When Pepys was in Cornhill on 5 December 1659, the day he saw an apprentice shot through the head by soldiers, the shops had their shutters up against the violence in the streets. On another day before the end of the year he was in Cornhill again, and this time he went into the stationer’s shop at the sign of the Globe, where John Cade sold paper and pens as well as the prints and maps Pepys loved to leaf through; and there he bought himself a paper-covered notebook, too fat to go into his pocket, and carried it home to Axe Yard. Over the next days he ruled neat margins in red ink down the left-hand side and across the top of each plain white page: seven inches down, five inches across. It was a long task, given that there were 282 pages, and he did not number them. This was his preparation for 1 January and the start of his Diary. That first notebook brought home from Cornhill still exists, bound into leather and with gilding on the edges of the pages, otherwise exactly as he wrote it. Now, together with its five successor volumes, it has become one of the great literary manuscripts of the world and is priceless – a change in value that would have appealed greatly to Pepys.
What made him embark on a diary? It is just possible he knew and was impressed by the fact that both his employers kept journals, although they, as high officials serving the state, had good reason to keep records of their meetings and travel, while he had no reason at all, coming of an undistinguished family, poor and without prospects. Whatever sense of destiny he had as a boy had culminated in a Cambridge degree and then failed to carry him any further. He had not begun to justify his education or fulfil his promise. Marriage had if anything made his situation worse. The times were uncertain and threatening. It was an unpromising moment to embark on a record of his daily activities, and the activities themselves were nothing to boast about.
Yet set against this was the very fact that he had no important, interesting or demanding work to absorb him and take up his energy. In preparing to keep a journal he was giving himself a task, and his temperament and training meant he was going to take the task seriously. The idea that he was singled out by fate was encouraged when he survived the stone operation, and, even if he had no idea of what he might achieve, he appears to have seen himself as a man who might do something in the world. Without his enthusiasm for himself, the Diary would hardly have begun to take shape as it did.
He was a passionate reader and cared for good writing. He had already tried his hand as a novelist and discovered a flair for reporting history in the making. Like many others, Pepys started off wanting to write something without quite knowing what it was, and the Diary could be a way of finding out. He may have seen it as a source book for something grander to be undertaken later. The high drama of the world in which he had grown up, the still continuing conflict between republic and monarchy, the heroic figures set against one another, paralleled the conflicts of the ancient world he had studied in classical texts. And principally there was his curiosity about himself, which made him see his own mental and physical nature as not merely a legitimate but a valuable and glorious subject for exploration. He did not yet know Montaigne’s essays, and his circumstances and status were as different as could be from those of Montaigne, who was born into a prosperous landed family in France; but he breathed the same intellectual air.1He may have read Francis Bacon’s recommendation to keep a diary, although that was specifically aimed at travellers: ‘It is a strange thing that in sea voyages, where there is nothing to be seen but sky and sea, men should make diaries, but in land travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they omit it; as if chance were fitter to be registered than observation. Let diaries therefore be brought in use.’2
Whatever nourished the idea of the Diary in his mind, he took care over its physical appearance and condition. It was to be written in ink, black or brown as it came to hand, with a quill pen, sharp when newly cut and even when blunt good enough to allow him to form shorthand symbols no more than two millimetres square. He spaced the lines evenly, with between twenty and thirty to a page. He gave curly ornamentations to the capital letters for the name of the month at the head of each page – very occasionally forgetting it was a new month, so that he had to delete ‘December’ and put in ‘January’. September and October were given particularly lush capitals, and February’s F always came out looking scratchy with its straight double up-and-down strokes. Some pages have browned to a pale toast colour with the years, but more have remained a fresh, almost chalky white; there are thin, fragile pages, and others that feel downy, almost velvety to the touch. Pepys was a fine calligrapher when he made time to write slowly, as he did for his Diary, and his pages are as beautiful as pieces of embroidery, with their neatly spaced symbols, the curly, the crotchety and the angular, interspersed with longhand for names, places and any other words that took his fancy, on one page a dozen, as many as forty on another. The longhand leaps out at you tantalizingly as you turn the pages, each word suggesting its own stories – Axe-yard, Mr Downing, Jane, Hinchingb., Deptfd, Whitehall, Monke, Easterday, emerods, venison pasty, pigions, Uncle Robert is dead, Uncles corps, Queen, DY [Duke of York], Robes, papists, Clergy, conventicles, tumults, subsidys, Justice, Sessions, Sr WP, gentleman, yellow plume, petty coate, drawers, summer, amours – small packets of meaning surrounded by the elegant, impenetrable shorthand.
