In the 1660s Samuel Pepys kept a secret diary whose contents, had they become known, would have destroyed his marriage, ended his career, and quite possibly seen him arrested.¹ Today this is the most famous diary in the English language. Pepys’s journal vividly describes momentous events, such as the plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London, alongside small moments – quarrels with his wife or jokes with servants. Since it was first published in 1825, it has variously been called an ‘incomparable masterpiece’, ‘an historical and literary work of an outstanding character’, ‘trifling’, ‘tedious’, ‘very amusing’, ‘too gross to print’, and ‘obscene’. Those divided judgements come just from the people (the editors, the publishers, and the lawyers) who were tasked with getting this extremely bizarre, frequently filthy text into print.² For most of the last two hundred years, significant sections of the diary were deemed unpublishable, thanks to Pepys’s habits of describing court scandals, his sex life, and his bowel movements. Since nothing could be more intriguing than a secret diary too shocking to print, this censorship only increased the public’s fascination.

If there is one verdict that most readers of the diary across the centuries could likely agree on, it is that it is ‘strange’. In 1841, Leigh Hunt set out puzzles about Pepys’s intentions that have continued to perplex readers. It was, Hunt wrote, ‘strange’ that for almost ten years Pepys had made the time, despite hectic work and socializing, to describe each day. Given the diary’s damaging contents, it was even ‘stranger’ that Pepys was prepared to risk its discovery during his life and then chose to leave it to his old college, Magdalene in Cambridge. That decision meant it might ‘be dug up at any future day, to the wonder, the amusement, and not very probable respect, of the coming generations’.³ If the diary’s creation is strange, and its preservation stranger, what generations have chosen to do with it since its first publication is no less strange. The diary has become recognized as a vital source on Restoration history and has served to make the past present in unexpected ways. Over two hundred years, Pepys’s diary has inspired parodies, historical novels, TV drama, interpretive dance, and whisky adverts.

Perhaps the strangest thing about Pepys’s journal is that, despite its fame and wide appeal, almost no one has actually read it. This is not just a case of the diary’s being better known by reputation than by reading, or because parts of it have traditionally been censored. Pepys’s diary is in six manuscript volumes, kept on the shelves of the library named after him at Magdalene College. He wrote it in shorthand – a system of symbols that masked its contents. As a result, very few people have ever directly read the diary. Even most of the diary’s editors, in a very literal sense, did not understand what Pepys wrote: they relied on others to transcribe the shorthand. This matters, because when we read a longhand text of the diary in print or online, it is in certain respects closer to a translation of Pepys’s writing than a simple transcription. Without closer attention to the shorthand and its implications, important clues about Pepys’s intentions and his meanings have been missed.

To trace the history of Pepys’s diary, we need to look at why he wrote, how he wrote, and why the diary became famous. Its publishing history is, to say the least, an unusual one, featuring battles with the shorthand, efforts to cast a highly ‘indelicate’ diary as highly respectable history, and stratagems to circumvent the laws against obscene publications. Even the writer’s name is a puzzle. ‘Peeps’ is now taken to be the historically correct pronunciation but, until the early twentieth century, to most readers he was ‘Peps’.⁴ From the first, readers of Pepys’s diary (or parts of it) have been led to reflect on which experiences are historically significant, who gets to write history, and who should be able to read that history. They have also been drawn to consider their own relationship to the past and to the future. Meanwhile, Pepys – a naval administrator, gossip, clotheshorse, and routinely unfaithful husband – has come to stand as both the personification of the Restoration period and, when needed, as a manifestation of an enduring national character. How he was cast in these dual roles tells us as much about British society over the last two hundred years as it does about his diary; his strange history has become, in more ways than one, British history.⁵

Beginnings

Since the first selection of Pepys’s diary was published in 1825, certain themes and passages have become famous or, indeed, infamous. The diary runs to around one and a quarter million words, so reading all of it is no small task. It has always owed a large part of its popularity to the fact that entries can be extracted and enjoyed without knowledge of the whole. These well-known episodes have, typically, shaped the diary’s reputation and dominated tellings of Pepys’s life. We therefore need to give them, and Pepys’s biography, some attention.

