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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit. With a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series, A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward/subscribe.
- [00:32]
Ray Winstone
Hello, it's Ray Winstone. I'm here to tell you about my podcast on BBC Radio 4, History's Toughest Heroes. I got stories about the pioneers, the rebels, the outcasts who define tough. And that was the first time that anybody ever ran a car up that fast with no tires on. It almost feels like your eyeballs are going to come out of your head. Tough enough for you? Subscribe to History's Toughest Heroes wherever you get your podcast.
- [01:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare, to summarize, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. I don't know about you, but I've always thought there's something a bit magical about keeping a diary. It can be the most intimate of companions, a place to pour your worries, secrets and triumphs, never really expecting anyone else to read them, perhaps hoping they won't. And yet, when we do get to peep into someone else's diary, it feels like opening a window straight into their world. Unfiltered, messy, honest in a way that history books so often aren't. One of the most famous and extraordinary examples of this is the diary of Samuel pepys. In the 1660s, he sat down almost every day to record his life and times and what times they were, shaken by plague, fire and war, but also full of gossip, theatre, dinners, mistresses and even kidney stones. Over nine years, Pepys wrote some 1.25 million words. It's one of the most vivid records of Restoration England ever created. And yet, if anyone had read it while he was alive, with its candid accounts of sex, corruption and scandal, it could have cost him his career as well as his marriage. After Pepys death, the diary sat hidden for more than a century in the library at Magdalen College, Cambridge, locked away in shorthand. When it was finally published in 1825, it was heavily censored. Pepys tied it up made, respectable, turned into a charming commentator on London life rather than the messy, complicated, very human figure he really was. And that's why I think his diary still fascinates us today. Pepys chronicled not only the Great Fire of London and other great events, but also the small details, the jealousies, the pleasures, the everyday dramas that make him at once a man of his own time and strikingly modern. For two centuries, people have argued over what to include, how to interpret it, or even who Pepys really was. Loyal crown servant, vain social climber, sexual predator, serial adulterer, or even a kind of national everyman. This episode comes thanks to one of our listeners, Angela Mayfield from Georgia in the United States.
- [03:56]
Angela Mayfield
Hello, history hit hosts and scholars. My name is Angela Mayfield and I'm a Not just the Tutors listener from Georgia in the us so, having not received a British primary education, I only recently encountered diarist Samuel Pepys. And I was instantly obsessed with this legendary 17th century mad lad who famously buried his cheese during the Great Fire of London. But the more I learn about him, the more I find that the cheese is barely the beginning of this incredible character. So what does Pepys tell us in his diary and what does he leave out? What can we learn about daily life as well as the political and social machinations of the Stuart Restoration happening around Pepys from his writing? Professor Lipscomb, I must know, what was this cheeky chappie truly getting up to? Did he really have a bladder stone removed without anesthesia and kiss the very dead corpse of Catherine of Valois? And what's the adjusted value of a partial wheel of slightly dirty 17th century Parmesan cheese? I'm so anxious to hear all about our man Sam. Thank you so much and cheers.
- [05:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It is our pleasure to do so. Joining me today to talk about Pepys is Professor Kate Loveman, who last joined me on Not Just the tudors back in August 2020 to talk about Pepys and his books. Do go back and find that episode. Kate Loveman is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Leicester and edited and annotated Pepys Diary for Everyman. Her latest book, the Strange History of Samuel Pepys Diary, explores not just how the diary was made, but how it's been preserved, censored, published and reinterpreted across the generations. And it's just won the Samuel Pepys Award 2025, awarded by the Samuel Pepys Club every two years to a book that makes the greatest contribution to the understanding of Samuel Pepys, his times or his contemporaries. I'M Professor Susannah Lipscomb and this is Not Just the Tudors from History hit. Professor Lovman, congratulations and welcome back to Not Just the Tudors.
- [06:10]
Professor Kate Loveman
Thank you very much and thank you for having me.
- [06:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So I think the first place I'd like to start is the fact that Samuel Pepys took what looks like quite a big risk, leaving his diary to Magdalene College, Cambridge, knowing that at any moment it could be read and used to destroy his reputation posthumously. Why did he do that?