The shorthand made the Diary inaccessible to casual curiosity, which was obviously his intention, although Shelton’s system was popular – at least one of his clerks learnt it.3 In any case Pepys guarded it carefully, and says he mentioned its existence to only two people, Lieutenant Lambert, the young naval officer he first met in the Baltic, to whom he showed ‘my manner of keeping a Journall’ in the spring of 1660, and much later a discreet and trusted senior colleague, William Coventry.4 At first he wrote it at home in Axe Yard, and on one occasion, in February 1660, he mentions Elizabeth being in the room while he set down ‘of this day its passages’ before going to bed, standing up to write.5 But if she knew what he was doing, the subject did not come up in any recorded conversation between them; in any case, she knew no shorthand; and it was not long before his circumstances changed and he could be sure of privacy when he wrote. It is clear that he made up his mind from the start that each day was to have its entry. He kept to this plan, and when he was not able to write on the day he would catch up, as he often explains he is doing in the text, occasionally expressing his pleasure in the process. He maintained the separation of each day on all but a handful of entries where one carries over into the next because he has been up all night or travelling. Sometimes he kept loose written notes to draw on, and there is also mention of a ‘by-book’ in which he put down material to be transferred later.6 More important, he trained his memory and shaped passages in his mind, a process he describes: ‘enter all my Journall since the 28th of October, having every day’s passage well in my head, though it troubles me to remember it; and what I was forced to, being kept from my lodging, where my books and papers are, for several days’.7 Plainly there was an element of mental exercise as well as literary skill in the process.
He intended from the start to cover public events but also made it clear from the first page that it was to be a chronicle of intimate experience. For this he had no model. Montagu’s and Downing’s journals, supposing he got a glimpse of one or the other, were largely official and impersonal and altogether different from what Pepys was about to embark on.8 As for other examples, there was a wave of enthusiasm for diary-keeping in England in the seventeenth century – it is the earliest period from which diaries have been preserved in considerable numbers – and Pepys may well have had an inkling that others were recording their lives; but he cannot have seen any them, since almost all remained unpublished until the nineteenth or twentieth century.9 If he was in fashion, he hardly knew it. It has been suggested that he may have encountered at Cambridge puritan divines who recommended Christian diary-keeping as a valuable exercise, a form of moral accounting that encouraged the individual to watch and discipline himself. And he may have looked at John Beadle’s The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian, published in 1656, which also approved the keeping of a diary and suggested it should include both public events and private experience.10 Supposing Pepys pondered any of this, he took his time and formed a very different view of what constituted the interest of private life from that of Beadle, who suggests listing experience of divine assistance, moments of calling, deliverance from danger, answers to prayers and the commemoration of parents, schoolmasters and benefactors. Nothing could be further from what we find in Pepys, whose private themes were to be not spiritual but intensely human: work, ambition, avarice, worldly pleasure in all its forms, jealousy, friendship, gossip, cheating and broken vows. Beadle’s likening of the diary to a tradesman’s shop book or merchant’s account book, a lawyer’s book of precedents or physician’s of experiments, or even state records, could well have appealed to Pepys, but his inspiration was all his own, and from the first page he produced a narrative with an entirely individual and wholly worldly point of view.