When Pepys began his diary, on 1 January 1660, he was twenty-six, working as a government clerk, and worrying if he could keep his job during the current round of political turmoil. He had few resources to fall back on if he did not. Although he had some influential relatives, his immediate family were not wealthy. His father, John, was a tailor and his mother, Margaret Kight, was a victualler’s daughter who had come to the capital from Gloucestershire to work as a servant.⁶ Pepys had grown up in parliamentarian London during the civil wars. He was nine when the English Civil War began in 1642 and fifteen when Charles I’s forces were finally defeated by the parliamentary army in 1648. Showing an early talent for being on the scene, he was at Whitehall to witness and to celebrate the execution of Charles in January 1649.⁷ Soon after, he won a scholarship to Cambridge. By virtue of his education at Magdalene, he could now claim to be a gentleman and a cut above his parents. In 1655, when he was twenty-two, he fell in love with and married Elizabeth St Michel, the fifteen-year-old daughter of an impoverished French gentleman (exactly which of their families was the most disreputable was one of the subjects they subsequently fought over).⁸ The new couple badly needed money. At this time, Britain was notionally a republic, though power resided with the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell as head of state and with army leaders. Fortunately, Pepys had a relative who was flourishing in this new modelled nation: Sir Edward Mountagu, the son of his great aunt. Mountagu held high offices in Cromwell’s government and navy, and he found work for Pepys in his household. Pepys also took up a government post as a minor clerk in the Exchequer. While starting his married life and his career, he was also dealing with excruciating pain from bladder stones – a condition that became life-threatening. In 1658, he endured an extremely risky operation to remove the stones. His survival gave him a new relish for life and a sincere thankfulness for a narrow escape, which he would commemorate each year.

A few months after Pepys’s operation, Oliver Cromwell’s death triggered a period of political chaos. For more than a year, various factions in the army, navy and parliament struggled not just for control of the state, but to determine which system of government would prevail: a republic? a protectorate? a monarchy? Pepys succeeded in holding on to his Exchequer post during these many changes of regime. Yet, as he began his diary, he feared his luck would not last. Again, Mountagu proved a valuable patron. Unknown to Pepys, he had been secretly liaising with Charles Stuart, son of the executed king. It was Mountagu’s role in aiding Charles II’s Restoration that transformed Pepys’s prospects and made him an eyewitness to the major events of the Restoration. When parliament, seeking to restore stability, voted to invite Charles II to take the throne, Mountagu was involved in the machinations. He sailed to collect the new king from the Hague in May 1660. Pepys was at his side as his secretary, recording his impressions of Charles. ‘The King seems to be a very sober man’, he noted.⁹ This was the start of Pepys’s long relationship with Charles II and with Charles’s brother, James duke of York, who would later become James II.

Scandal

Charles II enthroned proved to be a considerably less sober man than Charles Stuart auditioning for the crown. Pepys was present at the lavish celebrations for Charles’s coronation in April 1661, rising at 4 am to bag a good seat and going to bed almost twenty-four hours later, more drunk than at any time in his life (‘if ever I was foxed it was now’).¹⁰ The Restoration brought splendour, pleasures, and a moral laxity that Pepys enjoyed and deplored. His diary is a principal source of scandal on Charles’s infamously scandalous court. In 1663, for example, Pepys sedulously recorded how Sir Charles Sedley had appeared naked on a tavern balcony in Covent Garden, ‘acting all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined’. After abusing the bible, Sedley boasted of a powder that ‘should make all the cunts in town run after him’. He concluded by dowsing his prick in wine, downing the wine, and then, loyally, drinking the king’s health. Sedley’s subsequent trial for ‘debauchery’, incidentally, was later used to establish the legal grounds for preventing the publication of obscene texts – such as Pepys’s diary.¹¹ The year 1663 proved a particularly good (or bad) one for court scandal. A few months earlier, a friend told Pepys that Lady Castlemaine, the king’s chief mistress, had staged a mock marriage with another reputed mistress, culminating in the king’s taking Castlemaine’s place in the bridal bed. The same source supplied another story to illustrate the scandalous lives of courtiers. It is an account of a miscarriage: while the maids of honour were dancing at a ball, one of them miscarried a child ‘but nobody knew who, it being taken up by somebody in their handkercher’. Pepys later heard more horrific details: Charles had taken the ‘child’ to ‘dissect it’, ‘making great sport of it’ and complaining he ‘had lost a subject by the business’.¹²

