively little individual testimony. I mean, in the Roman period, you do have letters. Some of those documents survive, and you've got tombstones during the early Middle Ages and right on into the medieval period, there's very little evidence for individuals in terms of them talking about their own lives. That just doesn't happen. Or if it did, the evidence doesn't survive. It's not until the 1600s that you start to get a greater level of consciousness and it's difficult to account for this, but people start to write about their own lives and it goes hand in hand, I think, with the appearance of printing, although people didn't print the diaries, but also the phenomenon of pamphleting, which starts to appear, particularly in the 16th and the 17th centuries, so that people are expressing their opinions. Pepys quite why he wrote a diary. It's not entirely evident. He certainly had an eye for the period. Let's not forget this was not a lifelong diary. He did not start it until the 1st of January 1660, and he'd been born in 1633, and he only wrote it until the 31st of May, 1669. And while he kept it up almost every day. It wasn't absolutely totally complete. He often wrote it up retrospectively a few days later. And there are a few blocks in that period when he didn't write it up. And we know from his surviving notes that he had been compiling notes along the way from which he normally wrote up the diary. And like the best diaries, I suppose, it's a completely haphazard collection of daily ephemera and public business. So therefore, he will talk about getting up and going to the office, he will talk a bit about the business, and he's just as likely to lurch into the next sentence to discuss his constipation and the remedial measures he's taking, and then arguing with his wife. And also, as he begins, alongside all his official business or visiting the Royal Society and his awareness of great public events like the restoration of England. And he did have a ringside seat to that. Let's not forget that he was invited, through his connections, to participate in the fleet that collected Charles II from Holland in 1660. He witnessed the coronation the following year and also the plague and the Great Fire. So he had all that. But then he could also talk about dropping off to see one of his mistresses coming back and picking his wife up and spending the evening having a pleasant time with her. So it's an extraordinary cavalcade of information. One mistake is easily made is to assume that it's complete. It's not a complete record of his life at all, because we know from some of his correspondence that says all sorts of other things that he was doing on any given day that just simply aren't mentioned in the diary.
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David Musgrove
So he started writing the diary in 1660s, you said that was quite an important year. I'm just. I'm reflecting on myself. I started writing a diary in Covid because that felt like an important thing to do. And I kind of. I've given up on it now because it feels my life isn't that exciting anymore. But was he sort of drawn to start writing the diary because that was a period of particular historical moment that he thought, do you think?
- [07:25]
Guy Dillaburn Hoyer
Absolutely, because that's how the diary starts. I mean, to put it into a broader historical context. For anyone who's not immediately familiar with the period we're talking about. England has been ruled by a monarch right the way up until the 1640s, and that last king is Charles I. And during the 1640s, England is convulsed into a civil war, essentially between the forces of Parliament and the monarchy, which is seen to be increasingly arbitrary and absolutist. You've got a rise of ordinary people who are determined to have representation through the House of Commons in Parliament. And the result of the Civil war eventually is that Charles I loses, is arrested and is executed in 1649. And those are the very formative years of Samuel Pepys childhood and into his teen years and going to university. And in the 1650s, England is ruled by a Commonwealth and presided over eventually by Oliver Cromwell, who most people will have heard of. Cromwell dies in 1658. And then the whole system begins to unravel for reasons it's impossible to go into now. But the result is that by 1660 it's become evident that people would rather go back to the old system. And that is when Charles ii, Charles I's son, is brought back from exile in Holland to become King of England again, but under more control than the monarch had been hitherto. And so right from the first page of the diary, Pepys launches into reflecting on the earth shattering events of Parliament falling and the imminence of the Restoration. And he saw that he knew he was witnessing an amazing period.
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David Musgrove
And as you've already alluded to, Pepys was a man of means and importance. Tell us a bit more about the role and job that he had.
