Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703)

PEPYS, SAMUEL (1633–1703)

PEPYS, SAMUEL (1633–1703), English diarist and politician. Although Samuel Pepys spent fewer than ten years of his life keeping a daily record, his diary has become an extremely important source of information about Restoration England. The Diary, which begins on 1 January 1660 and ends on 31 May 1669, chronicles, with both exacting detail and stylistic flair, some of the most important events in seventeenth-century British history, such as the coronation of Charles II in 1660, the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666. The Diary has also become an important primary text for historians of music and drama, as Pepys was an avid patron of the arts and wrote regular entries describing the performances that he attended. Much of what modern scholars know about the Restoration stage, from the physical construction of the theaters to the mannerisms of the actors and the audiences, comes directly from the observations of Samuel Pepys. Since its first partial publication in 1825, The Diary of Samuel Pepys has been an invaluable historical record, a key example of early modern aesthetic criticism, and a valuable literary work in its own right.

Samuel Pepys was born in London in 1633. His father, John Pepys, was a reputable tailor with the means to provide his son with an education that included St. Paul's School in London and Cambridge University. Pepys came of age during the turbulent decades of the English Civil Wars, and his family was intimately involved in the political struggles that characterized the day. Samuel's father was a first cousin of Sir Edward Montagu, an important nobleman who initially supported Cromwell, but whose eventual conversion to the Royalist cause helped pave the way for the Restoration in 1660. After graduating from Cambridge in 1654, Pepys went to work as a minor functionary to his famous cousin. One year later, he married a French refugee named Elizabeth St. Michel and settled into a career as an English civil servant.

The first year of Samuel Pepys's Diary, 1660, is also the year of Charles II's coronation and the reestablishment of the monarchy in England. Edward Montagu's abrupt switch to the Royalist position after Cromwell's death placed Pepys in the center of the politics of the Restoration. In March of that year, Montagu asked Samuel to accompany him on a sea voyage to Holland to bring Charles II back to England as the king. Some of the earliest and best entries in the Diary consist of Pepys's firsthand observations of this momentous journey. Once returned to power, Charles rewarded Montagu's support by creating him the first earl of Sandwich; Montagu rewarded Samuel's service by helping him secure increasingly important positions with the Royal Navy. A skilled manager, Pepys eventually became the Navy's top administrator and is still credited with significant modernizations to its operations.

Believing that he was in danger of going blind, Pepys wrote his last Diary entry in 1669; however, he continued his career as a public servant for another twenty years. In 1673, he was elected to a seat in the House of Commons, which he held, with several interruptions, until 1687. Pepys's close political ties to the Stuarts brought him into conflict with the earl of Shaftesbury, who worked diligently during the 1670s to prevent the succession of Charles II's Catholic brother, James, to the throne. In 1679, Pepys was briefly imprisoned in connection with the "Popish Plot," a manufactured conspiracy in which Jesuits and French sympathizers were supposedly planning to assassinate Charles II. When it became clear that the evidence against Pepys was entirely fabricated, he was released to resume his public career. In 1684, he was elected president of the Royal Society of London, where he oversaw the printing of Isaac Newton's magnum opus, Principia Mathematica, in 1687. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, Pepys retired from public life and wrote Memories Relating to the State of the Royal Navy of England (1690), the only work he published during his life.

According to the terms of Samuel Pepys's will, both his extensive book collection and his personal papers—including the Diary —were donated to Cambridge University after his death. As the Diary was written in shorthand, with foreign words often replacing English ones when the subject matter was sexual in nature, it was not immediately accessible to historians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1825, a heavily edited, bowdlerized, and badly transcribed version of the Diary was published to widespread acclaim as Memoirs of Samuel Pepys, Esq. F.R.S. More complete versions were published throughout the nineteenth century, but the first complete and unabridged version was not available until 1983, when Robert Lathan and William Matthews completed their definitive eleven-volume edition for the University of California Press.

See also Biography and Autobiography ; Charles II (England) ; Diaries ; English Civil War and Interregnum ; English Literature and Language .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription. Edited by Robert Lathan and William Matthews. 11 vols. Berkeley, 1970–1983.

——. Private Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of Samuel Pepys, 1679–1703. Edited by J. R. Tanner. 2 vols. London, 1926.

Secondary Sources

Taylor, Ivan E. Samuel Pepys. Rev. ed. New York, 1989.

Tomalin, Claire. Saumel Pepys: The Unequalled Self. New York, 2002.

Michael Austin