Pepys recorded such stories because they shocked and fascinated him, but also because they had, however indirectly, a bearing on his new job. In the summer of 1660 Mountagu, now ennobled as the Earl of Sandwich, had got Pepys a post as Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board. This job brought with it a new home by the Navy Office in Seething Lane, near to the Tower of London. It also brought new wealth, and a new set of colleagues to impress and to feud with. Pepys threw himself into the role, mastering the administrative business of the fleet and capitalizing on the opportunities for advancement that the position offered. He acquired additional lucrative appointments, such as working on the committee that oversaw England’s new colony in Tangier. During all this, court gossip provided clues as to who was in favour and influencing policy, and who was on the decline. When Sandwich began to neglect his work to pursue an extramarital affair with a young woman, Betty Becke, Pepys feared this was damaging Sandwich’s interest for ‘the world doth take notice of it’.¹³ He eventually took the risky step of writing to his patron to warn him – it led to a cooling of their relationship. Meanwhile, the king’s growing reputation for neglecting state affairs ultimately threatened the navy’s efficiency and its funding. ‘Chance without merit brought me in’ wrote Pepys of his naval role, and ‘diligence only keeps me so’. That diligence included gathering all sorts of information that might improve his prospects.¹⁴

Disasters

Pepys’s commitment to his job extended to remaining at the Navy Office during the plague, after other members of the Navy Board had evacuated the capital. This was the time of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–7), making Pepys vital in maintaining communications. His bravery earned him the respect of the king and the duke of York, who was Lord Admiral. It also meant Pepys was on hand to capture how, as the plague spread, the extraordinary came to seem ordinary. In September 1665 the city was desolate and the landscape strange: ‘But Lord, what a sad time it is, to see no boats upon the River – and grass grow all up and down Whitehall-court.’ By October, he realized that he barely registered a corpse being carried by him: ‘but Lord, to see what custom is, that I am come almost to <think> nothing of it’, he wrote.¹⁵ Readers have always enjoyed Pepys’s capacity to not lose sight of personal matters amid his discussion of terror and upheavals. His most famous entry on the plague, 3 September 1665, begins with him dressing for church:

Along with the pleasures of fine clothes and wigs, this proved to be a profitable and delightful year for Pepys, especially once he had moved to the safety of Greenwich and joined fellow evacuees in dancing and partying. New friendships were made here, including with the actress and singer Elizabeth Knepp. Summing up the year, he wrote ‘I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague-time.’¹⁷

If Pepys’s account of the plague in 1665 is celebrated, it is his description of the Great Fire of London in 1666 that has truly secured his fame. Beginning with being woken in the small hours on 2 September by his maids who had spotted ‘a great fire’, he captures the chaos, the horror, and the entrancing spectacle of the fire as, over five days, it spread across the city. Pepys reports that it was he who warned Charles that the only means to slow the fire would be the drastic step of making firebreaks by pulling down houses. Samuel, Elizabeth, and their friends then spent the first evening watching the blaze from across the river:

The time for being a spectator soon ended. Pepys desperately moved his own gold and goods, before resorting to burying his naval papers, wine, and parmesan cheese in the garden. This famously eccentric decision was, in fact, eminently sensible. Pepys and his colleagues were at a loose end, waiting to see if the fire would destroy their homes: burying their remaining expensive goods to protect them from the flames and from looters was at least doing something. The Navy Office and Seething Lane remained standing. The cheese was recovered a few days later.¹⁹