A look at some of his contemporaries’ diaries, with their various emphases on political, public and spiritual experience, family life, science and travel, underlines the originality and pre-eminence of his achievement.11 Among those from a generation older than his, Bulstrode Whitelocke, born in 1605 – the young man who organized the music for a masque from his house in Salisbury Court when Pepys was a baby – produced one of the fullest and most informative records of a successful career in public life during the interregnum; he started his diary in 1644 and wrote up the earlier parts of his life only after 1660, when his political fall made him anxious to justify himself.
The Jersey sea captain, George Carteret, who was to be Pepys’s colleague later, wrote a journal of his adventurous voyage to Africa in 1638.12 The royalist and scholarly John Evelyn’s immense diary, also begun in the 1640s when he was in his twenties, was a conscientious record of travels, sights, public events, work undertaken, sermons, family matters and meetings with important people. Evelyn started ‘in imitation of what I had seene my Father do’, his father being a methodical man of affairs, and after many years noted his own belief in the ‘infinite benefit of daily Examination; comparing to a Merchant keeping his books, to see whether he thrived, or went backward; & how it would facilitate our reckonings, & what a Comfort on our death bed’.13 Both Evelyn and Whitelocke cover wide areas of interest and are crammed with information, but neither has Pepys’s candour or immediacy, and neither engages the reader in his narrative as strongly as Pepys does. Another of their generation, Nehemiah Wallington, a London tradesman with little formal education, kept a commonplace book in which he recorded great events such as the escape of Pym and Hampden from arrest by the king: ‘tell it to your children’, he wrote, ‘that they may tell it to their children, how God did miraculously deliver his servants’. His political and religious passions are vividly conveyed, and he also set down private matters; like Evelyn, he mourned in his diary the death of a beloved child: ‘The grief for this child was so great that I forgot myself so much that I did offend God.’ But he is without Pepys’s curiosity about himself.
Ralph Josselin, an Essex clergyman, farmer and schoolteacher, born in 1616, kept a diary steadily from the mid 1640s until the year of his death, 1683. It is a remarkable record by an intelligent man: like Pepys, Josselin studied at Cambridge, read and collected books, took an interest in public and foreign affairs and gave an account of his domestic life. He was a Nonconformist, served as a chaplain to the parliamentary army, rejoiced at Naseby yet did not approve the execution of the king. But although he records a dream in which he was secretary and adviser to Cromwell, it was only a dream, and he lived out his days in a small village, chiefly preoccupied with the weather, the state of the crops and his own health. His children, once past the age when they were always falling into fires or down stairs, gravitated towards London, and London stirred him to his only aphorism: ‘On good and bad of London: they must be good that miscarry not, there are so many temptations, and very bad that miscarry, so many opportunities for good’ – a countryman’s view that might have amused Pepys. Josselin’s diary becomes dull, partly because his experience is so confined, and still more because his language is weighed down with routine religious phrases. Hardly a day goes by without him thanking the Lord for being gracious to him, or seeking to understand why the Lord has punished him with a bad leg or a disobedient son. Josselin is Pepys’s contemporary, but, compared with Josselin’s fixed habits of thought, Pepys’s curiosity and scepticism, expressed in vivid, flexible and varied prose, take his Diary into what feels like the modern world.
Philip Henry, Pepys’s close contemporary, also kept a lifelong diary covering domestic and parish activities as a Nonconformist clergyman. Henry was a sweet-tempered and scrupulous man, devoted to his wife and children. He never ceased to grieve for the firstborn son full of promise who died at five, but he ensured that his daughters received unusually good educations, including classical studies. Oliver Hey-wood, another Nonconformist minister, also born in the 1630s, kept journals recording his work as well as his private struggles – he was greatly tormented by what he named, in a phrase of Shakespearean gorgeousness, ‘my darling and dalilah lusts’. He wrote of his brief happy marriage, the death of his young wife and the bringing up of their children with the help of a chaste maidservant. Yet another of Pepys’s contemporaries, the greatly gifted scientist and architect Robert Hooke, secretary of the Royal Society, recorded the facts of his daily life and work in the driest and most secular of diaries – no token churchgoing, hardly even any naming of God – its laconic entries also allowing a disconcerting view into his domestic arrangements. He was known to Pepys and will be discussed later.14 From women there are no known diaries, although Anne Fanshawe and Lucy Hutchinson, both of Pepys’s generation, would have been quite capable of keeping them, and each wrote spirited memoirs, from opposing political standpoints.