- [06:30]
Professor Kate Loveman
I think he had, by the time he had finished his diary, so he finished in 1669, final decision to leave the diary to Magdalen in 1703, he'd had time to recognise that this was a diary that first of all contained eyewitness, vivid accounts of major historical events like the Great Fire, the Plague. And he also, by that point, had really developed a passion for naval history. So he was probably thinking of his diary as something that could inform a naval history which would give a starring role to Samuel Pepys. So it had material in it that made the gamble worthwhile. He also, however, weighted the dice about who might access it. So by leaving it to Magdalen, he was leaving it under the guardianship of the Head of Magdalen, who was not likely to let the name of a great benefactor to the college be besmirched by publishing anything too dangerous. It was, of course, in shorthand, which meant it was going to be quite difficult for anybody to read. Even in 1703, you'd have had to make an effort. And he also had enciphered further bits of the diary, diary that contained some of the sexual passages, so there were extra protections on some of the most sensitive bits. And leaving it in Magdalene with these kind of protections in meant that it's really unlikely that somebody who was actively hostile to Samuel Pepys was going to come along and spend the time to actually filter this huge document for the bits that would be damaging to Pepys. He was setting the weighting the dice for people who were going to be sympathetic to him, I think.
- [08:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
How important do you think Pepys's diary has been in changing the way people think about history? Because it gives as much weight to everyday experiences as it does major events.
- [08:21]
Professor Kate Loveman
It's had quite a significant effect, but a very gradual one. So when it was first published, a number of the kind of comments on it were, this diary hasn't really changed our views of history and we're not really sure how significant it is. And that was because what Pepys had written and what had been published in that Version didn't significantly change the main narrative of the Restoration. So, you know, people knew about the plague, they knew about the Great Fire, but it has propelled social history. So social history, just as a term being coined when the diary was first published in 1825, it's helped throughout the diary's 200 years of being in print to bring social history to the fore, and if only by provoking debate about, you know, which bits of the diary are interesting, what matters. The diary has had quite an important role in encouraging the discussion of social history. And it arrived at exactly the right time, really, for people to begin to value it for that reason.
- [09:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, so give us an idea. What does he write about?
- [09:28]
Professor Kate Loveman
He writes about this amazing variety of material. So most entries proceed from the start of his day to the end of his day. So he will tell you about getting up, what he had for breakfast, what he did at the office, shuttling around London to visit various shops or to talk about the latest gossip. Because his job is bringing him into contact with court, he may talk about political gossip and what the King has been up to. He will talk about the price of eels. He will talk quite a lot about financial matters generally, talks about his colleagues, often feuds, his problems with home improvements, his relationship with his wife, and increasingly about sexual encounters with a range of different women and girls. By the end of his diary, he's describing it as a document that records his pleasures. Documenting sex and documenting other exciting things, like going to the theatre, increasingly come to the fore.
- [10:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Do you think that gives us an answer to the question, why did he write it?
- [10:29]
Professor Kate Loveman
I think there are a lot of different answers to that question because he was writing over nine years and it was serving him for a lot of different purposes. He, for example, used it to vent his spleen. Sometimes he was using it to monitor his health, which was something he was very worried about. You mentioned he suffered from the stone, from kidney stones. He used it to, I think, often because he didn't have anybody who was particularly close that he could talk to other than his wife. And one of the very useful ways of thinking about the diary and something that historian Mark Dawson has suggested, is that it is a way for people to monitor and improve his social status. So quite a lot of the information in the diary can be kind of understood by thinking about it as Pepys trying to work out how best to present himself and kind of strategizing about what other people think about him.
- [11:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, his diary was, as I understand it, part of a kind of larger record keeping attempt. You Know, got bills and letters and other papers and things. Would it be fair to describe him as a bit of a hoarder?
- [11:33]
Professor Kate Loveman
Yeah, he was a pack rat. He was quite a careful pack rat in that he did go through and periodically destroy records he thought would damage him, which is interesting because he never destroyed the diary. But the diary's kind of the product of other forms of record keeping. He was noting his spending as he went round London and keeping short notes, and some of those were bound into the diary, so they do survive. But he was keeping letter books about his work, correspondence. He was making all kinds of different notes. He at various times kept other diaries, so there's a whole host of different kinds of paperwork about the life of Samuel Pepys, some of which he deliberately preserved and some of which seem to have survived by good luck, really.
- [12:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So in some ways there's a practical side to it there, kind of tracking his finances, for example.
- [12:20]
Professor Kate Loveman
Yes. So he will tell you the diary is pretty good at noting certain things involved spending. So he might begin an entry by saying, the poor were clustering around my coach, asking for money. And that is probably because he wrote down in his financial notes that he had given something. Or he'll tell you about, as I mentioned, eels in the middle of the Great Fire entry. He's talking about the costs of bread and eels and things like that going up. Spending matters to him and how he spends his money as part of what he uses his diary for. Is it worth spending money on new clothes, for example? The answer to that is usually yes, as far as he's concerned.