Pepys’s unrelenting curiosity and his gift for evocative detail are never so apparent as in his entries on the fire. The sights, others’ reactions, and his own responses struck him as fascinating and disconcerting: ‘But strange it was to see Cloathworkers-hall on fire these three days and nights in one body of Flame’; ‘Strange to hear what is bid for houses all up and down here’; ‘But it is a strange thing to see how long this time did look since Sunday, having been alway full of variety of actions […]. And I had forgot almost the day of the week.’²⁰ On the fourth day of the fire, he walked out across the city to survey the damage. There, he was forced to pay ‘twopence for a plain penny loaf’; saw his cousin’s house ‘in fire’; collected from a chapel, as a souvenir, some melted glass that had turned ‘like parchment’; and witnessed ‘a poor Catt taken out of a hole in the chimney joyning to the wall of the Exchange, with the hair all burned off the body and yet alive’.²¹ In less than four sentences, he touched on the impact of the fire on the economy, his family, London landmarks, and on animals. Characteristically, Pepys’s focus in recording here is also not quite what we might anticipate: the curiously transformed glass and ‘poor’ cat’s fate merited more words than the destruction that had hit his cousin’s family. At this point in the disaster, his account implies, seeing yet another home burnt did not have much of an impact; seeing the injured cat rescued did and, centuries later, that is a moment that readers too remember. It is a good instance of how anecdotes from the diary can take on a life of their own. This cat now features in historians’ descriptions of the fire, narrates an online video aimed at primary schools, and has inspired at least two children’s books.²²

Londoners in the 1660s had the misfortune of living in interesting times, and Pepys had the good fortune to document them. In June 1667 the war came perilously close to home when the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway and burnt the great ships anchored at Chatham. Pepys feared the Navy Office would be attacked by the Dutch, the French, or by mobs of incensed citizens. He hurriedly sent his gold and his journal (‘which I value much’) to safety.²³ After this national humiliation, peace was made. Turning catastrophe to his advantage, Pepys carved out a new role for himself defending the beleaguered navy at the parliamentary enquiries into the war’s failures.

Sex

Public tumult, national disasters, and political machinations make for gripping reading and intriguing history, but so too do Pepys’s accounts of private tumults, personal calamities, and domestic scheming. Elizabeth Pepys, like her husband, was busy adapting to their changing status: she studied genteel skills and managed their expanding household of servants. Elizabeth is never named within the diary but appears only as ‘my wife’ – a sign of Samuel’s attachment but also his possessiveness. Sometimes, in affection (and especially when he felt he had wronged her), he described her as ‘my wife, poor wretch’.²⁴ This became one of his most recognizable phrases. They fought frequently over Elizabeth’s desire for ‘money and liberty’, for she wanted to spend their new wealth and to have more freedom to travel about town than her jealous husband allowed her.²⁵

Samuel could be jealous. Elizabeth, with much greater cause, was too. She rightly suspected that his relationship with their friend, the actress Elizabeth Knepp, was not innocent. However, she was unaware of the extent of his sexual activity inside and outside their home. During the 1660s, Pepys had sexual contact with, among others, Nell Payne, Jane Birch, and Susan (servants in his household); Mrs Daniel (a sailor’s wife); Elizabeth Bagwell (wife of a ship’s carpenter); Betty Mitchell (a family friend); the sisters Frances and Sarah Udall (who were servants in a tavern); and the sisters Betty and Doll Lane, who were shopkeepers. Many of these relationships were transactional (such as sexual favours for a husband’s promotion), some were for mutual pleasure (which did not rule out a transactional element), and some were coercive and violent (of which more later). Matters took a dramatic turn on 25 October 1668 when Elizabeth walked in on Pepys and her paid companion, seventeen-year-old Deborah Willet. Pepys described this using the mixture of languages that he sometimes employed to protect sexual passages, so I have added some translations in square brackets:

The effects of Elizabeth’s grief, rage, and retaliation upended Pepys’s control over his life and his diary. During the Great Fire, he had worried about losing track of the days; when struggling with the fallout from his behaviour in November 1668, he actually did.²⁷ Deb was, discreetly, fired but Pepys continued to hunt for her around London.

For much of the nineteenth century, readers were not permitted to read about Pepys’s sex life. The full details only became available in 1976, when Robert Latham, William Matthews, and their editorial team finally succeeded in getting all of Pepys’s entries into print. Nonetheless, Pepys’s private life was a source of avid interest from the first. This was not just because it seemed that scintillating information was being withheld (it was), but because these suppressions raised questions about what information was historically valuable and which groups of readers, if any, should be allowed access to it. Despite editors’ best efforts, sex and censorship have been major themes in the reception of Pepys’s diary, and they are major themes of this book. I am concerned, too, with evasions and suppressions in responses to the diary that cannot be solely traced to editorial censorship – that is, with aspects of the diary that readers have, historically, not recognized or preferred not to discuss. Chief among these are the records of Pepys’s enjoyment of sexual violence, and his references to his growing interest and involvement in the slave trade. As with questions of editorial censorship, investigating this content and responses to it reveals changing perceptions of history and of whose experiences count as valuable. Pepys’s inclusion of this material means that – if the principle of including sexual content in a history is no longer so controversial – his record nonetheless remains a provocative and controversial source.

