Dear Diary: Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, and Navel-Gazing as History

Today we look at the diary, a form of writing that became extraordinarily popular over the course of the 1600s.  We'll especially look at famous diarists such as John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, who not only chronicle details of their personal lives, but also give first hand accounts of the dramatic history of the period: the Restoration of the Monarchy, the Great Plague, and the Great Fire of London.

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• 10:20 (Cont.) Dear Diary: Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, and Navel-Gazing as History

Transcript

Dear Diary,

What a day it’s been!  I realized that, despite the hustle and bustle of daily life, I needed to get the next episode of The Classic English Literature Podcast out.  But what should it be about?  Well, I puzzled and puzzed till my my puzzler was sore – then I thought of something I hadn’t before.  I could do an episode on diaries!

You see, the show’s been up to its neck in 17th century literature for a good while now, and it’s about this time that keeping a diary becomes a thing.  I mean, people had kept diaries before – maybe even going back to ancient Egypt, and I suppose we could consider the meditative notes of medieval mystics diaries of sorts.  Diary, by the by, comes from the Latin diarium, meaning “daily allowance.”  It probably first popped up in English around the 1580s and it seems our old friend Ben Jonson was the first to set it in writing in 1605’s Volpone.

Anyway, Diary, you became increasingly popular over the 1600s because of a few different factors.  One thing I’ve mentioned in the show before is the increasing emphasis on the sovereignty and agency of the individual in western culture, how during the Renaissance, Europeans increasingly saw themselves as unique, autonomous consciousnesses – selves, in short.  The deep psychological interiority of Prince Hamlet is the greatest example of this.  The notion had always been latent in Judeo-Christian culture – free will presupposes an individual conscience that can exercise its will.  But it really moved to the fore after Martin Luther started taunting the Pope in the early 16th century.  Additionally, because of Protestantism’s emphasis on Biblical study, compounded by advances in printing technology, literacy flourished.  Education became essential, not only to conduct the business of a growing mercantile society, but also for one’s spiritual nourishment.  For example, it’s estimated that at the turn of the 17th century, about 10-15% of the English population could read and/or write.  By the time of the Civil Wars, we guess about 30% of men and 10% of women were literate, and that by century’s end, 45% of men and 30% of women knew their letters.  

So, you take those two things – the birth of a navel-gazing culture and the rise of literacy – and of course the diary will become the hot new trend.  One count says that 363 diaries survive from this period, as opposed to some 20 from the previous century.  And what are these diaries about?  Well, at first, they seem to largely concern record-keeping, either news of the day or business accounts, that sort of thing.  Still quite useful as historical documents, but not quite what people think you’re for nowadays.  By mid-century, though, we do have a book of advice by a minister named John Beadle and, among his pearls of wisdom, is the admonishment to keep a diary:

We have our state diurnals, relating to national affairs. Tradesmen keep their shop books. Merchants their account books. Lawyers have their books of pre[c]edents. Physicians have their experiments. Some wary husbands have kept a diary of daily disbursements. Travellers a Journal of all that they have seen and hath befallen them in their way. A Christian that would be more exact hath more need and may reap much more good by such a journal as this. We are all but stewards, factors here, and must give a strict account in that great day to the high Lord of all our ways, and of all his ways towards us.

Ah, so, you see there, Diary?  You really begin as a means of examining one’s soul, preparing for that exit interview from this vale of tears.  And that makes sense, too, because despite better education and rising literacy, Protestant England had largely deprived itself of a crucial psychological outlet: the confessor.  Under Catholicism, one examined one’s conscience before the sacrament of reconciliation and, whatever someone might believe about the spiritual reality of the sacrament, it does provide a therapeutic effect.  When Popery was abolished, that therapy went with it, and so an alternative had to be found.  Now, it’s not until about the mid-1800s (I think) that someone first writes down the now hackneyed salutation “Dear Diary,” but it does seem that well before that, people began constructing their diaries as personas, as almost sounding boards for their innermost thoughts.  Is parasocial too strong a word for the relationship I’m describing?  It seems much easier to unburden your soul to a “person” than to reflect in absolute solitariness.  I reckon that’s why people often talk to themselves when flustered or upset.  Imagining yourself outside yourself, as another person, to achieve the comfort and clarity of dialogue.  Isaac Ambrose, a Presbyterian minister who wrote a widely read devotional book called “Looking Unto Jesus” nods to this dialectical nature of the diarist, who “observes something of God to his soul, and of his soul to God.”