- [12:56]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's funny, it reminds me, when I'm deciding whether to buy something new or not, I will contact a friend who will, without fail, tell me it's a good idea. So he's kind of using the diary as that sort of sounding board. Now, journaling was quite a popular practice in the 17th century. You write. So in what ways is Pepys unique among his contemporaries?
- [13:19]
Professor Kate Loveman
Yes, he is unusual in the range of material that his diary contains and in the detail. So that alone makes it very different. Stuart Sherman, who has done a lot of work on diaries, has said that Pepys diary is the first recorded example in English of a diary that goes from start to finish each day. And also the first known example of a diary that records every day across a long span. Those are things that are actually, to us, look normal for a diary, but would have been fairly distinctive in Pepys's time. He was not unusual, really, in writing his diary in shorthand. This was something that other people did because they recognised that shorthand gave you a level of privacy. But yes, quite. How he put together his formula for his diary, that's a really interesting mystery. You can see where he gets parts of it from, like religious record keeping as an influence. Founders record keeper is an influence. But some of it he seems to have come up of his own account, really.
- [14:21]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you say in shorthand. Nowadays, when we think of shorthand, we think of Pitman shorthand. It's an established kind of code. Is this Pepys own device, shorthand, or is it something that other people could have broken?
- [14:34]
Professor Kate Loveman
He was using one of the most popular shorthands of his day. So he was using a shorthand which had been invented by a man called Thomas Shelton and was called Tychigraphy. And it had been around since the 1620s and it was sold on London bookstores. You could go buy manuals of Thomas Shelton's shorthand. And Thomas Shelton was touting his shorthand around Cambridge in particular, and London, both places where Pepys had been. So shorthand was. It was quite new in the sense that it was a late 16th century invention generally, and it was regarded by people who visited England as being a bit of an English fad. They noted that a lot of people sat and took notes during sermons using shorthand. So Pepys probably learned it partly because it was a fashionable, useful thing for young men in particular to do if you wanted to become a clerk, which was where he was heading. It made financial sense as your skill set. But he obviously clearly valued its secrecy element for his diary in particular.
- [15:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Am I right in thinking that he went further than using shorthand information in trying to conceal the contents of his diaries?
- [15:44]
Professor Kate Loveman
Yes, yeah. The shorthand would not have stopped anybody who knew his particular shorthand from reading anything. And it certainly wasn't going to stop anybody who was very determined from reading it. He added some extra measures of protection. The first thing that he started to do was to write some passages involving sex in French, whilst also writing in shorthand. Shortly after that, a year or so after that, he started to switch languages between writing in a mix of English, French, Spanish, Latin, sometimes the odd bit of Greek. And then shortly after that, he started to put in extra shorthand symbols. So all of these things combined mean that there are certain passages that are really quite difficult to read. You have to put a lot of effort into them. So, yes, that was not a very consistent method. He didn't always do it with all of the sensitive passages, but he certainly was doing it enough to suggest that he was getting increasingly thoughtful about the prospect that people other than him might one day read this diary.
- [16:45]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And who do you think he was worried might read it?
- [16:48]
Professor Kate Loveman
On a fairly practical level, the person who was most likely to come across his diary was his wife. If he died in particular, she might well go through his papers. His household servants might accidentally happen upon it. Particularly towards the end, in the late 1660s, he was getting quite a lot of enemies to his work, and he had seen examples where his colleagues had been arrested and had their papers seized. And that was certainly something he was worried about in later life, after he'd finished the diary, that the government officials or rival politicians might come along and get their hands on things. So he was quite careful about his record keeping in that sense. I think those are probably the categories of people he had in mind.
- [17:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And interestingly, I suppose the fact that he was using shorthand must change the character of the prose.
- [17:38]
Professor Kate Loveman
Yes. Well, to sort of explain a little bit about Shelton's shorthand, Shelton's shorthand has symbols for letters, and it has symbols for certain words that Shelton regards as common words. So words like and, for example, have their own symbol, including, because this is a shorthand that's devised partly for taking sermons. You know, words like heaven have their own symbol. So Pepys shorthand does tend to use words that are easy to write in shorthand. Some words are easy to write than others, and it also makes use of the common symbols. So when he says he has catchphrases, so things like and so to bed are dead easy to write in shorthand. That is really simple. That's minimal shorthand effort. When he's excited about something, he will say it is mightily something, or these kinds of words. You can see him falling into certain patterns because words are relatively straightforward in shorthand to use. But Lord is another of his exclamations. So once you sort of have a sense of what the shorthand is like, you can start to see why his word choice is the way it is. And that does help to make his prose more direct and straightforward than certainly when he's writing in longhand. Depending on the circumstances, he can be really ponderous and verbose. And the switch with his diary is.