Philip Henry comes closest to Pepys in his origins and formation. Born in London to an educated mother and a father who was servant to a courtier, he was sent to Westminster School and Oxford. Like Pepys he was present at the execution of Charles I, but, unlike him, was shocked by it; and he settled in the remote provinces, in Shropshire, and reared his family there. His diaries were written in pocket almanacs, four inches by two, and in longhand. He was a braver and a simpler soul than Pepys. He refused to conform when his religious practice was proscribed, and he routinely gave one tenth of all his earnings to charity. The acquisition of a new suit caused him to write, ‘lord, clothe me with thy Righteousness, which is a comely costly lasting everlasting Garment’. He agonized about accepting interest on a small sum of money left to his children and about attending the performance of a play put on by the same children; in both cases good sense happily prevailed over religious scruples. He noted many public events, the Turks at Vienna, the plague and the fire of London, and warmly approved the war against the Dutch, giving as good reasons the fishing dispute and their refusal to acknowledge British rights in the Channel, and only lamenting ‘they are Protestants, hinc Mae lachrymae’. He was credulous about divine intervention in human life, especially when death struck drunken or ill-behaved neighbours, like most puritans finding it hard not to look to heaven for direct rewards and punishments. Gentle, pious Henry and Pepys, streetwise and sceptical, are like the town and the country mouse: the purity of the country is admirable, but we shall have a better time in the company of the town mouse.
Pepys’s Diary is from its first pages doing so many things at once that it can be daunting. It lists places visited and people encountered, without explaining where or who they are. It chronicles contemporary history: Londoners building bonfires to proclaim good riddance to a detested parliament, the ecstatic festivities accompanying the coronation of the restored king. It provides the first full and direct account ever of a man starting uncertainly on a professional career and finding, to his own surprise, that work is one of the major pleasures of life. It supplies much of the detail of his working practice, and also of his daily domestic experience. It is full of music, theatre, sermons, paintings, books and scientific devices. It is a tale of ambition and acquisition, and money is one of its obsessive themes: how it is made, how borrowed and lent, how spent, how saved, how hidden. Money in all its forms runs through the pages, as pieces of gold and bags of silver, shiploads of spices and silks, bribes, wages, debts, loans, payments, inheritances, Exchequer tallies (hazelwood sticks on which the amount of every loan to the government was notched) and the first paper promissory notes. When the Diary starts, Pepys has hardly £25 to his name; when it ends less than ten years later he has a fortune of £10,000.
Within a few months from the start there is the joyous sense of the momentum of a young man’s life at last getting under way, the surprise of good luck, success, riches and the power of patronage all coming at once. In the first pages the Pepyses are too poor to keep their house warm in winter, and are driven out to get their Sunday dinner with his parents on the other side of town; by the end of the year he is enjoying a barrel of oysters pressed on him by a colleague whom he takes home to enjoy the piece of excellent roast beef he has at the fire for dinner. It was the sort of contrast he delighted in.
And although in its pages Pepys delights in remembering the past and in planning the future, he is always conscious that now must be the best time to enjoy life. This is why he conveys pleasure so memorably, pleasure in the lengthening of the days and spring and in summer weather, in journeys out of town, in music made and listened to, and in the theatre, with great acting like Thomas Betterton’s and the astounding first appearance on the English stage of women to play women. He gives an unblushing account of the satisfactions of becoming successful and important; and prizes his own physical toughness and good health all the more because sickness had spoilt his boyhood and youth.
