There is a darker side to Samuel Pepys unfortunately. Either unknown, glossed over or ignored.
Pepys had many admirable qualities but these have to be placed against his extremely bad behaviour towards women. Today he would be called a "sexual predator" and he was almost certainly also a rapist. Unfortunately, women were (and still are in many places) seen as sexual objects and this view was common in the 18th Century.
I became aware of this from watching Guy de la Bédoyère's YouTube video "Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations" [1] where he discussed the good and the bad in Pepys, having just completed a new book about the diary and man. The video is good, as is the channel (he's a historian I was familar with from his Time Team appearances).
I don't like mentioning things like this usually, but for the sake of a true picture, it is worth it.
I suspect most people who read unabridged Pepys for any length of time end up feeling very ambivalent about him as a person. His diary contains the some of the deepest introspection of a human life--both the good and the bad--in the history of literature. Rousseau was a cheap marketer by comparison.
That depth of revelation is one of the things that make Pepys hard to put down, even as you find his personality increasingly disagreeable. It is a truly remarkable work.
Edit: added unabridged for clarity
dash2 1 hours ago [-]
I'm a bit skeptical. For a start, you seem not to know which century Pepys was from! The link is to a 50 minute video. Perhaps you could briefly explain what leads you to believe Pepys was a rapist.
He had affairs with staff and found his wife annoying. Is that what you're referring to?
tialaramex 10 minutes ago [-]
Ah yes, "affairs" with staff. He has sex with young female servants who, if they resist him can expect to have their employment immediately terminated, it's an enormous power imbalance. It's a problem that you look at that and see an "affair".
Veen 5 hours ago [-]
Pepys attitudes and behaviours in that regard were unremarkable for a man of his time and class. It would have been more surprising - and more worth commenting on - if he’d anachronistically endorsed modern standards of sexual propriety.
verisimi 3 hours ago [-]
I barely have a clue about the attitudes and behaviours of the people around me - and yet you think you know not only Pepys' but also his contemporaries' attitudes and behaviours, so much so that you feel comfortable making a generalised comment about people who lived 3-400 years ago. Remarkable! Perhaps you are a historian.
rpmisms 2 hours ago [-]
You could still confidently say that casual sex is normal in America currently, even without a perfect window into the soul of every American.
2 hours ago [-]
tialaramex 1 hours ago [-]
I mean, yeah, he's a rapist, but I dunno if you're paying attention however this century #metoo is about women generally being of the opinion that yeah, lots of men are what you're calling "sexual predators" and getting away with it.
A rapist is currently President of the United States of America. You likely work with and admire "sexual predators". Works like this diary serve the same purpose as SF shorts, they're holding up a mirror to our world, Sam has wasted days because telephones don't exist and so it's impossible for him to reach a person quickly if they're not where he expected - but "I'm a powerful man so I decided to have sex with a less powerful woman and she couldn't stop me" is one of the top stories in the news site I was just looking at.
Plus ça change
stronglikedan 6 hours ago [-]
> I don't like mentioning things like this usually, but for the sake of a true picture, it is worth it.
I'd say you do like it, which is the only reason you did it, since it's not worth it since it adds nothing to the context.
speerer 5 hours ago [-]
IMO it adds a lot: the article is about cuts from the diary, the result being that the picture is distorted. This is half the point of the link isn't it?
fsckboy 1 hours ago [-]
you two should split the difference: it does add a lot, and he does like mentioning it, which is good because it adds a lot every time.
The British had invaded the Netherlands and burned 130 merchant ships and killed a few old ladies. This was shockingly uncivilized — no one benefits from the burned goods. During war, one may kill soldiers and burn warships, but to burn goods and kill old women? Horrible! So, the Dutch shamed the British by invading in response— and while they destroyed their warships, they very carefully did not hurt anyone or plunder. And here Pepys expresses his shame.
“It seems very remarkable to me, and of great honour to the Dutch, that those of them that did go on shore to Gillingham, though they went in fear of their lives, and were some of them killed; and, notwithstanding their provocation at Schelling, yet killed none of our people nor plundered their houses, but did take some things of easy carriage, and left the rest, and not a house burned; and, which is to our eternal disgrace, that what my Lord Douglas’s men, who come after them, found there, they plundered and took all away; and the watermen that carried us did further tell us, that our own soldiers are far more terrible to those people of the country-towns than the Dutch themselves.” June 30, 1667
Oarch 3 hours ago [-]
And a few years later we invited them to rule over us, which they gladly did.
emblaegh 7 hours ago [-]
It’s pronounced peeps by the way.
kurthr 7 hours ago [-]
The time has long passed for dry aged Pepys.
vehemenz 7 hours ago [-]
I found this video ages ago with some scholarly background on Pepys, including some beautiful antique volumes of the diary:
Such an important diary from a social and historical perspective. When reading about other topics relating to 17th-century Britain (such as the Fire of 1666 and the development of the British Navy) it is frequently cited.
I don't know if the paywalled article mentions the shorthand he used to write it, but that's a fascinating topic on its own. It was called Tachygraphy, and was used from the mid 1600s through the early 1800s by Pepys, Thomas Jefferson, and Isaac Newton among others.
Not really? "I imagine Pepys used Shelton’s Shorthand because he had to take copious notes of Navy Board meetings and take official government minutes."
Since the diary (and so his shorthand use) pre-dates his appointment to the Navy Board, this conclusion is a bit of a reach....
How does nearly every entry have like 30 comments on it??
dcminter 3 hours ago [-]
A few years ago I downloaded some of the Gutenberg version [0] of Pepys' diary which is a transcription of the Wheatley edition which contains this rather odd paragraph in the introduction:
"It has now been decided that the whole of the Diary shall be made
public, with the exception of a few passages which cannot possibly be
printed. It may be thought by some that these omissions are due to an
unnecessary squeamishness, but it is not really so, and readers are
therefore asked to have faith in the judgment of the editor. Where any
passages have been omitted marks of omission are added, so that in all
cases readers will know where anything has been left out."