- [18:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Very dramatic and are the portions of the diary that are in longhand.
- [19:03]
Professor Kate Loveman
So if you could page the diary, what you see is a page full of symbols with a word written in longhand at the top the month. And you will see odd words down the page in longhand. So it's really normal to write names for people and place names in longhand. And Pepys will then also write some other words in longhand, sometimes because those words are difficult or bit complicated to write in shorthand, just easier to do it in longhand. But sometimes he seems to be using words in longhand as a kind of. Basically the way we might use bolder underlining to make them jump off the page. It makes the page of shorthand easier to navigate. It makes the diary a bit more easy to navigate. If you can read through and look for the longhand. You often get a little summary of an episode by looking at the longhand that's jumping off the page at you.
- [19:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And we've just been talking about his sort of fears of people reading it. But do you think there was any sense that he hoped the diary would.
- [20:02]
Professor Kate Loveman
One day be read by the end of his life? Yes, because he left it to Magdalen in circumstances that meant it was going to be read by somebody at some point. And he. I think he probably had, by the time he was ending his diary, began to think of it as something that would one day be useful. Whether at that point he expected it to be read in its entirety, I don't know. But he seems to. One of the things about Pepys is that by about the middle of the 1660s, he was thinking about writing history himself. He wanted to be a naval historian, and people have been saying to him, you should really start to think about writing up some recent naval events or maybe a history of the English navy. So he may have started to think that he would be able to take bits from the diary and rework those himself. And in the end, as I suggested earlier, maybe he was leaving it because he expected that somebody else would come along and take out the relevant bits to write a naval history or to write a history of the Restoration, even.
- [21:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Do we have any idea, Kate, why Pepys stopped writing his diary? Or is that impossible to know? Literally, because he stopped.
- [21:10]
Professor Kate Loveman
Oh, he tells us so, fortunately. So he stopped because he feared he was going blind. He'd been having increasing difficulty with his sight from the middle of the 1660s, and when he gets to 1669, he was afraid he was going blind. So he writes in his last diary entry that he has to stop. This is the 31st of May, 1669, so it's in the middle of a year. He said, I've got to stop because I fear this is damaging my sight. And he says he's doing so exceptionally reluctantly. He says that ending his diary is like seeing himself go to his Grave. He says that he hopes that. He says that he thinks actually now that he is losing his sight, he might not have anything that's worth writing about. His pleasures are being denied him. And he says, my amours to Deb are past, referring to the fact that he's now ended, or has been forced to end a relationship with his wife's servant that he had been documenting. So what he says suggests that the diaries become a way of recording secretly illicit pleasures. And he needs shorthand to do that. He says, I'm ending it. If I do continue anything, it's going to be in longhand. It will have to be taken down by my servants. I might write something in shorthand in the margin if there's anything worth keeping secret. And then he ends. So he feared he was going blind. He actually wasn't. He continued to have eye trouble. He did keep other diaries, but they weren't as detailed or as various as this 1660s one.
- [22:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And how old was he during the time of the diary?
- [22:51]
Professor Kate Loveman
I suppose so he started when he was 26 and he kept it for nine and a half years. So he was middle aged, at least in 17th century terms when he ended it. And he's. But he still had. His real career achievements were still ahead of him. So it's a shame that he did not keep writing, if only for that reason.
- [23:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
He was 35 as middle aged. Okay, so we'll talk a bit more in due course about some of the ways we should read him. But I do want to ask you at this stage how he presents his relationship with his wife, Elizabeth. What's his relationship with her look like in his writings?
- [23:26]
Professor Kate Loveman
He is very attached to her. He always refers to her as my wife. She's never called Elizabeth throughout the 1,250,000 words in the diary. So that is possibly partly because he didn't want her to come along and see her name in the diary. As I mentioned, names are normally written in longhand, but it was also a sign of his kind of attachment to her that he finds it difficult to imagine her identity completely separate from his. He talks about her often with some element of frustration. We hear quite a lot about what she's not done right, but we also hear about him taking advice from her and about him realising that often she is a little bit smarter than he gave her credit for. She refers to her as being cunning and when she least shows it, she's being cunning. Elizabeth was quite keen, like he was, to improve herself. So she was busy learning things. She was learning the Skills that gentle women should know, like drawing and painting, music, which was one of Pepys passions, and also things like mathematics and geography she was working on. So she was in some ways a really good partner for him. But they both came from not completely genteel backgrounds. So Pepys's father was a tailor and Elizabeth's dad, whilst he was a gentleman, was an impoverished French refugee. So they both criticised each other's backgrounds when they fought, which was not that infrequently calling each other, criticizing each other's families was part of the repertoire. So we get a really detailed portrait of their marriage from this diary, at least a portrait from Pepys side of the marriage.
