Cabinet officers -- Great Britain -- Biography. |
Authors, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography. |
English diaries -- History and criticism. |
Great Britain -- History -- Stuarts, 1603-1714 -- Biography. |
Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 17th century |
Pepys, Samuel, 1633-1703 |
Great Britain. Royal Navy -- Officials and employees -- Biography. |
S. P. (Samuel Pepys), 1633-1703 |
P., S. (Samuel Pepys), 1633-1703 |
Great Britain. Navy |
צי הבריטי |
Cabinet ministers |
Ministers of State |
Secretaries of State |
Great Britain -- History -- 17th century |
Great Britain -- History -- Joint Monarchy, 1603-1707 |
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Summary
Summary
The seventeenth century saw a revolution in man's thought, as Isaac Newton and others began the scientific study of the universe around them. At the same time a shrewd young civil servant in London began to observe, with something of the same dispassionate curiosity, the strange object around which, for him, the universe revolved--himself. For ten years, beginning in 1660, Samuel Pepys secretly kept one of the most remarkable records ever made of a human life. With astounding candor and perceptiveness he described his ambitions and peculations, his professional successes and failures, his pettinesses and meannesses, his tenderness toward his wife and the irritations and jealousies she provoked, his extramarital longings and fumblings, his coolly critical attitude toward the king he served and his watchful adaptation to the corrupt and treacherous life of the court. Pepys's diary is a magnificent creation. But there is more to Samuel Pepys than his diary, as Claire Tomalin makes clear in this profoundly original biography. Buttressing it with less familiar sources and other contemporary material, she is able to illuminate his entire life--as a poor London tailor's son, as a schoolboy rejoicing at the execution of Charles I, as an aspiring clerk with good connections who transforms himself into a royalist, escorting Charles II to England for the Restoration. Then there is the bureaucrat heroically working against the odds to create a modern navy, finding his way through the dangerous years of political and religious conflict (even, at one point, being charged with treason and jailed), peacefully retiring at last with his books and his music and his friends. It is Claire Tomalin's unique skill as a biographer to achieve extraordinary intimacy with her subject, and Pepys is no exception. To the endlessly fascinating question of his relations with women, for example, she brings the same insight and freshness of approach that distinguished such highly praised books asJane Austen and The Invisible Woman. At the same time, the historical context is never less than brilliantly evoked. The result is exemplary, by far the most revealing--and readable--portrait of the greatest diarist in the English language, a man of unmatched interest and importance.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) is the most famous diarist in English letters. From 1660 to 1669, he penned an unforgettable day-by-day description of Restoration London, with its disasters (the Great Plague of 1665, the Great Fire of 1666), its tumultuous politics and its amazing cultural fervor. Pepys's diary also describes his eager womanizing, as he makes passes, often clumsily, at barmaids and shop girls and the wives of his associates. It is Pepys's intermingling of the public and the private that makes his diary so remarkable. Tomalin (Jane Austin: A Life, etc.) really knows her man, following him closely through some of the great events of English history. As a young government clerk, Pepys allied himself with his cousin Edward Montagu, who turned away from Cromwell to help Charles II become king in 1660, and the Restoration made Pepys's career. Highly organized, intelligent and a savvy political infighter, as Tomalin portrays him, he became a leading navy official and helped build the British navy into a world power. Tomalin also brings us inside Pepys's personal life: his tempestuous marriage, his romantic liaisons, his private, quite negative feelings about King Charles II. Tomalin writes brilliant chapters on all aspects of Pepys's life, relying not only on the diary but also on impressive scholarship. Tomalin clearly admires her subject, whose energy she constantly praises. For those who have already enjoyed the diary, Tomalin's learned and entertaining work admirably fills in the gaps. 16 pages of photos. (Nov. 14) Forecast: Tomalin has a fine reputation as a literary biographer, and this will be widely and well reviewed. It's hard to imagine, though, very large demand being generated beyond devoted literary and English-historical readers. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Sing another chorus of "Life Isn't Fair." Last year, Stephen Coote, author of Royal Survivor (2000), a fine biography of English Restoration monarch Charles II, published an excellent life of the man who started to make the British navy the great instrument of empire that it became: Samuel Pepys, clerk of the acts on the Restoration-era naval board. Now Tomalin, author of the acclaimed Jane Austen (1997), rather trumps Coote by plumbing much more extensively Pepys' best-known achievement, his diary for 1660^-69, considered the absolute classic of its type ever since its first, bowdlerized publication in 1825 (unabridged publication came as late as 1970). Coote drew upon the diary, but he concentrated on Pepys' significance as the archetypal modern bureaucrat, albeit one who had to observe the patronage system that persisted from medieval times until the nineteenth century, and did so adroitly and very much to his profit. Tomalin mines the diary, and she also expands upon the characters and events, great and small, that affected Pepys' life and livelihood to bring the man and his milieu to life--pungently as well as vibrantly, for one of her most effective tactics in the book is to point out how fulsomely every place smelled in an age lacking plumbing, sanitation, and cleanliness as we know them. Think of Tomalin's biography as the Technicolor version of a story Coote renders in sepia. --Ray Olson
Choice Review
The tercentenary of the death of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) has seen renewed interest in the man Robert Louis Stevenson called an "unparalleled figure in the annals of mankind." In prose of grace and clarity, Tomalin describes the rise of Pepys from humble tailor's son to secretary to the Admiralty and president of the Royal Society. Unlike Stephen Coote's recent biography (Samuel Pepys: A Life, CH, Nov'01), Tomalin's account does not lose steam after the diary closes in 1669. She provides a sympathetic reading of the difficult marriage of Pepys and Elizabeth de St. Michel, narrates the succession of physical ailments from which he suffered (including a horrifying description of the surgery for removal of a bladder stone), and demonstrates how his vitality and critical intelligence gave him an unrivaled mastery of all matters relating to naval affairs. Tomalin's regard for her subject makes her withhold judgment when discussing his "evolution" from republican to nonjuring royalist, and she handles his numerous infidelities with greater tact than previous biographers. But for the most part, she renders Pepys warts and all, reveling in his humanity and showing how the diary reveals "the bursting, disorganized, uncontrollable quality of his experience." Summing Up: Highly recommended. All libraries. D. R. Bisson Belmont University
Kirkus Review
A sparkling, wonderfully readable biography of the English official less well known for his contributions to good government than for his salacious, achingly self-doubtful diaries. Plenty of tidbits from those diaries make their way into this thorough, richly detailed portrait by English writer Tomalin (Jane Austen: A Life, 1997, etc.): on one page we find Pepys (1633-1703) chasing after a servant girl and castigating himself for his success, on another recording a moment of sexual pleasure with which he graced his long-suffering wife--and then worrying whether she might "get a trick of liking it," as no seemly woman should in those days. Sex was much on Pepys's mind throughout his adult life, as was the attendant guilt; and there many biographers have left the matter. Tomalin, however, brings us the rest of Pepys's story, notably his accomplishments as a businessman and naval administrator, one of the chief architects of the royal fleet that would soon after his time extend England's empire to every corner of the world. Pepys entered the civil service in an era when officials were expected to enrich themselves at the public expense; indeed, Tomalin writes, one of the first bits of advice he received from a sea captain concerned "how to fiddle his expenses by listing five or six non-existent servants when he went on board and claiming pay for them all." Though Pepys earned a fortune himself while in service, he conducted himself honorably and made noteworthy reforms, insisting that the navy's accounts be squared and suppliers paid what they were owed (and nothing more). He also managed, more than once, to fall on the wrong side of events, backing King James, for example, in his struggle to keep the crown; forced into retirement, he spent his days with the likes of John Dryden talking about the works of Chaucer, his nights revisiting his remarkable diary--the product, Tomalin writes, "of both the most ordinary and the most extraordinary writer you will ever know." A fine work of literary and cultural history.