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Guy Dillaburn Hoyer
Well, I would slightly challenge that to some extent. And Pepys, his family had been originally landowners, but thanks to the dispersal of family wealth through marriages and things, there wasn't very much left. So Pepys actually was the son of a tailor, one of 11 children, most of whom had died in infancy in London, quite near to St Bride Church, which is just on the west side of the old medieval city, quite close to Fleet street, which everybody's heard of, which leads up to the Strand. And he had an extraordinary piece of good fortune. One of his great aunts had married into the Montagu family and that meant that he had connections. And he said himself that it wasn't merit that got him posts. It was due to his cousin, Edward Montagu, who would lead the fleet to get Charles II back, who eventually gave Pepys a job, job as Clerk of the Acts in the Navy Office in London. So in that sense he was a lowly official. But you have to remember that in those days London was like a very small provincial town. You knew everybody, it was possible to see the King and the Duke of York and move in and out of the palace. There wasn't security or protection. Whitehall palace was almost like a public thoroughfare. So it's a very small scale, sort of world. And Pepys, because he was involved with the Royal Navy, let's not forget that the Royal Navy is. Was the whole manifestation of the English state on the world theatre. The Navy is English power. It's the navy that will bring England's and then ultimately the British Empire. And we talk about whether it's a good or a bad thing or not, but that's what happened. So that is the source of wealth and it's the navy which becomes the basis of England fighting the Dutch wars, the great commercial rival controlling the high seas and claiming control of the seas. So Pepys is right in a pole position because he's such a brilliant administrator. He starts sorting out the corruption. Not his own, of course, but he's very happy to sort out other corruptions and get things organized. And that gives him even more of a ringside to history. He's not somebody standing in the street watching this happen. He knows these people. He sees them. He's in and out of all of it. And he has this brilliant turn of phrases. But I should explain, which I haven't mentioned already, that unlike most diaries, he wrote it in shorthand. And not only did it facilitate writing the diary, but it also affected how he wrote it, how he composed it.
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David Musgrove
Well, let's get into that, because that's what I wanted to explore a bit more with you, because you are one of the few people who can actually sort of understand and read the diary in its original format. So tell us about the way he wrote it and how that's meant that it's been sort of portrayed in the years since he wrote it.
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Guy Dillaburn Hoyer
It's a really interesting phenomenon. Shorthand is something that most people have heard of, but it's really fallen out of use today because I don't know about you, Dave, but I can type much faster than I can handwrite. The great advantage is that I can actually read my typing. I certainly can't read my handwriting. It's a complete illegible scrawl. Although that's nothing compared to my wife, whose handwriting looks like Babylonian and I just simply can't make head or tail of anything she writes. Now. Now, there have been lots of systems of shorthand over the years, but as people became interested, as liter evolved in the 16th and 17th century, it became much more commonplace. There was a great interest in recording events. I mean, today people would go out now with a digital recorder and record conversations or interviews or if you were really fanatically interested in religion. And in those days, people were. You would sit down and you would record the sermons with an electronic recorder. They didn't have any such facility. And the only way you could possibly record these valuable pearls of wisdom, and this was particularly true at a time of religious factionalism, was to sit in the congregation writing out sermons. And that's what attracted the shorthand market. And amongst one of them was somebody called Thomas Shelton, who devised a system called tachygraphy, which is simply based on the Greek words for short writing. That's all it means. And it's a very primitive form of shorthand. He published it in books. It's essentially based on consonants and prefixes and suffixes. You normally omit the vowels, so there are symbols for individual letters, there are symbols for prefix and suffixes, and there are also arbitrary symbols for certain selected individual words. And I'll just take an example. If you take the figure eight and you lay it on its side, that's the shorthand sign for good. It's as simple as that, but is just simply a vertical stroke based on the same sign for B. And there are all sorts of examples of that. So it's relatively easy to write, and it's relatively easy to write it in a way that makes. So Pepys kept shorthand archival copies of his correspondence. Again, you know, today we keep a photocopy or just save it on file, but in those days that was the most convenient thing to do. And it's clear from what Pepys says that he must have learnt this as a student. It was quite popular at Cambridge, which is where he took his degree at Magdalen. And he never explains the rationale for all of this, but he launches into the diary in this shorthand system. He wrote it often late at night. He wrote it with a quill pen, presumably by candlelight. And this was eventually going to wreck his eyesight because of this very close work. And he also used this shorthand in his official business.
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- [16:27]
David Musgrove
Now the thing I want to focus on for a few minutes is these darker sides to his personality that have come to light because of the work that you've done and which haven't been so widely known before now. Actually, that's a question to ask. You've pointed out in your new book. These dark aspects that I mentioned at the top of the interview. Were those facets to Pepys personality known to Pepys scholars for all time and they were just coming to light to the wider public, or is this actually new stuff that most people didn't know?