- [25:23]
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- [26:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, if he records the criticisms she makes of him as well as his of her, then actually he's trying his best to offer a fairly impartial account, I suppose.
- [26:46]
Professor Kate Loveman
Yes. She calls him pricklous, which is a way of being offensive about his family background as a tailor. So she knows how to push the buttons. After these disputes, he sometimes seems to be writing them up to evaluate to what extent he was justified or, you know, is she right? So we do sort of get not just his views, but hers incorporated. And that's always been something that's really fascinated readers ever since the diary was first published. They've kind of wanted to know more about Elizabeth's view.
- [27:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So it was first published in 1825. Why was this edition so heavily edited?
- [27:21]
Professor Kate Loveman
There was material in Pepys diary which was just too obscene to publish and would have got you arrested if you'd done it. So that was one reason somebody to have clearly had to go. But the editor of that diary, Lloyd Braybrooke, explained to his readers at the start that Pepys was in the habit of reading, writing about trifling occurrences, and that he, Braybrooke, had therefore had to cut back the material quite drastically to focus on matters of public interest. So trifling occurrences meant what we might call social history. A lot of this kind of peeps bouncing around London talking to shopkeepers, talking to everyday people, that was less significant and its historical value was not as clear because of the ways that history is understood. So Braybrooke was trying to produce an edition that would be a hit. So he cut out a lot of the social history, not all of it, but quite a lot of it. Most of Pepys private life went. And he also was busy tailoring Pepys to look like a credible, authoritative Georgian gentleman, which was no mean task because Pepys was not very polite in his language. He does record doing things like taking bribes. He says things about the Church of England that Braybrooke cut because they were unorthodox. So he was busy trying to make Pepys look like a credible source, amongst other things, and that included being respectable, polite and not including trifling information.
- [28:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I do feel that professor of trifling occurrences might be an aspiration for some social historians out there. Did the fact that Pepys diary was in shorthand create a barrier for those early 19th century editors to their comprehension?
- [29:15]
Professor Kate Loveman
It did not that Braybrooke was too bothered about that. Braybrooke couldn't read shorthand himself and was absolutely unrepentant about this. When people wrote to him sort of 40 years later, saying, you know, can you tell us about whether the diary actually reflects what Peake said in his, you know, his spelling? He said, don't actually read shorthand, but I'm sure it does. The person who actually did the work on doing the first full transcript of the diary was a student called John Smith. It's always a student to, yes, get the student to do the tedious academic labour. So John Smith prepared the transcript and he actually did a really, really good job of it. He managed to deal with most of Pepys's efforts, extra protection, so the switching languages, he sorted out. The extra letters being added in, he sorted out. So what Braybrooke and the people involved the first edition were presented with was an almost, but not entirely complete transcription of the diary from that point on, however. So John Smith was the first person that we know about, after Samuel Pepys, to actually read through all of the diary. He Seems to have remained the only person to have done that until the 1870s. So the diary became exceptionally famous at a point where only one person had really actually read all of it. And I say that because the transcript of the diary did not contain all of the. Sometimes John Smith simply wrote the word objectionable when he got to a passage that he regarded as too obscene. He did get over that later on. He started doing that initially in the diary with the extra coding that was involved. By the time he got to the end, he'd given up on that attempt at censorship for one reason or another. Possibly he just got better at reading it, but he may have realised that he was cutting large chunks, really, when he did that, that were difficult to justify. If he was transcribing the whole, maybe.
- [31:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
He grew up a bit.
- [31:08]
Professor Kate Loveman
Yep. What was the reaction?
- [31:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What did reviewers have to say about the publication?