Another minister, a fella from Essex named Ralph Josselin, kept a diary for over 60 years, and while he does concur with Ambrose about the contemplative function of a diary, saying that it is “a thankful observation of divine providence and goodness towards me,” he finishes that sentence with “and a summary view of my life'.  He writes about his deep religious devotion, his weekly preaching, and his pastoral duties—but also his more intimate concerns: his fears about illness, his love for his family, his worries over the well-being of his parishioners.  He does reflect on the seismic events shaking England at the time—from the chaos of the Civil War to the uneasy calm of the Restoration.  What makes his diary especially remarkable, though, is its emotional depth.  He notes his birth status and his relative poverty:

I was the eldest son in our whole Family and yet possessed not a foot of land in which yet I praise God I have not felt inward discontent and grudging, God has given me himself, and he is [all] and will make up all other things to me.

He tells of his marriage, one generally happy and, remarkable for the time, rather equitable:

You can consider, here I was wont to see my dear Wife; here to enjoy her delightsome embraces; her counsel, spiritual Discourses, furtherance, encouragement in the ways of God, I was wont to find her an help to ease me of the burthen and trouble of household-affaires, whose countenance welcomed me home with joy.

Josselin writes with great tenderness about his wife and children, and he doesn’t flinch from recording the pain of loss when his children die—something rarely seen in the writing of men from this period.

So, it seems, Diary, that you are quite useful: for spiritual edification, for psychological vigor, and for a “ground up” view of history.  Well done.

Dear Diary,

When I ended my last entry, I didn't mean to imply that you are incapable of recording the momentous events of history; oh, not at all!  In fact, truth be told, I probably wouldn’t include an episode on 17th century diarists in the podcast were it not for those which do offer us an intimate window into the great upheavals of history.  It doesn’t hurt either, of course, that some of these diaries came to publication in the early 19th century and thus became widely read as portals to another time.

I think that probably, when I come to do the episode, I’ll start this section by looking at John Evelyn’s diary.  And that one’s a whopper!  He kept it from 1640 all the way till his death in 1706.  And while he’s not exactly an average citizen – he was a landowner, courtier, and government official; oh, he also helped found the Royal Society – so not Joe Six-Pack, but still a unique and personal view of not only his family life, but that of his country.

Seems he was quite pro-Charles.  The entry for January 1649 reads:

The villainy of the rebels proceeding now so far as to try, condemn, and murder our excellent King on the 30th of this month, struck me with such horror, that I kept the day of his martyrdom a fast, and would not be present at that execrable wickedness; received the sad account of it from my brother George, and Mr Owen. 

You can certainly hear the shock and outrage here and a deep sense of pseudo-spiritual devotion to the king, right?  He fasted.  I also like that he includes from where he heard the news of the king’s death – not that it’s a grand detail, but just a little hint that obviously these events were much on the minds of the people.  He’s not above a bit of gossip, though.  He reports in 1653 that on a visit to Lady Gerrard, he saw the cursed Lady Nolan, “of whom it was reported that she spit in the King’s face as he went to the scaffold.  Indeed, her talk and discourse was like an impudent woman.”  You just know that was written with nose worn quite high.

There’s a little tossed off entry from August of 1654 when Evelyn travelled to Leicester, which though an ugly city, is “famous for the tomb of the tyrant Richard III, which is now converted to a cistern from which I think cattle drink.”  I can’t really tell if these desert-dry remarks are meant to be so barbed, but I suspect they are.  As a sidebar, Diary, should I mention that Richard’s body was discovered beneath a Leicester parking lot and reinterred in Leicester Cathedral in 2015?  No?  You’re probably right.  Quite irrelevant to the episode’s main line.

What other big historical events does Evelyn comment upon?  Well, the death of Cromwell gets a terse but pregnant comment: “3 September 1658: Died that arch-rebel Oliver Cromwell, called Protector.”  Certainly Evelyn sees the OC as a destroyer, not a preserver, and almost beneath mentioning, except maybe to gloat a bit.