Endings

Pepys reluctantly ended his journal on 31 May 1669, believing that keeping it was damaging his sight. He also feared that blindness would mean he had little left to write about. To be forced to end his diary was, he grieved in his final entry, ‘almost as much as to see myself go into my grave’.²⁸ This sense of loss is widely echoed in writing about Pepys. The rest of his life has attracted far less interest than the 1660s, though it was amply documented and scarcely less eventful. Thousands of his personal and professional papers survive, including other journals he kept – though none as detailed or as intimate as his 1660s diary.²⁹

Pepys did not go blind, but he soon had more to mourn than the end of his journal. Elizabeth died of a fever in November 1669. From hints in his surviving papers, it is apparent that he continued contact with the now married Deb Willet and, in 1670, began a relationship with Mary Skinner, a merchant’s daughter. She would remain – in his words – a source of ‘Steddy friendship and Assistances’ until his death.³⁰ Meanwhile, his impressive rise to power continued. In 1673 he was appointed Secretary to the Office of Lord High Admiral; later, he became Secretary for the Affairs of the Admiralty, a role which saw him reporting directly to Charles II, on a level with a Secretary of State.³¹ In these decades, Pepys’s achievements included establishing measures to clamp down on corruption (with strictly limited success); overseeing a huge programme of naval reconstruction; and instituting an exam for lieutenants (a means of ensuring those in charge of ships actually knew something about sailing rather than, say, having been appointed due to high birth or high bribes). He saw his naval work as fundamental to his legacy, and his achievements in this respect were admired well before his diary was public.³²

Pepys’s political and social success was punctuated by dramatic reversals. His fortunes were closely tied to those of his chief patron, James, duke of York. As Charles had no legitimate children, James was the heir to the throne. He was also, from the early 1670s, known to be a Catholic. These two facts were not seen as compatible by many Protestants. In 1679, during the febrile atmosphere of the Popish Plot when alleged Catholic conspirators were being hunted down and executed, Pepys (though a Protestant) was arrested on a capital charge of treason. The main allegation was that he had sold naval secrets to the French, but behind this was the implication that he was part of a wider conspiracy to put James on the throne and forcibly convert the nation to Catholicism. He endured anxious months before the unfounded case collapsed. It was several years before Charles could reappoint him to the admiralty. In 1685, James became king.

Serving as Secretary for the Admiralty under Charles and James in the 1680s was the high point of Pepys’s career. His networks and influence stretched around the world. Another sudden reversal ended this. In 1688, James’s efforts to promote Catholicism by circumventing parliament prompted an uprising and an invasion by his son-in-law William of Orange. James fled the country. This ‘Glorious Revolution’, as it was remembered by the victors, was the last of the revolutions in Pepys’s lifetime. He was forced out of the admiralty. As he was not prepared to swear allegiance to the new monarchs, William and Mary, he moved from being at the heart of power to being barred from holding civil office. Two further arrests on suspicion of treason and Jacobite plotting followed in 1689 and 1690.

Rather than scheming to overthrow the new regime, Pepys was instead planning his legacy. He had long hoped to write a history of the navy, but instead he settled for collecting and curating the library that would carry his name after his death. In 1703, dying from the bladder condition that had first tried to kill him over four decades before, he made his will. His library, he instructed, should ultimately go in its entirety to one of two Cambridge colleges, Magdalene or Trinity.³³ Magdalene was Pepys’s first choice: it was the college that had given him his start and which he had continued to sponsor during his life. Among almost 3,000 books that he decided to preserve were the six volumes of his diary.