- [16:58]
Guy Dillaburn Hoyer
Okay, that's a very good question. So let's say from the outset that there's no evidence whatsoever that in Pepys lifetime anyone other than his immediate circle and his victims were aware of what he got up to. As for the diary itself, it in my opinion serves as a confessional, but it's a confessional to himself. And he was also something of a collector and he wanted to record the conquests and activities that he indulged in. I think that it's important to say that, that Pepys was clearly a very physical and emotional person. He was someone who was moved to ecstasy by music. He lived something of an extreme. And all that was evident to the early people who transcribed the diary. But it's also quite clear. So John Smith was the first. He was a student at the time, became a cleric. This is the early 1800s. And he created the first transcription of the diary which was very selective and it's quite obvious from the editors. And it was somebody called Richard, Lord Braybrooke, as he was later ennobled, who published that edition, who explains that there's this very controversial, totally unacceptable material which cannot possibly be published. And this is one of the funniest things about Pepys is that these editors spend their time telling people that there's all this filth in there, but they're not going to tell anybody about what that filth is, which, of course, is very enticing and very titillating. And it sort of. It leaves people, what the hell is this stuff? And then in the 1870s, you get another edition. This is the minor, bright edition that he did publish his own version of it before Wheatley produced another version of it a few years later. And he also left out the vast bulk of these passages. And it became completely obvious to these men that what Pepys was writing about was an almost obsessive pursuit of women and girls and maids, so that he was assaulting his own maids, he was assaulting waitresses, he had regular mistresses with whom he was sleeping on a routine basis, some of whom had spotted that Pepys had power and authority and could get their husbands positions and jobs or their families were pushing the women into this. And Pepys seems to have been unable to stop himself. Now aware of what he was writing and beginning to record meant that he found various tactics to disguise that text further. Now, this will lead me to answer you in slightly more detail about the editors, because one of the complications is that Pepys started to write those passages in what you or I would call frongle, although in his case, I think it's better to call it Spronglay, because it's predominantly French and Spanish. So this is in shorthand, remember? And the shorthand was designed for English. But Pepys starts to write synonyms for the English words that he would have used in Spanish or French in shorthand. And it's a jumble, it's a mix up of English and these foreign languages. Initially, the editors in the past were completely confused by this. They didn't realise because Pepys hadn't written at the beginning of the diary, oh, watch out, folks, some of this is written in French at Spanish didn't say that. It's not immediately obvious until you realise that that's the case. So he started to do that. And he also, later in the diary, in some predominantly English passages, started to introduce extraneous letters, extra consonants, and that is actually a very interesting phenomenon in its own right. This frustrated the editors enormously. So having realised and then realised what it said, which is about, in a couple of instances, raping a mistress of his called Elizabeth Bagwell, and also some really quite uncomfortable detail about some of his sexual escapades, although more often he's oblique and he implies things rather than being explicit. They left them out until the 1970s edition. Now that's when you get a big change. But it goes back to the Obscene Publications act of 1959. So when the plans were being formed to publish the whole Darrit with nothing left out, they decided that they would include these passages. But even though Penguin had been found innocent over the Lady Chatterley escapade, they published Lady Chatterley's Lover. They were prosecuted, it went to court and the case collapsed. So they were found not guilty, and that should have opened the floodgates. Nevertheless, the editors of Pepys's diary, Robert Latham and William Mathes, were frightened. They were given legal advice saying, place out. So they published the passages, but they didn't analyse them and they didn't translate them. And because they didn't do either of those things, they made some mistakes in their transcription of the Spanish. And what that means is that quite a lot of those passages are almost impossible to translate or very difficult to get the correct meaning. In fact, the correct readings are surprisingly straightforward. Pepys had French and Spanish dictionaries and the Spanish dictionary is still in his library. And that was the solution to reading some of the words. I was amazed that nobody seemed to have done that before. Not trying to be clever about it, I really don't understand why that didn't happen. It's just sitting on a shelf nearby and if it had been used, they would have realised. So this is the first time that those passages have been translated. So what I've done now is I've translated these, but importantly, I've selected one narrative strand, because the problem with a diary is that it jumps from so many different things. It's all very well reading it, but in fact it's very difficult to follow any theme in a diary. If you take all these passages out, which I've done, and contextualize them, you can then see the pattern of Pepys's behavior and how he descends progressively into a kind of addiction to sex. The thrill, the secrecy, the hiding it, the risk. Something that is familiar to anybody who knows about, you know, people with compulsive disorders. For example, kleptomania is one, or gambling, which we now recognize to be mental health conditions, do we not? In those days, no one would have done so. I think there's a great deal about Pepys behavior that can be explained that way. But by suppressing these passages in the past or occluding them, which is what happened in the 1970s edition, you completely miss one side of his own self confessed personality. And so I hope that this will sort of redress the balance. This isn't what Pepys was all about. This is part of his life. But if you cut that part out, then you don't have the whole man.
