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The diary, its style, and its honesty:

In January of 1660 Samuel Pepys, a clerk and a cousin to the future Earl of Sandwiche living in London, began his diary. Due to poor eyesight he was forced to cease writing nine years later on May 31st. Although only nine years of a seventy year life, the diary witnesses significant moments in British history, it sees Pepys rising influence as a public figure (Click here to read about the public Pepys), and it details his private life as he does so(Click here to read about the private Pepys).

-He witnessed the coronation of Charles II

-He remained working while the bubonic plague swept through London.

-And he witnessed the Great Fire of London.

Pepys focus is not on style, but on events. That does not make its value solely historical. This occasional carelessness actually enhances the diaries literary value. In The Soul of Samuel Pepys Gamaliel Bradford says,

it is a serious error to suppose Pepys was not a great stylist, because he was not a careful one. The same error might involve Shakespeare. Even the quaintness springs largely from a lack of restraint, from throwing off convention... Pepys had an extraordinary gift for conveying just what he saw and felt, just as he saw and felt it.

(Bradford 32)

In Mr. Pepys J. R. Tanner expresses a similiar assessment of Pepys skills as a diarist. He adds,

As the author is his only reader, he never writes for effect. He does not emit correct sentiments with one eye on the public, but delivers himself of his real mind. The result is that he writes simply and without effort... Any attempt at elegance would have destroyed the characteristic charm of the Diary, because it would have disfigured with insincerity a literary work which is absolutely sincere... we have here the perfection of style... for which it is used.

(Tanner 205)

It is bizarre that scholars like Tanner believe in Pepys as a completely sincere and honest diarist when Pepys narrates his various attempts to seduce maids, married women, and any one else with a vulva. (Click here to read about his infedelities.) More bizarre, Pepys actually seems to be honest diarist and the diary does seem to be "absolutely sincere" (Tanner 205)--as sincere as a diary can be. Although decietful, Pepys was honest in his deceitfulness. Furthermore, the diary and his real life were two separate spheres. He had less fear of consequence in the diary and felt less need to lie or restrain his desires.

To elucidate this honesty, Tanner refers to an entry on June 13, 1666:

there happened an extraordinary case--one of the most romantic that I ever I heard of in my life... [Christopher Myngs died in battle and a number of his soldiers asked for a] 'fireship... [that they] shall shew... [their] memory of... [their] dead commander and... [their] revenge...'

Then...

Sir Christopher Mings was a very stout man, and a man of great parts and most excellent parts and most excellent tongue among ordinary men... but dying at this time, his memory and name... will be forgot in a few months as if he had never been...

And finally...

In my way home I... bought three eeles which cost me three shillings.

(Tanner 209-211)

Tanner calls this, "an anti-climax." (211) Pepys begins his entry warning of a romantic tale, but he distances himself from any emotion. He is moved by the display of loyalty but he also knows that the emotion felt is transitory. None of the emotion in Pepys writing feels false. At the end of his entry, he seems to forget Myngs. Instead of ending with some contrived, uplifting phrase about Myngs, he concludes with a commonplace event: he buys his dinner and travels home, because that is what happened.

Although written in honesty, the events in Pepys diary are inevetably altered by internal and external forces. Pepys may have been the diaries only human reader, but an omniscient god would have known its pages as well. On November 19, 1668 he writes, as if in prayer, "I hope God will give me that grace more and more every day to fear him, and to be true to my my poor wife." (Pepys, 2131) Belief in God affected how he wished to behave and how he he wished to be viewed. Thus, the diary was not exlusively for Pepys reading.

In "The Pepys Show: Ghost-writing and Documentary Desire in The Diary" Harry Berger Jr. points out another possible altering force:

I find it difficult to believe that this project didn't have some influence over what he did--what he chose to do--during the day... "We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest with equal justice that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that the writer is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined , in all aspects by its resources of his medium." [Quote from: Paul De Man, "Autobiography as De-Facement" (1979), in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984), 69.]

the diary "often reads as though it had been written by an alter ego, by another man in the same skin, one who watched understandingly but rather detachedly the behavior and motives of his fellow lodger. The diary form lends itself this kind of duality, since the diarist is at once performer, recorder and audience." [Quote from: The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Volume Nine, 1668-1669, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), 59.]

(Berger Jr. 582-585)

Thus, Pepys was as honest as he could be, but affected by forces beyond his control.

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Public Pepys

Pepys the Clerk

Private Pepys

Pepys Infedelities

Sandwiche Man

Works Cited

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Links To Other Sites

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"After letters was gone, then to bed."

(Pepys, May 14 1660)