The Restoration of Charles II gets a more florid recognition:

29 May 1660: This came in his Majesty Charles the 2d to London after a sad and long exile and calamitous suffering both of the King and Church; being 17 years. This was also his Birthday, and with a triumph of above 20,000 horse and foot, brandishing their swords and shouting with inexpressible joy; The ways strewn with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets hung with tapestry, fountains running with wine . . . I stood in the Strand and beheld it and blessed God; and all this without one drop of blood, and by that very army, which rebelled against him. 

Entries for October of that year record the bringing to trial of the regicides, as Evelyn calls them, at the Old Bailey, and the consequent execution of traitors at Charing Cross in the traditional grisly manner: “I saw not their execution, but met their quarters, mangled, and cut, and reeking, as they were brought from the gallows in baskets on the hurdle. Oh, the miraculous providence of God!”  Not sure how much God is a fan of strangling men, disembowelling them, burning their severed genitals, and then cutting them into four pieces, nailing the pieces up as public warnings.  But, you know, religion is a very private and personal thing.

That will make a juicy section for the episode – people always go in for a bit of gore.  But, to keep an audience engaged, Diary, you have to modulate their emotions.  So after a bit of horror, we’ll move to something heart wrenching and sentimental.  The end of January 1658 concerns the illness and eventual death of Evelyn’s son Dick, whom “it pleased God to visit . . . with fits so extreme.”  They bundle the child in heavy blankets and place him by a roaring fire, but he “expired, to our unexpressible grief and affliction.”  Yet, Evelyn does so, with quite great pathos:

we lost the prettiest, and dearest Child, that ever parents had, being but 5 years, 5 months, & 3 days old in years but even at that tender age, a prodigie for Witt, & understanding; for beauty of body a very Angel, & for endowments of mind, of incredible & rare hopes.

Ugh! isn’t that heartbreaking?  He then goes on to detail a postmortem examination, which discovered a swollen liver, and the recriminations for perhaps having suffocated the boy by making him too warm.   Yet, through it all, Evelyn retains his faith in God, his submission to the dictates of Providence: “The Lord Jesus sanctify this and all others my afflictions.  Amen.”

Holy cow, Diary – that blows my mind!  Evelyn betrays no hint of rage or sense of injustice.  If I’m honest, I’m always mystified by people who have undergone great trials in their lives, but keep their faith intact, or indeed, amplify it.  How do they do that?  How did peasants in 1348 not curse God when the plague came? How did those in the Nazi death camps continue to pray?  I am deeply moved by such faith, and I feel its absence in myself sometimes.

And you know what?  Evelyn’s trials aren’t even over yet!  On February 15, mere weeks after burying Dick, the youngest son George dies of dropsy.  This entry is more stoic than those for Dick.  Evelyn merely writes: “God's holy will be done: he was buried in Deptford church the 17th following.”  There is a deep sense of exhaustion here, of resignation.  Even the prayer feels perfunctory.  Such emptiness.

Dear Diary,

Obviously, I’ll have to include in my episode some discussion of probably the most famous of English diarists, and ironically famous at that: Samuel Pepys.  He was a Tory politician, did a lot on the Navy Board and the Admiralty, despite having no maritime experience – pretty much invented the modern Royal Navy, actually.  Apparently a quite gifted bureaucrat, though.  He kept his diary from 1660 to 1669. If anyone can name a famous English diarist, he’s the one they name.  And I say ironic for two reasons. One: the style does not in any way feel like what we’ve come to see as its characteristic personal, intimate, musing style.  Pepys’ style is very dry – not in the humorous way, just very neutral and declarative.  Matter of fact.  One detects very few instances of emotion.  It feels much more journalistic than personal – almost as if Pepys is somehow detached from and observing his own life.  Hmmm . . yeah, I guess I talked about that before.  But I’ll need to be careful not to imply that this style means Pepys is boring – he is certainly not that.