History and Literature

Three hundred years later, Pepys’s diary is casually referred to as ‘one of the greatest texts in our history and in our literature’, and ‘one of the great literary manuscripts of the world’.³⁴ This is impressive, especially given that on first publication its historical and literary credentials were both considered suspect. The acclaim for the diary today is the result of changing perceptions of history and literature. The diary’s first editor Richard Griffin, third Baron Braybrooke, worked on it in the 1820s and 1840s. He was far from persuaded of its literary merits. Braybrooke warned his readers that the diary was sorely lacking in ‘accuracy of style’ and that they would form no glowing opinion of ‘Mr Pepys’s literary reputation’. The diary’s ‘indelicate’ passages were also obstacles to any literary esteem. Braybrooke did not attempt to defend Pepys on that score, instead silently cutting most of them.³⁵ As a valuable historical text the diary’s claims were stronger, but still contested. It appeared at a time when the topics and the people that constituted ‘history’ were expanding – and its publication drew attention to that transformation. In 1848, the Gentleman’s Magazine pondered Braybrooke’s comments on the passages he had added to his latest selection. Braybrooke seemed to imply that only episodes relating to ‘kings or other public characters’ had ‘historical value’. In contrast, the reviewer believed, ‘everything which exhibits the manners and condition of a people […] is history; aye, and far more important and instructive history than the minutest narrative of the actions of royal or noble persons in which historical writers ever indulged’.³⁶ As we’ll see, the early editions of Pepys’s journal fuelled the development of what would now be termed ‘social history’ – before they were, in turn, used to attack social and literary history in the early twentieth century. In the 1970s, the publication of the complete edition of the diary coincided with trends in historiography (or the writing of history) which the diary’s fame both benefited from and encouraged. Mark Salber Phillips has pointed to ‘the preoccupation with affective experience and everyday life’ in historical thought after 1968. ‘Cultural history’ and ‘microhistory’ came to the fore.³⁷ As part of these developments, the late twentieth century saw a renewed interest in diaries among both historians and literary scholars.³⁸ In recent decades the complete edition of Pepys’s journal has enabled new scholarship on everyday life and ideas of the self.³⁹

Although the diary has always struck readers as a strange text, it is a marker of its cultural success that much of what it offers seems deeply familiar. Pepys’s diary does what we now expect diaries to do. ‘A good diary’, it has been argued, is written regularly and close to the events it describes; good diarists are spontaneous and frank; they write about themselves and they write for themselves, not for ‘an outside reader’. If Pepys’s journal ‘fulfills all the conditions of what a diary should be’, it is partly because influential scholars pronouncing on what a diary “should be” greatly admired Pepys’s writing and employed it as their standard.⁴⁰ The wide appeal of diaries as historical sources, Jerome de Groot observes, comes from the fact they appear to offer ‘a direct relationship with the subject’. They seem to lack the mediation and repression of official histories.⁴¹ Pepys’s diary has frequently been praised on this score: his expansive yet minute record, together with his frank accounts of private matters, mean that his diary has struck readers as a peculiarly complete and intimate account of a life. Phillips has discussed how a sense of ‘affective proximity’ can reduce our perception of historical distance.⁴² This has been a common experience for readers of Pepys’s diary. In 1848, Peter Cunningham was delighted by how ‘the reader is taken into [Pepys’s] inmost soul’ and praised his skill in ‘bringing vividly before a reader whatever is attempted to be described’. In 1914, Wilbur Cortez Abbott argued, ‘It seldom happens among myriads of human relationships that anyone knows any of his fellows, however near and dear, as well as all of us know Pepys.’ Pepys’s diary, Abbott believed, brought the 1660s ‘nearer to us than any other decade of English history’. Nearly a hundred years later, a commenter on the website pepysdiary.com, addressed similar sentiments to Pepys directly, speaking on behalf of the online community that had formed to read the diary: ‘We all feel we know you personally, despite the 350 year gap, and regret we can never share a “merry” dinner with you.’⁴³

These are powerful, pleasurable experiences of connection with one personality and with the past, and they have many counterparts across two hundred years of responses. They are, however, experiences prompted by dramatically different texts, most of which have omissions and all of which transform what Pepys wrote at a fundamental level by rendering shorthand into fluent English longhand. Setting aside the question of editorial mediation between reader and diarist, any sense of closeness to Pepys or celebration of his diary as uniquely comprehensive should be nuanced by considering what that seemingly comprehensive, seemingly frank record masks or omits – especially where this concerns the agency or the humanity of others in Restoration society. When we read a version of Pepys’s diary today, we can choose to relish the unusually immediate sense of the past it gives. As I’ll be arguing, we also need to recognize it as a candid but nonetheless calculated creation, and one whose changing forms have helped shape what ‘history’ means in Britain and beyond.