Library Journal Review
Tomalin, biographer of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, goes beyond Pepys's diary years to examine his entire life. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Part One 1633-1668 The Elected Son He was born in London, above the shop, just off Fleet Street, in Salisbury Court, where his father John Pepys ran a tailoring business, one of many serving the lawyers living in the area. The house backed on to the parish church of St. Bride's, where all the babies of the family were christened and two were already buried in the churchyard; when he was a man, Pepys still kept the thought in his mind of "my young brothers and sisters" laid in the ground outside the house of his youth. Salisbury Court was an open space surrounded by a mixture of small houses like John Pepys's and large ones, once the abodes of bishops and ambassadors, with gardens; it was entered through narrow lanes, one from Fleet Street opposite Shoe Lane, another in the south-west corner leading into Water Lane and so down to the Thames and river steps fifty yards below. The south-facing slope above the river was a good place to live; people had been settled here since Roman times, and when Pepys was born in 1633 a Christian church had stood on the spot for at least five hundred years. A block to the east was the Fleet River, with the pink brick crenellated walls of Bridewell rising beside it; it had been built as a palace by King Henry VIII and deteriorated into a prison for vagrants, homeless children and street women, known to the locals as "Bridewell Birds." A footbridge spanned the Fleet between Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill, and from St. Bride's you could look across its deep valley-much deeper then than it is today-with houses crammed up both sides in a maze of courts and alleys, to old St. Paul's rising on its hill above the City. This was the western edge of the City, and Pepys's first playground. The City was proud of being the most populous in the world; it had something like 130,000 inhabitants, and in the whole country there were only about five million. If you went west from Salisbury Court along Fleet Street, you came to the gardens of the Temple lawyers, with their groves of trees, formal beds and walks, and further west along the Strand you were out of the City, on the way to Whitehall and Westminster. To the east was the only bridge-London Bridge, almost as old as St. Bride's Church, with its nineteen arches and its spikes on which traitors' heads were stuck-and then the Tower. The river, without embankments, was very wide, with a sloping shore at low tide, a place for children to explore; and the great houses of the aristocracy were strung along the riverside, each with its own watergate. The best way to get about fast in London was by boat. The Pepys house centred round the shop and cutting room, with their shelves, stools and drawers, cutting board and looking-glass. At the back the kitchen opened into a yard, and in the cellar were the washing tubs and coal hole, with a lock-up into which troublesome children or maids might be put for punishment. The stairs to the living quarters went up at the back. Timber-framed, tall and narrow, with a jetty sticking out over the street at the front, set tight against its neighbours, with a garret under the steeply pitched roof: this was the pattern of ordinary London houses. On the first floor the parlour doubled as dining room. Above there were two bedrooms, each with a small closet or study opening off it, and high beds with red or purple curtains. In one of these Pepys was born and spent his first weeks. Older children, maids and apprentices slept on the third floor-Pepys mentions "the little chamber, three storeys high"-or in the garret, or in trundle beds, kept in most of the rooms, including the shop and the parlour; sometimes they bedded down in the kitchen for warmth. In one of the bedrooms was a virginals, the neat, box-like harpsichord of the period. John Pepys was musical: he played the bass viol, and his eldest daughter, six-year-old Mary, could have started at the keyboard by the time Sam was born. Singing and musical instruments-viol, violin, lute, virginals, flageolet (a recorder of sorts)-were an essential part of family life, and music became the child's passion.Music was not only in the family but literally in the air for many months during the first year of Sam's life. It came from one of the large houses in Salisbury Court, in which a young and ambitious lawyer, Bulstrode Whitelocke, was preparing a masque to be performed before King Charles and his queen. Whitelocke and Edward Hyde, together representing the Middle Temple, had joined with members of the other three Inns of Court in a plan to celebrate Candlemas in a great masque to be produced before the Court at Whitehall, and Whitelocke, who had some skill as a composer, was in charge of the music. He assembled a large group of singers, including some from the Queen's Chapel, and "caused them all to meet in practise at his house in Salisbury Court where he . . . had sometimes 40 lutes, besides other instruments and voices, in consort