The other reason Pepys’ fame is ironic is because he did not, by any means, intend anyone else to read the diary.  He composed the diary in shorthand and also used a code comprising a mash-up of French, Spanish, and Italian – especially, I guess, when he was writing about all his ladies on the side.  But that’s actually an interesting point I should stress: Pepys doesn’t hide anything from himself.  He is almost ruthless in his observations and evaluations of his own failings and weaknesses.  That’s probably why it has become the most famous of diaries – it describes, with detached disinterest, a very human person.

But I shouldn’t imply that Pepys was not rather self-impressed.  After all he devised the diary in its modern form – the private account of one's daily thoughts and activities.  He must have thought these were worth recording after all.  When he starts this project, he is, at best, a rather humble factotum, but will call himself a “very rising man,” so no problem with self esteem.  This journal will track his rise to glory!  And despite the great pains he took to keep the diary private, scholars have noted that the text as we have it has gone through at least five revisions, so Pepys was very conscious of how he wanted his life presented, even to himself.

The first entry is dated 1 January 1659/60.  Lord’s Day.  Despite what may seem to us an auspicious day to begin this account of his life – the first day of the first month of a new decade – the events recorded are quite quotidian:

This morning (we living lately in the garret) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts, having not lately worn any other, clothes but them.

Went to Mr. Gunning’s chapel at Exeter House, where he made a very good sermon. . . . 

Dined at home in the garret, where my wife dressed the remains of a turkey, and in the doing of it she burned her hand.

I staid at home all the afternoon, looking over my accounts.

Then went with my wife to my father’s, and in going observed the great posts which the City have set up at the Conduit in Fleet-street.

Supt at my, father’s, where in came Mrs. The. Turner and Madam Morrice, and supt with us. After that my wife and I went home with them, and so to our own home.

Not exciting, I grant.  But the details are rather interesting.  He and his wife live in a garret - or attic apartment – and he has been wearing the same suit of clothes repeatedly.  I sense the beginnings of a bootstrap story.  He eats – often, one will find in the diary; meals are constantly noted – looks over the accounts, goes to church, visits family.  All quite ordinary, but somehow granted significance just by virtue of being recorded.  Much of the diary is this kind of window on one man’s world.

The most famous portions, though, are the ones that offer an eyewitness account of the great turning points in London history.  The first, really, is the coronation of Charles II on April 23, 1661.  Pepys notes that he woke a four AM and waited about till 11, remarking upon the beauty of Westminster Abbey, the glorious procession of bishops and noblemen, and finally . . . finally . . .  

the King with a scepter (carried by my Lord Sandwich) and sword and mond before him, and the crown too.

The King in his robes, bare-headed, which was very fine. And after all had placed themselves, there was a sermon and the service; and then in the Quire at the high altar, the King passed through all the ceremonies of the Coronacon, which to my great grief I and most in the Abbey could not see. 

Ha!  So much for eyewitnessing.  There’s something so recognizable about this moment to me – so close, yet so far away.  Great patience and expectation rewarded by missing the event.  Alas.  

Perhaps Pepys drowns his frustration in some celebratory cordial, because he writes 

we drank the King’s health, and nothing else, till one of the gentlemen fell down stark drunk, and there lay spewing; and I went to my Lord’s pretty well. But no sooner a-bed with Mr. Shepley but my head began to hum, and I to vomit, and if ever I was foxed it was now, which I cannot say yet, because I fell asleep and slept till morning. Only when I waked I found myself wet with my spewing. Thus did the day end with joy every where.

The second half of 1665 is dominated by the ravages of the plague.  The June 7 entry begins in the normal fashion: woke up, went to the office, the weather very hot, met some colleagues, then to bed.  But appended, almost as an afterthought, is as follows:

This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “Lord have mercy upon us” writ there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that, to my remembrance, I ever saw. 

It’s a well constructed dramatic moment, and one, I would guess, that appeared after a revision, because it wonderfully and forebodingly shadows the tragedy to come.  Another of these atmospheric moments of dread comes at the end of July: “It was a sad noise to hear our bell to toll and ring so often to-day, either for deaths or burials; I think five or six times.”  And the next day, Pepys writes of the difficulties of “the plague, which grows mightily upon us, the last week being about 1700 or 1800” dead.  In August he notes an incident that at once distresses him, but also makes him realize how used to the horror he has become.  On the night of August 15,

It was dark before I could get home, and so land at Church-yard stairs, where, to my great trouble, I met a dead corps of the plague, in the narrow ally just bringing down a little pair of stairs. But I thank God I was not much disturbed at it. However, I shall beware of being late abroad again.