The Diary is history – on the whole reliable history – and it is comedy, of which Pepys was also a master. Parts of it read like a novel, parts like a farce. Its near literary relation is the fiction of Chaucer, whom he admired so much, another Londoner who worked in colloquial language three hundred years before him. Chaucer put his anatomy of English society into poetry without ever losing the zest of common speech and displayed his characters at their lewd and rude worst much as Pepys showed himself. What Pepys does not do is explain, or fill in the background of what is happening. He rarely writes a character of a man or woman, just as he hardly ever asks himself why his wife might be behaving as she is. He gives scurrilous stories and gossip, especially about those he dislikes, but most of his circle of acquaintance are touched in with only the smallest strokes as occasion arises; there are no formal portraits such as we find in Evelyn. This lack of ceremony towards others is partly due to his curiosity being so squarely centred on himself, on ‘that entrancing ego of whom alone he cared to write’, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s phrase.15 The famous and obscure, the loved and the hated, everyone else revolved round him in his place at the centre of the universe. He is also, for the moment at any rate, talking to himself.
One other thing about the Diary: as it opens, and at those moments when he puts in a summary of his current condition, or remarks on the state of the nation at the conclusion of a month or a year, it looks as though part of his intention in writing is to try to make order and clarity in his life, like a good accountant drawing up a balance sheet of profits and losses. But the totality of the Diary defeats any such aim. It becomes instead a demonstration of how impossible it is to make a tidy account of any one life. What we become most aware of is the bursting, disorganized, uncontrollable quality of his experience.
Pepys started his Diary with some formal statements. The opening words thank God for his health, restored by the operation for the stone, clear evidence that he regarded this as the most significant event in his life so far. God continues to receive occasional thanks throughout the Diary; moments of guilty feeling bring on a ‘God forgive me’, and a serious crisis will drive Pepys to prayer, which is about as far as his relations with the deity go. For although he thought swearing on God’s name unbecoming, defended the Church of England – ‘the Religion I was born in’, he tells his mother firmly in the course of an argument – and enjoyed commenting on sermons, neither his Anglicanism nor his wider religious sense can be called enthusiastic on the evidence of the Diary.16He takes family prayers on Sunday evenings, but rarely prays by himself, scarcely refers to the Bible, attends church irregularly, works on Sunday when he finds it necessary and never takes communion. God’s name comes up in his pages as a tic of usage, routine rather than reverential, except when Pepys is thanking him for his recovered health, when a note of sincere gratitude does sound; but when, in the course of the first year of the Diary, Montagu tells him that he is ‘wholly Scepticall’ in matters of religion, Pepys expresses his agreement privately with an ‘as well as I’.17 And when he found a thin congregation at the Abbey, he wrote, ‘I see religion, be it what it will, is but a humour, and so the esteem of it passeth as other things do.’18
After God and his health, his next sentence places himself as the occupant of his house in Axe Yard and as the head of a family of three, flanked by his wife, whose name he does not find it necessary to give, and their servant, who is named as Jane. He goes straight on to the dashing of his hopes of his wife being with child by noting that, on the last day of the old year, she had what he calls her ‘terms’. Elizabeth’s monthly periods become a sad repeated message tolling through the years of the Diary under many different names, her menses, her months, her being unwell, ses mois, ceux-la, moys, mois – no doubt her own usage was French – or simply ‘those’. But for now they are just one of the features of his life that requires to be set down. And from this he turns to the condition of the state. It makes a striking start, this direct yoking of the private and public, of Elizabeth’s period and news of General Monck with his army in Scotland. In fact it is so striking that until 1970 no edition of the Diary printed the complete text. Elizabeth’s period was simply removed, and Pepys’s clear signposting of the intended scope of his Diary went for nothing.19
This is what he wrote in the opening paragraphs:
Blessed be God, at the end of last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain but upon taking of cold.
I lived in Axe yard, having my wife and servant Jane, and no more in family then us three.
