Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys , 1633-1703, English public official, and celebrated diarist, b. London, grad. Magdalene College, Cambridge, 1653. In 1656 he entered the service of a relative, Sir Edward Montagu (later earl of Sandwich ), whose secretary he became in 1660. That same year he started as a clerk in the navy office and by 1668 he was an important naval official and owned a considerable estate. In 1672 he was made secretary to the admiralty. He sat in the Parliament of 1679, but he was charged with betraying naval secrets to the French in the same year. He was briefly imprisoned in the Tower but was vindicated and freed in 1680. In 1684 Pepys was reappointed secretary to the admiralty and was made president of the Royal Society . The accession of William III forced him into retirement, where he wrote his Memoirs … of the Royal Navy (1690).

Pepys left his valuable library, including his diary in cipher, to his nephew John Jackson and in turn to Magdalene College, Cambridge. His diary was discovered there in 1728 and nearly a century later was partially deciphered and first published (1825). An almost full text was edited by H. B. Wheatley (10 vol., 1893-99), but a complete edition did not appear until after World War II. One of the most famous diaries of all time, an intimate record of the daily life and reflections of an ambitious, observing, and lusty young man, it extends from Jan. 1, 1660, to May 31, 1669, when failing eyesight forced him to stop writing. Pepys's diary gives a graphic picture of the social life and conditions of the early Restoration period, including eyewitness accounts of the great plague (1665) and the great fire of London (1666).

Bibliography: See the diary (new ed. by R. Latham and W. Matthews, 10 vol., 1970-83) and the abridgment of the diary (ed. by O. F. Morshead, 1960); Pepys's letters (ed. by H. T. Heath, 1955); biography by C. Tomalin (2002); studies by P. Hunt (1958), C. Emden (1963), O. A. Mendelsohn (1963), M. H. Nicolson (1965), I. E. Taylor (1967), R. Barber (1972).

Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703). Diarist, naval official, bibliophile, musician, member of Parliament, president of the Royal Society, twice master of Trinity House, Pepys lived through an epoch of increasing sophistication in government, when capacity and drive could help a man rise high, especially if assisted by patronage. Pepys's patron was his cousin Edward Montagu, a naval commander under the republic who promoted Charles II's restoration and became earl of Sandwich. Pepys was appointed clerk of the acts (secretary) to the Navy Board in 1660 when that body effectively ran the navy under James, duke of York. The young secretary's assiduity rapidly won him esteem, and some dislike. But, weathering the disasters of the second Dutch War, Pepys was appointed the first secretary of the Admiralty in 1673. Though out of office 1679–84, a victim of the ‘Exclusion’ agitation, his return saw Pepys become the crown's minister for the navy until the Glorious Revolution. Then he was forced from office as too closely associated with James II.

For all his contributions to the navy's well-being, however, Pepys has become much the best-known Englishman of the 17th cent. through his diary, or ‘Journal’, kept in shorthand and complete secrecy between January 1660 and May 1669, and first transcribed in 1822. Sometimes priggish, it is guileless in self-revelation. ‘Traits of actual speech fleck its pattern’ and mark the author as a journalist of genius, in his own words ‘ever with child to see any strange thing’. Pepys's scholarly discrimination is plain from his library, scrupulously preserved in Magdalene College, Cambridge.

David Denis Aldridge

Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703) English diarist. His Diary (1660–69) describes his private life and the English society of his time. It includes a vivid account of the Restoration, the 1661 coronation ceremony, the Plague, and the Great Fire of London of 1666. Written in shorthand, it was not published until 1815, and not in complete form until 1983.

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