When I read that I looked it up in Wikipedia [1] and it turns out that it's hilariously disingenuous and it absolutely was an "unnecessary squeamishness" (i.e. censorship of the "dirty" bits) that motivated the omissions.
I therefore picked up a cheap copy of the Latham & Matthews complete paperback edition and am rather slowly making my way through that. It's in eleven volumes - one for each year plus a supplementary overview. I'm still on 1662 but it's very entertaining in short doses. This edition, as well as including the bits that Wheatley sought to obscure, has rather nice illustration of London landmarks on the covers.
There are some other good bits in that Wikipedia page by the way - one of my favourites is the stuff about Lord Granville painstakingly deciphering a few pages of the "encoded" content while the instructions for decoding them were in the same library a few shelves away!
Some or all of this may be in the linked article, but alas it's paywalled (and archive.today didn't work) so my apologies if I'm just repeating its contents!
Pepys' writings nicely precede the stuff about Hooke [2], to whom someone linked yesterday, because Hooke collaborated closely with Christopher Wren (famously the architect of St Pauls Cathedral in London) in the rebuilding of many of the churches destroyed by the conflagarion of the city that Pepys observes and writes about in 1666.
Pepys had many admirable qualities but these have to be placed against his extremely bad behaviour towards women. Today he would be called a "sexual predator" and he was almost certainly also a rapist. Unfortunately, women were (and still are in many places) seen as sexual objects and this view was common in the 18th Century.
I became aware of this from watching Guy de la Bédoyère's YouTube video "Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations" [1] where he discussed the good and the bad in Pepys, having just completed a new book about the diary and man. The video is good, as is the channel (he's a historian I was familar with from his Time Team appearances).
I don't like mentioning things like this usually, but for the sake of a true picture, it is worth it.
[1] https://youtu.be/uxaPbPm7sMk?si=W9vIJ_JD-BynAlOp
That depth of revelation is one of the things that make Pepys hard to put down, even as you find his personality increasingly disagreeable. It is a truly remarkable work.
Edit: added unabridged for clarity
A rapist is currently President of the United States of America. You likely work with and admire "sexual predators". Works like this diary serve the same purpose as SF shorts, they're holding up a mirror to our world, Sam has wasted days because telephones don't exist and so it's impossible for him to reach a person quickly if they're not where he expected - but "I'm a powerful man so I decided to have sex with a less powerful woman and she couldn't stop me" is one of the top stories in the news site I was just looking at.
Plus ça change
I'd say you do like it, which is the only reason you did it, since it's not worth it since it adds nothing to the context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmes%27s_Bonfire
“It seems very remarkable to me, and of great honour to the Dutch, that those of them that did go on shore to Gillingham, though they went in fear of their lives, and were some of them killed; and, notwithstanding their provocation at Schelling, yet killed none of our people nor plundered their houses, but did take some things of easy carriage, and left the rest, and not a house burned; and, which is to our eternal disgrace, that what my Lord Douglas’s men, who come after them, found there, they plundered and took all away; and the watermen that carried us did further tell us, that our own soldiers are far more terrible to those people of the country-towns than the Dutch themselves.” June 30, 1667
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VccalarFTU&t=1640s
I don't know if the paywalled article mentions the shorthand he used to write it, but that's a fascinating topic on its own. It was called Tachygraphy, and was used from the mid 1600s through the early 1800s by Pepys, Thomas Jefferson, and Isaac Newton among others.
There's a sample on this page:
https://pepyshistory.le.ac.uk/pepyss-shorthand/
This source states Pepys learned it as part of his Navy responsibilities as it was an effective way to take notes: https://deborahswift.com/who-remembers-shorthand/
Since the diary (and so his shorthand use) pre-dates his appointment to the Navy Board, this conclusion is a bit of a reach....
Posts one diary entry a day, along with commentary from people explaining or asking what stuff means.
It's a pretty cool idea...
Works surprisingly well as a social media feed.
"It has now been decided that the whole of the Diary shall be made public, with the exception of a few passages which cannot possibly be printed. It may be thought by some that these omissions are due to an unnecessary squeamishness, but it is not really so, and readers are therefore asked to have faith in the judgment of the editor. Where any passages have been omitted marks of omission are added, so that in all cases readers will know where anything has been left out."
When I read that I looked it up in Wikipedia [1] and it turns out that it's hilariously disingenuous and it absolutely was an "unnecessary squeamishness" (i.e. censorship of the "dirty" bits) that motivated the omissions.
I therefore picked up a cheap copy of the Latham & Matthews complete paperback edition and am rather slowly making my way through that. It's in eleven volumes - one for each year plus a supplementary overview. I'm still on 1662 but it's very entertaining in short doses. This edition, as well as including the bits that Wheatley sought to obscure, has rather nice illustration of London landmarks on the covers.
There are some other good bits in that Wikipedia page by the way - one of my favourites is the stuff about Lord Granville painstakingly deciphering a few pages of the "encoded" content while the instructions for decoding them were in the same library a few shelves away!
Some or all of this may be in the linked article, but alas it's paywalled (and archive.today didn't work) so my apologies if I'm just repeating its contents!
Pepys' writings nicely precede the stuff about Hooke [2], to whom someone linked yesterday, because Hooke collaborated closely with Christopher Wren (famously the architect of St Pauls Cathedral in London) in the rebuilding of many of the churches destroyed by the conflagarion of the city that Pepys observes and writes about in 1666.
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4200
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pepys
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44232699