- [23:33]
David Musgrove
So you just mentioned kind of the risks that Pepys faced with this sort of activity. What were they? I mean, aside from the risks to his marriage, it's important to say that he was married during this period. Was his sexual behaviour towards women particularly anomalous at the time? Would people have been disgusted by his behaviour?
- [23:53]
Guy Dillaburn Hoyer
Well, let's say from the outset. We have no equivalent record of anybody else, so it's impossible to make a direct comparison. On the other hand, we know that the royal court was conspicuous for the infidelities of the King, the Duke of York. They flaunted their mistresses publicly. So there was this impression that the elite did exactly what they wanted, flying in the face of contemporary morality. And people believed that this decadence was going to bring about a sort of destruction to society. In those days, he faced direct personal risks through his profession. If he'd been caught, involved in corruption, he risked exposure and therefore, although many of them were corrupt, they took gifts and all sorts of bribes for positions and contracts and things. But there's always that risk of being denounced in public. And of course he faced the terrible risk of being caught by his wife. Let's not forget that Pepys had had an operation for a bladder stone in 1658. There seems to have been a particular problem in those days, something to do with the water. He was in such agony. He underwent an operation that would make anybody squawk, even at the thought of, because it meant an incision between the scrotum and the anus with a totally unsterilised set of instruments, the bladder cut open. And in his case, a stone the size of a contemporary tennis ball, which is a bit smaller than today, dragged out of his bladder. I mean, I could see your eyes are watering even at the thought of that. And this almost certainly sterilized him. Pepys didn't know that he survived. He was very grateful for surviving. But one of his tactics was always to encourage his mistresses to be married. And he preferred married mistresses because then that would have been a cover had they fallen pregnant. They never did buy him. Nor did his wife Elizabeth, who was herself afflicted with all sorts of gynecological disorders that made her life very uncomfortable. And, you know, she was in many ways a very unhappy woman. She, of course, eventually does catch Pepys, possibly, some people think entrapped by her. But famously, she catches him with his hand up the skirts of her companion, Deborah Willett, who is a girl of about 18. That comes towards the latter part of the diary.
- [25:54]
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- [25:54]
Guy Dillaburn Hoyer
And although that completely undoes things for Pepys, incredibly, in that last seven, eight months of the diary, he continues, incredibly, to seek out his other mistresses. He just can't stop himself. The risk is part of the thrill and one has to understand that psychologically it's dancing with death. And some people think that if you live in an age with plague and fire, the fact that you're alive means it's a kind of. Of damn the future. Just live for the moment, indulge yourself, because you don't know what's around the corner.
- [26:27]
David Musgrove
What does his diary say about how he actually got away with this, in the sense of how he persuaded the women to be engaged with him? Was he, like, a handsome charmer? Was he using his power or was he in fact corrupt and offering bribes to people?