together." The noise must have been terrific. On the day of the performance, 2 February 1634, three weeks before Pepys's first birthday, the masquers, in costumes of silver, crimson and blue, some riding plumed horses draped in cloth of silver, some carrying flaming torches, processed along Holborn and Chancery Lane, through Temple Bar to Charing Cross and so to the Banqueting House. Inigo Jones was the designer, and the poet Thomas Carew wrote the words.The event was such a success that Queen Henrietta Maria asked for a repeat performance at the Merchant Taylors' Hall in the City. This was done, and gave "great contentment to their Majesties and no less to the Citizens, especially the younger sort of them." It may be too much to imagine the infant Pepys held up to enjoy the festivities among the many Londoners agog at the sound of the music and the brilliant show of the young lawyers; but music, theatre, celebration, processions, ritual and fine clothes delighted him throughout his life. A tailor's family was likely to be well dressed. There was a looking-glass upstairs, in which the children could look at themselves in imitation of the customers below and make themselves fine with scraps of cloth. But clothes, fine or plain, were hard to keep clean in London. Every household burnt coal brought from Newcastle by sea in its fireplaces and cooking ranges. So did the brewers and dyers, the brick-makers up the Tottenham Court Road, the ubiquitous soap and salt boilers. The smoke from their chimneys made the air dark, covering every surface with sooty grime. There were days when a cloud of smoke half a mile high and twenty miles wide could be seen over the city from the Epsom Downs. Londoners spat black. Wall hangings, pictures and clothes turned yellow and brown like leaves in autumn, and winter undervests, sewn on for the season against the cold, were the colour of mud by the time spring arrived. Hair was expected to look after itself; John Evelyn made a special note in his diary in August 1653 that he was going to experiment with an "annual hair wash." But every house, every family enjoyed its own smell, to which father, mother, children, apprentices, maids and pets all contributed, a rich brew of hair, bod- ies, sweat and other emissions, bedclothes, cooking, whatever food was lying about, whatever dirty linen had been piled up for the monthly wash, whatever chamber pots were waiting to be emptied into yard or street. Home meant the familiar reek which everyone breathed. The smell of the house might strike a new maid as alien, but she would quickly become part of the atmosphere herself. When Pepys wrote of his "family," meaning not blood relations but everyone who lived in his household-the Latin word familia has this sense-we understand that, as a group sharing the same rooms, they also comfortably shared the same smell. His mother was a connoisseur of dirty linen, having worked as a washmaid in a grand household before her marriage. It was not a bad preparation for eleven children in fourteen years; the babies followed one another so fast that she was always either nursing or expecting one, and each made its contribution to the monthly washing day. Samuel was her fifth, hardly more than a year after John. Paulina and Esther, who preceded him, were both dead before he was born, but by the time he was five there would be four more, Thomas, Sarah, Jacob and Robert, of whom only Tom would live to grow up. God's system was inefficient and depressing. A doc- tor writing in 1636 regretted that humans did not reproduce like trees, without the "trivial and vulgar way of coition."This was Sir Thomas Browne. He might have added a further expression of regret at the wearing out of so much health and happiness, but he failed to, and instead overcame his distaste at the triviality of the act often enough to father twelve children on his wife. Pepys's mother must have been always busy, tired, distracted or grieving for the deaths of his brothers and sisters when he was a child: soon worn out, physically and emotionally. Pepys's birthday was on 23 February and his baptism by the vicar of St. Bride's, James Palmer, is recorded on 3 March 1632/3, "Samuell sonn to John Peapis wyef Margaret."The same year, in October, the queen gave birth across town at St. James's Palace to her second son, James. After his christening, he was given the title of duke of York. He had a staff of officials paid to rock his cradle; and, unthinkable as it would have seemed then, he was destined to become one of Sam Pepys's close associates. Another boy who grew up to influence Sam's life, Anthony Ashley Cooper, was also living off Fleet Street, in Three Cranes Court, from 1631 to 1635. Sam's brother Tom was born in the summer of 1634, making a trio of little Pepys boys, John, Sam and Tom, and a sister Sarah the following summer. Other tailoring families in the district produced playmates. There were the Cumberlands, also in Salisbury Court, with three boys, Richard and his younger brothers William and John; Richard would go to school with Pepys later, and to college, and become a bishop. Another tailor, Russell, in St. Bride's Churchyard, was landlord