- [31:14]
Professor Kate Loveman
So there's a very enthusiastic reaction. This was a high class production, so it was aimed at people who had a good deal of money and could afford an expensive edition. The main words that people used to describe it were entertaining and curious. So curious means both interesting and intrigu, but also strange and weird. They were quite astonished that Pepys would write this down and they were also astonished that he would leave it for people to read. There's quite a lot of speculation about what Samuel Pepys might think if he were to realise, or was alive to realise, his diary had become a high class publishing phenomenon. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, people weren't entirely sure about the historical value of the diary. There were reviewers that said, this is, you know, it's interesting, but it's nothing new. And there were others, reviewers who was making arguments that it was actually important to think about what they called the mass of the people, middle classes, usually what they meant. And you couldn't have a proper history that properly understood social change without the kinds of minute details that Pepys and other diaries provided. So it started to get some debate going about what history meant. It also started to get debate going about censorship because it very quickly became known that what Braybrooke had cut included scandalous passages and included which Braybrooke had not said scandalous passages about Samuel Pepys. People wanted to see more of the diary and that became a real public pressure that eventually led to more of the diary being published.
- [32:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. So there were three major expanded editions of the diary, you say, in the 19th century. Tell me a bit about the debate around editorial ethics.
- [33:09]
Professor Kate Loveman
People were people. I say reviewers were increasingly frustrated that Braybrooke essentially had the monopoly on Samuel Pepys. So Braybrooke was. If you are interested in Samuel pepys in the 19th century, your only access to Samuel Pepys is really through Lord Braybrooke and Magdalene College. Bear in mind, you can't turn up and check the manuscript because it's in shorthand and it is not public for most of the 19th century, what that shorthand is. And Braybrooke is reluctant to release. And Magdalen, I think College also was not particularly keen to release all of the diary. Again, it was illegal. Some of it would have been illegal to print, but they were carefully guarding people's reputation. So we get a lot of complaints increasingly about people being denied access to the diary. Even scholars are not being allowed to see this diary. We also get a lot of slightly more frivolously intended complaining that we want to know the secrets. What is Peake's hiding? We want the scandalous detail. When people can't get their hands on that, they start to write fiction, paint pictures, write parodies that are filling in the gaps. Great.
- [34:21]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I didn't know there was a sort of fan fiction around Samuel Pepys. It's amazing.
- [34:24]
Professor Kate Loveman
Oh, yeah. By the. Braybrook publishes an expanded edition in the late 1840s. And that prompts. The prime example is that this is a diary that comes out over the course of about a year. So you're waiting for the next installment and what will be revealed at the point it ends. The new monthly magazine publishes a fiction called An Evening With Nepal and Nep is one of the actresses with whom Pepys has a relationship. And this is a sort of invented episode about Elizabeth Pepys chasing Mrs. Knapp and Samuel Pepys around London, trying to catch them in the act, along with Mrs. Knapp's husband, who is also part of this sort of farrago. So that's been published, and that's explicitly according to the magazine being published to satisfy the need for. And the word used is racy, racy Samuel Pepys material, you know. So the diary hasn't quite given us what we wanted in this edition. It's now over. We're not going to get any more for a while. Here is your Victorian fan fiction to fill in the gap.
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- [36:51]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
In the 20th century. There's a real surge in popularity in Pepys's diary. Why do you think that is?
- [36:58]
Professor Kate Loveman
There was a big surge in the 1930s, which is a partly because it was tercentenary of Pepys birth. He was born in 1633, so there were quite a lot of books out around that time. But the real turning point I think was the Second World War, because there's one writer at that time in the newspaper said Samuel Pepys seems to be everywhere. People were suddenly noticing all of these correspondences between the 1940s and the 1660s. So Pepys had talked about London being evacuated. In his case was the plague. So London was being evacuated in the 1940s. He talks about being at war, in his case, the Dutch war and being involved in a European war again was close to the bone. And he talks about the Great Fire of London and these being read by people in the 1940s who were living under the Blitz and what was called the Second Great Fire of London, which was a particularly bad night of the Blitz. So these parallels were really coming to the fore. And Pepys was by that time featuring in radio broadcasts and was also regularly featuring newspapers, including one particular parody of the diary, which was rewriting it as if it was done in the 1940s. So there were lots of ways you could encounter Pepys and he really resonated with readers in terms of both big historical events. You're living through big historical events, but also how living through big historical events can be kind of really tedious and just difficult. And you feel like you're kind of not living up to being a hero and things still, the everyday problems like the price of food or your annoying spouse still to the front of your mind. And people seem to find reading peaks really reassuring. If England and Britain can get through the 1660s, they stand a chance of getting through the 1940s. And if Pepys is not presenting a particularly heroic figure, but we still value what he's got to say, you know, many hundreds of years later. Perhaps it's all right if you're not feeling particularly heroic as you're living. And, you know, dealing with rationing and everyday life is just tedious as well as scary. So that kind of raised his status. He was already very well known and very celebrated, but he's got this kind of new resonance after the Second World War.