My wife, after the absence of her terms for seven weeks, gave me hopes of her being with child, but on the last day of the year she hath them again. The condition of the State was thus. Viz. the Rump, after being disturbed by my Lord Lambert, was lately returned to sit again. The officers of the army all forced to yield. Lawson lies still in the River and Monke is with his army in Scotland. Only my Lord Lambert is not yet come in to the Parliament; nor is it expected that he will, without being forced to it.
The new Common Council of the City doth speak very high; and hath sent to Monke their sword-bearer, to acquaint him with their desires for a free and full Parliament, which is at present the desires and the hopes and expectation of all – 22 of the old secluded members having been at the House door the last week to demand entrance; but it was denied them, and it is believed that they nor the people will not be satisfied till the House be filled.
As he wrote, he was still living in the world in which he had grown up, a republican state, but it was now in terminal confusion, with rival groups fighting and scheming for the upper hand and a fourth civil war very likely, an unbearable prospect for the exhausted population. The effect was that the first few months make a prologue distinct from the main body of the Diary, during which he does not know where either of his employers stands, and no one else knows who is friend and who enemy. The first page sketches the situation in a few cautious sentences. Essentially, it was this: the Rump parliament, residue of the Long parliament voted in nearly twenty years before and from which many MPs have been excluded, has become wholly ineffective. It had been suspended by an army junta in October and then recalled in December when the army leaders fell out among themselves; and it has now ordered the republican General Lambert to disband his troops in the north of England. But he has disobeyed them, because he and the junta want to re-establish a republican and puritan government.
In Scotland General Monck, who has disavowed the army junta, is hovering with his troops on the border with England, his intentions mysterious. And if the ‘universal fear and despair’ Pepys reported to Montagu in December has given way to any glimmer of hope at all, it is being offered by the City Council, which has asked for ‘a free and full Parliament’, by which they mean a newly elected one. Pepys says this is desired, hoped and expected by all, but this is still wishful thinking; it has to be remembered that Pepys’s parents, and many of his cousins, are dwellers and workers in the City. The City Council has also sent a message to Monck asking for his support. Meanwhile troops continue to occupy the City, and Vice-Admiral Lawson, who is confusingly against the army and in favour of the Rump, has brought the fleet into the Thames and looks as though he might be preparing to blockade London, cutting off the coal and corn on which it depends; he has his own programme of republican reform that he has submitted to the City and had rudely rejected.20 The City Council, the Rump, the army junta, Monck and Lawson are all pursuing different and unclear objects, while in the background the exiled royalists stir, plot and hope.
Pepys did not know that Montagu was waiting for the right moment to declare his support for the exiled Charles II, although he may have had his suspicions; he was certainly unaware of the fact that ‘Mr Downing, master of my office’, who appears at the end of his introduction to the Diary, was also considering how he could ingratiate himself with Charles. Neither Pepys nor anyone else could be sure what Monck or Lawson had in mind, because neither was sure himself yet; both had explicitly repudiated the idea of support for a restored monarchy, and Montagu suspected Monck of wanting power for himself and went on thinking this as late as March 1660.21 Bulstrode Whitelocke, until very recently one of the most influential men of the government and keeper of the Great Seal, had delivered up the seal and gone into hiding under the disguise of a grey wig on the last day of 1659, despairing of the future; he would come creeping out again, but meanwhile his wife destroyed as many of his papers as she could find. So it is not surprising that Pepys was cautious about expressing political opinions of his own, even in the private pages of his insignificant Diary, and that he concluded his introductory remarks with the reflection that his own position was ‘somewhat uncertain’.
Yet what he does over these first months of the Diary is to cover with rare effectiveness one of the key periods in history when a whole population is changing its allegiance. It was a movement comparable to the political wave that swept Communism out of Eastern Europe in 1989, and like that wave it came out of a surge of feeling that had built up over a long period until it became an irresistible force. The feeling was very widespread, but everyone had to work out for himself individually what compromises or betrayals he must be prepared to make to keep afloat as republicanism and puritanism were thrown out. Some heads were bound to roll, and some rich rewards were to be won. Hard decisions had to be made, and the most delicate timing was required.