- [26:44]
Guy Dillaburn Hoyer
Multiple possible explanations. We've got paintings of Pepys, but we don't know what his physical presence was like and we don't know what his voice sounded like, in my opinion, and it's only an opinion. He must have had a considerable level of personal charisma. There must have been something around him about him that some women found so attractive that they were unable eventually to resist. Only some, I hasten to add, nevertheless, he was only just over 5 foot tall. So we're not talking about, you know, a magnificent, Errol Flynn, like, male spe specimen. We're talking about somebody, let's just say, not very tall by today's standards and not a particularly imposing presence. However, it's clear that he executed a certain amount of grooming, particularly with younger girls, once he'd taken a shine to in inns or what we would call pubs today, that he would, sorry for the phrase, start touching them up in a sort of intrusive way. He certainly in church would, if he took a shine to a maid, he could start trying to accost them. But there's one girl who fends him off with pins, she's so irate. So he's tending to approach women of lower social status people. This is a very deferential society. They would have found it hard to know how to react to a man of that in his own household. He has a certain amount of what would have been regarded in those days as entitlement as the boss. And they Certainly wouldn't have known how to fight back. And there was no recourse to legal protection. You're not going to call the police and make an allegation, a no one's going to believe you and there's no one to call in the first place. So although there are in fact prosecutions for rape at the period, they're very, very difficult to bring. There was a book at the time that came out that Pepys would certainly have known of, where the author talks about the incredibly bad situation that women and girls were in, that they were totally powerless to resist all this, that they were always being subjected to it. Then, as far as the corruption is concerned, Pepys knows or discovers that he has the power. But it is a bit. This is a difficult subject today. We have to understand it's not the same as it is now. In those days, women had very, very little power of any sort, very little power over their own futures. Some of that power was if they could use their sexuality to obtain positions or advantages for their husbands, because if their husbands were employed, it meant their own security was greatly enhanced and their families knew that too. Now it's very difficult, difficult to unravel all of this. But Elizabeth Bagwell, who is one of Pepys's mistresses, there is no question, because Pepys talks about it, her family, which means her husband and her husband's parents, are pushing her into liaisons with Pepys because they have recognized that he is corruptible. His reputation must have preceded him. Now, that relationship, although it's extremely uncomfortable for Elizabeth Bagwell, lasts so long, long that well after the diary period in the 1680s, she is still coming to his office to try and persuade him to give her husband a professional advantage. At which point Pepys sends her away. She's in her 40s by then and he's an older man. If Pepys was still doing this sort of thing, it certainly wouldn't have been with women like her. We don't know because there isn't any evidence from that period. But it shows you that this is a very complicated web of corruption and jeopardy. There's a naval widow called. She's another Elizabeth and, you know, they're all called Elizabeth. Extraordinary. Elizabeth Burrows. She's widowed. Her husband was killed in the Second Dutch War. She was known to be attractive, she had lots of children. She eventually, out of desperation to get some sort of payment from the Navy for her husband's wages, she slides into acceding to Pepys sexual demands and he exploits that. Right.
- [30:33]
David Musgrove
This all begs the Obvious big question that we've talked about a little bit as to why on earth he wrote this and why on earth he allowed his diaries to be sort of kept because he didn't burn them afterwards. He'd written this stuff which he knew was going to be dangerous and presumably he knew would blacken his reputation in years to come. But he didn't throw it in a fire. What on earth is going on? Why did he write this guy? What can you say to explain it?
- [30:58]
Guy Dillaburn Hoyer
Well, let's be clear. First of all, he never does explain it. So we don't have anything to base that on. And you're completely correct. He goes to considerable trouble to preserve the diary in his library remains there, the six volumes of it, and they're still there to this day, he took steps to make sure that they would be preserved along with everything else, in my opinion. And again, it's only an opinion. Throughout the diary he refers to his guilt and his shame. He makes a number of oaths that he's not going to carry on like this. But we all know that people like that, they break their oaths constantly. They can't resist the temptation. So he is consumed by an element of total self disgust quite a lot of the time. I think that writing the diary had several things for him. For a start, as I may have mentioned earlier, he was a collector. He collected coins, he collected medals, he collected songs, he collected ballads, he collected fashion prints. He liked to accumulate things and archive them. I think in a way, on one hand he was collecting his conquests. So he knew, and this is not actually there was a French serial sex offender in the news not very long ago. And one of the reasons, reasons he's been caught and charged with so many crimes is that he kept his own archive of his conquests. I don't think I'm misquoting that. I'm sure that's what happened. So this is a facet to that condition, if you like, is wanting to record it, not wanting to lose all of that. And the other way is, I think it's a sort of expiation. But by confessing what he had done to himself and somehow, strangely for posterity, he was setting the record straight. But it does mean that if you take the whole dialogue and that's everything from his physical health to watching the Great Fire of London, to his sexual behavior, we end up with a completely unmatched self portrait by an individual. Most of us, no matter what we've done, would balk at setting it down anywhere we'd Want to bury it. We wouldn't write it, we'd destroy it if we even wrote it down in the first place. Most people, you know, there's always a litany of political biographies, aren't there, about often written books by the politicians themselves. And of course, what they write is a very colored version of events. They want their own version of it and leave out the bits that are uncomfortable. Pepys is one of those very, very remarkable individuals who just. There it all is, it's all there. And to be honest, Dave, I don't think we'll ever have a full explanation for this. It's just not there.