- [39:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yet the complete diary still hadn't been published. When did that happen? Why did it take so long?
- [39:41]
Professor Kate Loveman
It hadn't been published partly because of the law. So the Obscene Publications act, which was in existence for the first part of the 20th century, at various points, Magdalene College had looked at whether it would be possible to publish all of the diary and had concluded no, they'd got legal opinions. In 1959, we get a new Obscene Publication act, which redefines justifications for publishing obscene material. And at that point, new legal views are sought and it becomes apparent that they can perhaps now publish. And also there is enough momentum, perhaps in particular due to peakes increased status after the Second World War, to overcome concerns that publishing the full diary will damage his respectability or will hurt the people involved in publishing. You know, you can now risk it. It is very obviously not just of major historical value, but major literary value. And that means you actually need all of it. You can't just go through censoring bits of it anymore.
- [40:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Let's talk about how we should read Pepys today. How can we apply some sort of, you know, modern historical approaches, reading against the grain, attending to silences, omissions. Are there ways that we can engage with Pepys now that wouldn't have been thought of in the past?
- [41:00]
Professor Kate Loveman
Yes, I mean, it helps that we have a complete edition of the diary, which people did not before 1976. So actually, having a full access star is quite new. The other thing we now have is the Internet and digital archives, which makes it much easier to piece together the lives of people that Pepys mentions, sometimes only in passing, that you want to find out more about. Perhaps the first thing that's really helpful when you read the diaries, just to slow down. Pepys races through each day and he can mention things that, if you're not paying attention, can sort of fly over your head. So taking a bit of time to try and work out what he means when he uses his polyglot, his mix of languages, or talks elliptically about sex, which he sometimes does, thinking about, as people have always done, you know, what is Elizabeth's viewpoint? What might be the alternative perspectives on this? And so of getting a little bit into Pepys language, that's helpful. That's something that I've been really interested in. And because we've got access to archives, we can kind of do research to find out about the female shopkeepers that Pepys mentions or the young black man who was living next door to him that he mentions in passing and sort of get a wider picture of his society. So it's helpful to. I think Pepys has got this reputation for being incredibly frank, but like any diarist, he didn't write about every single thing. And also he is sometimes not quite as frank as you might expect. You know, he misses things or he puts things in ways that favour him, which you can miss when you're very absorbed in his viewpoint.
- [42:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
You've mentioned his relationships and particularly that one with Debs. Would it be fair to call Pepys predatory with regard to his attitude towards the young female servants of his household?
- [42:53]
Professor Kate Loveman
Yes, predatory is a fair description. And the kinds of women that he tends to pursue or target, they are often servants in his household, a number of them, including young servants. They are people whom he's met through the Navy, so the wives or widows of sailors, people who often need something from him or might be willing to engage in some transactional sex or transactional exchange of whatever kind of sexual favours who he can exert pressure on. He also has relationships with linen drapers, so there are a few women who are independent. Doll Lane and Betty Lane, where that's a relationship, where calling them his mistress seems a reasonably fair term. You know, everybody is getting something out of this relationship. There's a fair amount of equality. It is long term. When we speak of Pepys's mistresses thing, we often have to sort of stop and look at particular evidence about particular people, because sometimes, you know, Pepys, as is the habit in the 17th century, is referring to somebody as Mrs. Mrs. Tooker is actually a prepubescent girl that he is targeting. So some of what he's doing is extremely predatory and exploitative. Others of it appears to be mutually enjoyed, if transactional. But yes, a wide range of sexual relationships.
- [44:19]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Also in the nature of transactions at the time, what was his involvement in the slave trade?
