Pepys’s diary has always been regarded as a very strange text. From its first publication, the reasons why Pepys wrote about his life in such detail – and in such embarrassing detail – have puzzled readers, as has why he then preserved his diary for posterity. This introduction outlines Pepys’s life, the episodes from his diary that are the most famous, and the changing estimations of its importance as history and literature. It argues that one of the strangest things about this text is that, despite its fame, very few people have read the original, for Pepys wrote in shorthand with all printed texts being transcriptions into longhand. Answering some of the puzzles of Pepys’s diary means getting to grips with the shorthand, the censored versions in which the diary has circulated, and the strange things that readers have done with it.

This chapter returns to the conception of philosophy as the thought of the illimitable object from which Marx began. It then considers how, in the here and now, the actualization of philosophy can be conceived as the actualization of a resurgent absolute idealism. This actualization shows the question of the ‘applicability’ of philosophy to the world to be misplaced: philosophy, being human thought as such, and philosophy actualized the actualization of that, our human thinking life is already its own application to the ‘real’ world. This is brought out by considering that there are, in and around us, pockets of communism—actual, not merely potential.

This final chapter investigates what Pepys’s famously frank and comprehensive diary does not say – and how readers have dealt, or failed to deal, with those omissions. The focus is on a selection of the people mentioned in Pepys’s papers whose lives are barely mentioned in official documents or who went otherwise unrecorded: his wife Elizabeth, women and girls in whom he had a sexual interest, and certain of the Black people who worked for him or lived near him. Pepys’s diary and his other surviving records contain valuable information on their lives – information which shows Pepys to have been a sexual predator and an enslaver. For a range of reasons, these are aspects of his life missing from his popular reputation. Getting the most from the diary, and using it to explore the lives of others, requires understanding and countering influential traditions about Pepys and how his diary should be read.

This chapter looks at the evidence of Pepys’s diary manuscript and at the implications of Pepys’s decision to write in shorthand. These are dimensions usually missing from discussion of this key source, for the nature of Pepys’s shorthand is generally not well understood by commentators. Pepys used Thomas Shelton’s shorthand system, known as ‘tachygraphy’. The chapter begins by explaining how this system worked and how it shaped Pepys’s prose style. With illustrations from Pepys’s manuscript, it uses his description of the Great Fire and Charles II’s coronation to show how his pages differ from what is in print. It then explores the escalating methods of disguise that he developed for sexual passages and the implications of this. Finally, it considers what his manuscript tells us about his intentions in writing, especially about his sense of who might read his diary.

Pepys kept his diary for more than nine years, covering a variety of topics that is unrivalled among seventeenth-century diarists. This chapter explores why and how he did so, drawing on recent work which has expanded our sense of early modern life-writing. Pepys turned the methods seen in religious diaries and financial recording to his own ends. His diary’s purposes developed to include assessing his social status and his health; storing useful anecdotes; and relishing illicit pleasures. To illustrate Pepys’s techniques his account of Charles II’s coronation is examined, alongside his friend John Evelyn’s account of the same event. Pepys’s diary was a dynamic text: it evolved in response to Pepys’s changing needs and was intended to act upon him, stimulating favourable change in him and for him.

The history of postwar clothing can be understood only with prior reference to wartime conditions. The reorientation of civilian industries (including textiles and garment manufacture) towards military production, severance of prewar shipping routes and supply lines and redirection of millions of workers into uniform all contributed to a chronic shortage of garments and footwear available for civilian purchase. Civilian scarcity existed alongside, and largely because of, a surfeit of military apparel. Clothes rationing and campaigns to ‘make do and mend’ were introduced both in Britain and in Nazi Germany. Wartime planners in Britain and the newly formed United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), set up in 1943, anticipated that the end of hostilities would leave millions of people in areas hitherto occupied by Axis forces in dire need of fundamental human necessities. Along with shelter, food and medicine, humanity in extremis would need clothing and footwear. ‘Postwar’ efforts to recirculate secondhand garments, manufacture civilian apparel and repurpose military surplus all began before fighting ceased, forcing us to rethink conventional periodization of when, and how definitively, World War II ended. Victory’s texture was extremely uneven.

The later nineteenth century saw expanded editions of Pepys’s diary by Lord Braybrooke (1848-49), Mynors Bright (1875–79), and Henry Wheatley (1893–99). This chapter surveys the publication of these editions and the responses to them as Pepys’s fame grew. Each new edition was accompanied by swirling rumours about what was left out. The diary inspired parodies, paintings, historical fiction, and articles in children’s magazines. A dominant theme in these creative responses was imagining what the censored texts had omitted, especially about the women in Pepys’s life. By the late nineteenth century, Pepys featured in formal education as a representative of the Restoration, but his name was also shorthand for unorthodox and fun history. The popularity of the comical version of Pepys sparked discussions about the purpose of history, notably via stress on Pepys’s role in naval and imperial history.

An overview of the physical state of Rome in the year 900, followed by an introduction to each of the major categories of material culture to be discussed: architecture, painting, icons, sculpture, inscriptions, manuscripts, ceramics, and coins. A rationale is provided for the format of the book: not a diachronic chronological survey as such, but instead organized around four overarching themes.

Making Do unpicks the devastating impact of World War II by focusing on fabric. As the war ended, a ‘textile famine’ loomed. Carruthers argues that material stuff – garments and footwear, as well as blankets and bedding – was critical to how Britons refashioned relationships within Britain and with allies and former enemies. Clothing lay at the heart of an interlocking series of postwar entitlement struggles. Clothes rationing, introduced in 1941, lasted until 1949. With clothing and shoes chronically scarce, policymakers, military commanders and humanitarians had to adjudicate whose needs to prioritize as uniforms were discarded in Britain and abroad. Service personnel, prisoners of war, former inhabitants of Axis camps all required ‘civilianized’ clothing as they reconstructed postwar lives. Making Do foregrounds mobility as central to the history of postwar adjustment, as millions of people and garments changed places and shapes. Military surplus found myriad new uses with people continuing to ‘make do and mend’. Carruthers offers an intimate portrait of everyday life in postwar Britain – and in transient spaces inhabited by veterans, relief workers, displaced persons and ‘GI brides’ – as they attempted to reconstruct new relationships in an age of persistent austerity shadowed by catastrophe.

This chapter explores the redefinition of “youth,” their relationship with the federal government, and their role in national security in the 1930s. Due mainly to the widespread unemployment among young people in their late teens to mid-twenties, adults classified them as a distinct age group with economic, educational, and cultural problems. Many adults believed that the federal government should intervene in the “youth problem,” which prompted the establishment of New Deal programs for young people, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the National Youth Administration. The chapter also demonstrates, through an examination of debates over the introduction of military training to the CCC, as well as the transition of these agencies’ goals from unemployment relief to national defense in the late 1930s, how the Great Depression, often compared to war, was a significant turning point in the evolution of the relationship between youth, education, and national security.