to a bachelor scholar, poet and schoolmaster, John Milton, who had his eight-year-old nephew Johnny living with him when Pepys was six. Here was an outstanding and conveniently placed teacher; but there is no sign that the tailor's sons took any lessons with him. Who did teach the little Pepys children? The learned and leisured John Evelyn coached his eldest son into reading and writing at the age of two, but John Pepys, who had left his native Cambridgeshire for London at fourteen to be apprenticed, was only just literate himself, and if his wife could write at all she left no trace of it. Manuals for parents of the period recommended they should start their children's education at home by playing with them at mealtimes or when sitting by the fire before they started school; but John and Margaret Pepys were unlikely readers of manuals. The household must have been in a perpetual scramble between babies and apprentices, and what energy there was to spare was for music-making. Sam put nothing on record about early lessons. Instead he recalled boys' games in the backyard; being carried by one of his father's workers into one of the Temple Halls, to see the law students gambling with dice at Christmas; and street activities such as "beating the bounds," when the children of the parish went in procession, carrying broomsticks and shepherded by the constable and churchwarden, had water poured over them from the windows of their neighbours and were playfully beaten before being rewarded with bread and cheese and a drink-the whole ancient ritual intended to fix the limits of their own parish in their memories. Contemporary books of manners for children give some idea of what was expected of them at home. There was advice on how to set the table for family dinner, with trenchers (wooden plates), napkins, salt and bread; glasses should be placed well away from the edge of the table to avoid knocking them off. Children should not crumble their bread into "mammocks" but cut it up properly; salt was taken with the knife, and they should not overload their spoons with "pottage," which might spill on the cloth. A polite child would volunteer to remove and fold up the cloth after the meal, and bring a jug of water, basin and towel for parents to wash their hands. Since there was no dining room in the Pepys household, only a folding table in the parlour, meals can rarely have risen to such elegance; but it was something to which Sam paid attention later in life, when he could hardly bring himself to eat food served by a woman with greasy hands, and was sharp with his wife about the presentation of dinner in his own house. Children were also told to keep their clothes in decent order at all times: Let not thy privy members be Layd open to be view'd It is most shamefull and abhord, Detestable and rude. Four adjectives seem a lot for one small privy member, but children had to be given a sense of its sinfulness. When he was six, in 1639, his closest brother, seven-year-old John, fell ill and died. Two years later a second John was born, never much liked by Sam, perhaps because he missed the first so much; but he had a strong sense of duty towards his siblings. He was now top of the hierarchy, as the eldest boy in the family. Tom, who was closest to him, was not clever; he learnt to write but not much better than his father, and he struggled with a speech impediment; Sam was always protective towards him. Mary, at twelve, was almost grown up, one of the solid loving presences in his world; but Mary failed to grow up. When she was thirteen, at Christmas 1640, a year after John's death, she sickened and died. The next year Sarah, who had reached five, followed her to the grave; so did the family maid Barbara. Sam was left with only Tom, besides the two new babies, Paulina, or Pall the second, born in October 1640, just before Mary's death, and John the second. Excerpted from Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
List of Illustrations | p. vii |
Acknowledgements | p. ix |
Pepys Family Tree | p. xii |
Map 1 The London Dwellings of Samuel Pepys | p. xiv |
Map 2 Huntingdon, Hinchingbrooke and Brampton | p. xvi |
List of Principal Figures | p. xvii |
Prologue | p. xxvii |
Part 1 1633-1660 | |
1. The Elected Son | p. 3 |
2. A Schoolboy's War: Huntingdon and St. Paul's | p. 18 |
3. Cambridge and Clerking | p. 36 |
4. Love and Pain | p. 49 |
5. A House in Axe Yard | p. 65 |
6. A Diary | p. 78 |
Part 2 1660-1669 | |
7. Changing Sides | p. 93 |
8. Families | p. 117 |
9. Work | p. 131 |
10. Jealousy | p. 147 |
11. Death and Plague | p. 160 |
12. War | p. 176 |
13. Marriage | p. 191 |
14. The King | p. 211 |
15. The Fire | p. 221 |
16. Three Janes | p. 230 |
17. The Secret Scientist | p. 246 |
18. Speeches and Stories | p. 253 |
19. Surprise and Disorder | p. 263 |
Part 3 1669-1703 | |
20. After the Diary | p. 273 |
21. Public and Private Life | p. 292 |
22. Plots | p. 305 |
23. Travels for the Stuarts | p. 320 |
24. Whirligigs | p. 332 |
25. The Jacobite | p. 345 |
26. A Journey to Be Made | p. 354 |
Epilogue | p. 370 |
Notes | p. 379 |
Bibliography | p. 442 |
Index | p. 450 |
Text and Illustrations Permissions | p. 464 |