- [44:24]
Professor Kate Loveman
So his involvement in slave trade does not appear to have been direct in terms of investing in the slave trade, as far as we know. So he's not a recorded investor in the Royal Africa Company. As part of his job, he was involved in facilitating the activities of the Royal Africa Company, the main slaving company. And he did own enslaved people. This was certainly the case after the diary, and his naval correspondence is very explicit about. For example, there was a young boy who was unnamed in his letters, who was traded for some chocolate and some sherry. That's what Pepys got in return. He had, in the 1680s, a young black man, again unnamed work, working for him, whom he sent off to the plantations to be sold, because the young man had been lying and pilfering and smoking in bed, and Pepys wanted him to be treated very harshly on board before being sold off. So he was involved in the slave trade in the sense that he sold people during the diary, right at the end, in 1669, he had a black woman called Doll working for him as a cook maid. And Pepys doesn't discuss whether she was enslaved or free. It's. Some of the phrasing in the diary suggests that she was enslaved but was on loan to him from a neighbour. So he praises her cooking, which is a way of praising the fact that he's. You know, he owes this neighbourhood, he owes his neighbour a debt for recommending or loaning him a doll. And he talks about other black people living in Seething Lane. His neighbours owned enslaved young men. He talks about a young man called Mingo who worked for Sir William Batten, who turns out to have one of these stories that you can piece together from the archives. So he peeps as a really useful source on the lives of black Londoners in the 1660s, but that has to be put into the wider context of his other papers and what he was doing with other aspects of enslavement, really, to kind of build up a broader picture.
- [46:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, before we get to the end, I wanted to give you some of Angela Mayfield, our listener's questions, some of them you've answered along the way and we've approached in various ways. But she has some specific questions I want to put to you now, if you don't mind. Did he really have a bladder stone removed without anaesthetic?
- [46:53]
Professor Kate Loveman
Yes, and proceeded to show it to people afterwards. He had a case made for it. He took this risk of having this operation which could easily have killed him. And after that, every year he would have a celebration for his family and friends who had supported him through that operation. And he was. It was. The bladder condition was eventually responsible for his death. Many decades later, when he died, he was found to have died in a lot of pain of kidney stones. So, yes, he made the right choice in the 1650s to have the operation. If he had not done, we would not have half the records of Restoration England that have survived, I think.
- [47:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And how interesting that he celebrated his survival each year. That feels very modern, doesn't it? As well as having a kind of touch of memento mori about it.
- [47:44]
Professor Kate Loveman
Yes. I think other people might have had a sort of solemn day of fasting and prayer, but Pepys gets his relatives round and has a day of 20 dishes and a good celebration. Yeah.
- [47:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Angela also asked, did he kiss the corpse of Catherine of Valois?
- [48:01]
Professor Kate Loveman
Yep, he did that. Records it in his diary. I think this is after the fire of London has damaged the fabric of St. Paul's Cathedral, if I may be misremembering this. But yes, he definitely talks about kissing a queen.
- [48:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And famously, of course, he hid his parmesan at the time of the great Fire. And Angela asked, what's the adjusted value of a wheel of 17th century slightly dirty cheese?
- [48:24]
Professor Kate Loveman
That I cannot tell you. But it was expensive, it was worth hiding. And this is often regarded as being a kind of eccentric and strange thing to do. It was, in a number of respects, a very sensible thing to do. For one, they had moved all of their other expensive goods that they could move by that point, and they were just standing around waiting to see if the fire was going to destroy their home. So, you know, digging a hole in the garden and burying your cheese and wine and your papers is at least doing something psychologically helpful. Turns out it was actually quite a practical thing to do. People who know more about this than I do say that if you buried it at sufficient depth away from a building, the cheese would have survived. And in fact, it did survive the fire, did not burn his house, and he got his cheese back a few days later.
- [49:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So, hurrah to end, then. I'd like to ask you how you think the modern reader should understand Pepys. How should we read him today?
- [49:18]
Professor Kate Loveman
I think Samuel Pepys has something for everybody. So this is a decision that we can make, each of us, for ourselves. It's really helpful if you're looking at a version of the diary that is complete. So quite a lot of the versions that are available on the Internet are Victorian versions that are out of copyright. So if you want a version of Samuel Pepys that's as close to the diary as you can get, you need to be looking for an edition that is by Leifman Matthews or which has bits of Lathman Matthews in it in order to read the full version. And it is just helpful to read peeps carefully with a little bit of skepticism, as well as looking out for the inadvertent humour. And that will help sort of bring out the range of kind of content we've got. We've talked about a lot of things today ranging from sexual abuse to burying Parmesan cheese. And it's one of the, one of the real benefits of Santa Cruz's diary is that it's got that range, but it also means we have to deal with, you know, that range and each make up our own minds about what we're going to value in this experience.
- [50:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, thank you so very much. Thank you to Angela Mayfield for posing the question. And thank you to you, Professor Kate Loverman. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you again about Samuel Pepys and congratulations again on the prize.
- [50:36]
Professor Kate Loveman
Thank you.
- [50:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher, Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History. Hit.
- [51:09]
Professor Kate Loveman
Foreign.
- [51:17]
Ray Winstone
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