Man of Affairs

Samuel Pepys: the Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

This smells strongly of lamp-oil, as any good portrayal of life in seventeenth-century England should. Ms Tomalin has done her homework, and how; we get an awe-inspiringly detailed account of Pepys’s life and times, not just the Diary years but the whole story from birth to death. The scope and depth of the author’s research is astounding, and her portrayal of the times in which Pepys lived – the early Enlightenment, the English Civil War, the Restoration and the so-called Glorious Revolution – is vivid as well as detailed. The characters in the story are presented in all their human complexity and contradiction.

And if any human being was complex and contradictory, Samuel Pepys was. By today’s standards he was a serial sex offender, exercising his domestic droit de seigneur over the maidservants, visiting prostitutes, forcing his attentions on unwilling women (some young enough to be thought children by the conventions of our own time) and cheating incessantly on his beautiful French wife. He was – again, by today’s standards – a corrupt man, one who used his position as a trusted public servant to enrich himself, in some cases (such as the Tangier Mole affair) at the expense of his country. He charged interest on loans to members of his family and absconded from their funerals. Now and then, he beat his wife (she beat him back). Samuel Pepys was a man of his time.

Though loyal enough, he commanded more devotion than he showed, and was not slow to abandon his benefactors and sponsors when the political winds were changing, as they did with alarming frequency during his lifetime. He was born and raised a Parliamentarian and something of a Puritan, was a vengeful spectator at Charles I’s beheading, served Cromwell with dedication but grew disgusted with the period of Parliamentary misrule that followed the Protector’s death and was not slow to turn his coat, along with his sponsors Edward Montagu and George Downing, in good time for the Restoration. His loyalty swung to and fro between Parliament and Crown thereafter before finally settling with the latter – only for him to be put out of favour again when William III gained the throne.

Claire Tomalin proposes these saving graces: Pepys, she tells us, was a clear-eyed and honest reporter of his own actions and perceptive about his own character and motives as well as those of others. He was prudent, meticulous and a very hard worker, and although he did accept bribes and commissions he excelled at his job and rose from a clerkship in the Navy Department to become, in the course of ten or fifteen years, the civilian boss of the Royal Navy. In this capacity he reported directly to Charles II, and also to James II during the latter’s short, inglorious reign. He looked after his own, friends and family alike, though he expected (and usually managed to) lord it over them while doing so. He had excellent taste in domestic objects, art and food, was a passionate amateur musician, interested himself in science and was at one time president of the Royal Society. He counted Robert Hooke and Sir Isaac Newton among his friends. He was no coward, and in youth had himself operated upon successsfuly for kidney stones, which without anaesthetic and in the absence of sterile modern instruments was one of the bravest things a man or woman of his era could do. He was also, in Tomalin’s words, an expert at ‘squeezing every drop out of the day’. He lived as fully and intensely as any man ever did.

Most of all, of course, Pepys was a great writer, who invented a new literary form – or, if you prefer, elevated one to the condition of literature. There are plenty of quotes from the Diary here. Too many of them, for my taste, are about Pepy’s rather ugly sexual behaviour, which he liked to describe in excruciating detail using a special vocabulary of his own, part foreign words and part made-up ones that clearly held an erotic charge for their coiner. But there are plenty of other extracts that give us the flavour of the man and his thought and which often take our breath away by their frankness and insight. There is no question that he was both a man of, and one of the founding fathers of, the Enlightenment.

And what a reporter! His accounts of London life, the trials and executions he had seen, the plague, the Great Fire of London and so on have survived to this day because they are masterpieces of descriptive journalism – though written, originally, for no eyes but his own. It is largely because of Pepys’s diary that we know so much about London life in those long-ago times.

Although I found Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self slow going, I appreciated the level of detail and Ms Tomalin’s own incisive commentary. There are times when she takes speculative risks, as for example when she attributes a painting in Pepys’s library to his mistress, although the evidence is only circumstantial. However, what she has done in terms of writing and research in order to produce this book is extraordinary. I, who have spent the last six years working on a project of similar depth and scope, can only marvel at her scholarship and dedication, and at a work-ethic that clearly rivals her subject’s. It took me forever to read this book, but only in the chapters concerning Pepys’s personal life and relationships during his final years did my interest really flag. As a history of his times (and they were interesting, indeed frightening ones to live in) as well as a biography of a great though largely unsung icon of literature and culture, I heartily recommend it.