- [33:40]
David Musgrove
I mean, it's very strange. And your work just adds a very interesting new angle to exploring this man who. Clearly a fascinating man. But I wonder, to wrap up the conversation, how you think we should feel about Pepys now, given that you've identified these very dark aspects to his personality. Obviously it gives, as you say, a much rounder picture of the man and what he did. But should we be sort of looking at his diaries in a new way? Should he be cancelled? Should we be looking at his diaries at all?
- [34:09]
Guy Dillaburn Hoyer
That's a very, very good question. Because if you were dealing with a modern individual whose secret track record had been exposed, our custom today is to destroy that person's reputation completely. So they are cancelled in the parlance of the era. What do we do with the historical figure? That's very hard because you're looking at a time when standards were different and that doesn't excuse them. But they were different. We might regret that they were. Pepys made an enormous difference to the Royal Navy. His record of 17th century life in London is so vivid and compelling that were we to say, well, we must cancel Pepys's diary, we can't look at that ever again, we would be removing one of the most important pieces of evidence for everyday life in this country, in London in the 1600s on which so much is based. And, you know, from a historical perspective, we can't possibly afford to do that. I can't really answer what we do about. I know that some people have found the content of the book really distinct, disturbing and distressing. But I think it's also. Although vast majority of people are not going to behave anything like this, I think perhaps we all ought to recognize that none of us is wholly perfect and that we are all very complicated mixes of different sorts of things, good and bad. That's what makes it. And we're all prone to certain types of temptation, even if it's Nothing to do with what Pepys indulged in. So I suppose the diary is a fact. Fact. It's a collection of facts. It is as it was. But I do think that if the diary is going to exist as in our archives, it deserves to be the whole thing. Not something where individuals have taken it upon themselves either to cut bits out, to falsify the reputation of peeps. And some of the editors did. They falsified Pepys own account of himself or to occlude it, which in my opinion is what happened in the 1970s. It's there, but it's kind of not there. It was deliberately designed to dissuade readers from fully realizing what was there. And in some cases I believe, and it's only my opinion, but some of the mistakes are so obvious that I believe in a few cases they were deliberate. It made it impossible to read. And it's only when you get to somebody like me, and you're right, I'm one of terribly few people, I don't know how many, two, three, four, five maybe, who can read this. I have very little expertise in life, but believe it or not, being able to read Samuel Pepys is one of them and it's taken an awfully long time to get there. One thing I will say, make it different for me from all the other previous editors is that I could blow it all up digitally on screen. That was impossible for previous editors, even if they'd imagined doing it. So I'm very privileged. It's a very lucky time to be. And with Pepys Spanish dictionary I didn't have to go and look at it. I got it off Google Books. There it is, all these things. It's just all there now. It's much easier for me to do that anyway. Yes. So that's my answer.
- [37:08]
David Musgrove
That's an excellent answer. And you do yourself a great disservice by saying you're not an expert in things. You're an expert in many things. So don't put yourself down like that. But Guy, thank you so much for that. A very interesting and thought provoking conversation about a very interesting individual who we should understand better, and we do now from your book, which is the Confessions of Samuel Pepys, His Private Revelations, as you said, on sale now. Thank you very much.
- [37:35]
Guy Dillaburn Hoyer
Thank you, Dave.
- [37:38]
Podcast Host/Announcer
That was the author, historian and broadcaster Guy Dillaburn Hoyer speaking to David Musgrove. Guy's book on this subject is the Confession of Samuel Pepys, His Private Revelations. And you can read an article by Guy on this topic@historyextra.com or by downloading the History Extra app now.