Chapters in This Book

A history of the diary has to start with Pepys himself. My first two chapters explore the puzzle of his intentions when writing (a subject of much debate) and what we can learn from his shorthand. In the reception of Pepys’s diary, certain topics are routinely ignored because they are difficult, their ramifications inconvenient, or because readers have not had the resources to deal with them. For all three reasons, informed discussion of Pepys’s shorthand is very rare. It takes effort and considerable resources for scholars to learn shorthand and to access the diary manuscript (or images of it). Shorthand is also the kind of topic that readers of the diary might not want to think too much about, not least because it disrupts the pleasing idea that in reading an edition of the diary we are getting direct, intimate access to Pepys’s thoughts. When I point to such blind spots in the journal’s reception, it is often because I have shared them. For example, I worked on Pepys’s papers for years but only learned his shorthand when I came to edit a selection of his diary.⁴⁴ It proved well worth the trouble: reckoning with Pepys’s shorthand adds a new layer of meaning to his diary and new insight into his intentions when writing it. To understand what the diary was for and why it survived also means examining Pepys’s intentions at the end of his life, when he bequeathed his library ‘for the benefitt of Posterity’.⁴⁵ Chapter 3 therefore investigates his ideas of history, and his plans for how his archive, and his diary, would be read.

Chapters 4 and 5 deal with how Pepys’s plans came to fruition – or not – when the diary was published and popularized in the nineteenth century. The first edition of 1825 was a very limited selection chosen by Lord Braybrooke. Bowing to popular demand, he then published an expanded selection which came out in 1848 and 1849. More text was offered in Mynors Bright’s edition in the late 1870s, and more still by Henry B. Wheatley in the 1890s. Over this period, Pepys became representative of Restoration history. His name became a ‘household word’ through newspapers, paintings, and children’s magazines.⁴⁶ Driving this interest was speculation about what readers were not allowed to see, conflict between commercial and scholarly imperatives, and competing ideas of historical worth. It also began to worry some commentators that readers were having altogether too much fun with Pepys and his diary, to the apparent detriment of Pepys himself and a patriotic appreciation of English history.

By the 1930s, the diary was widely available in cheap editions, and Pepys was to be found in advertising, in biographies, and in historical fiction. Chapter 6 explores these manifestations, together with how the experience of two world wars gave the diary a new social importance and personal relevance. Although Pepys’s diary was firmly installed as a classic of English history and literature by this time, readers still did not have access to the full text. Chapter 7 reveals the legal and editorial scheming that lay behind the publication of the complete text (1970–83), edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews. This version of the diary – a major feat and still the only full edition – was shaped by a desire to dodge both ridicule in the press and prosecution in the courts. That dodging was successful: it is the most respected edition of the diary today. The most widely read versions, however, remain the Victorian editions, which have had a new lease of life as electronic texts. Chapter 7 ends by bringing the story of the diary into the twenty-first century, looking at what happened when readers of one such website, pepysdiary.com, found themselves living through history during the COVID-19 pandemic.

My final chapter uses the knowledge of the diary’s text and the reading traditions discussed over the course of this book to examine what is possible when reading Pepys’s journal today. The focus is on reading the diary against the grain to draw out information that Pepys himself missed or obfuscated. This involves giving attention to Elizabeth Pepys, to certain of the women and girls with whom Pepys had sexual contact, and to several of the Black people who lived in or near Pepys’s household. This apparently disparate selection of people do share certain things in common, including being barely mentioned or appearing not at all in official records. Their presence in Pepys’s journal therefore adds greatly to its value as a record of Restoration society, although his references to them have historically proved difficult for readers to register and interpret. This diary, as readers are constantly discovering, is puzzling, amusing, unsettling, and intriguing. To fully appreciate what it can offer today, we need to get to grips with its past, and with the weird and wonderful things that readers have done with it.