By September, we sense the toll the pestilence has taken, and how close it has come to middle-class life.  Pepys laments the deaths of his waterman Payne, a laborer he had contracted, Captain Lambert and a man named Cuttle.  Sidney Montagu is fallen ill, and Mr. Lewes’ other daughter, too.  William Hewer and Tom Edwards have both lost their fathers.  The victims have names – they’re people, they had rich thoughts and experiences themselves, perhaps their diaries could have been written.  And now they’re gone, maybe only mentioned in Pepys’ lament.

Dear Diary,

For this episode on diaries, and especially Pepys’s, I would like to create a bit of narrative tension.  You know the thing – some catharsis, purging fear and dread, then some light humorous moments, back to the tragedy.

But Pepys doesn’t really let me do that.  Not his fault.  He lived through interesting times.  Because just after the plague subsided, someone decided to have the Great Fire of London in 1666.  The problem started in Pudding Lane, near the city’s center, in a bakery owned by Thomas Farriner – probably an improperly dampened oven.  The conflagration spread rapidly through the densely-packed city aided by relentless winds.  After four days, 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, The Royal Exchange, Guildhall, and St. Paul's Cathedral were destroyed.  Some 80,000 people were left homeless.  Charles II was instrumental in the firefighting efforts and in organizing relief efforts, as well as getting Sir Christopher Wren (perhaps the greatest architect of the age) to plan for the reconstruction.

Pepys’ entry for the day the fire started – September 2, 1666 – feels rather blase:

Some of our mayds sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast to-day, Jane called us up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose and slipped on my nightgowne, and went to her window, and thought it to be on the backside of Marke-lane at the farthest; but, being unused to such fires as followed, I thought it far enough off; and so went to bed again and to sleep.

But, of course, as time goes on, the extent of the threat becomes clearer.  By later in the morning, reports of up to 300 houses gutted in the Pudding Lane, FIsh Street, and St. Magnus Church areas.  People begin to panic, choosing flight rather than fight the fire: 

everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.

Wait, here’s a little amuse-bouche to cleanse the palate:  Pepys and his friend Sir Willim Penn (his son would found Pennsylvania) decide to bury their valuables to spare them the fire.  Among other things, which are not specified, are “our wine . . .  and my Parmesan cheese.”  Ha!  I reckon parm was rather costly and exotic at the time for it to merit mention here.

Now, while Pepys is saving his dinner, our old friend John Evelyn is recording the events in his own diary:  “2nd September 1666: This fatal night, about 10, began a deplorable fire, near Fish Street in London.”

Very stoic that.  He holds public prayers in his home, then takes a coach to Southwark, where the sight of the devastation moves him:

The Conflagration was so universal, & the people so astonish’d, that from the beginning (I know not by what desponding or fate), they hardly stirr’d to quench it, so as there was nothing heard or seene but crying out & lamentation, & running about like distracted creatures, without at all attempting to save even their goods; such a strange consternation there was upon them.

Evelyn details many of the strategies for halting the fire’s progress: tearing down buildings, blowing up houses.  He compares the London that “was, but is no more” to the Biblical city of Sodom, though it seems only in the scale of its destruction, not to any retribution for immorality.  At the end of his September 4 entry, there’s an ambivalent little coda:  

In this Calamitous Condition I returnd with a sad heart to my house, blessing & adoring the distinguishing mercy of God, to me & mine, who in the midst of all this ruine, was like Lot, in my little Zoar, safe and sound.

The Sodom allusion is reinforced in the allusion to Lot, and while the sentiment expressed here – thank God my family is all right – is perfectly understandable, there’s also a slight sense of “better them than us.”  I don’t mean to smear John Evelyn – he is clearly overwhelmed with grief and compassion – but it’s so human to search for solace that might dilute the absolute purity of that compassion.  And to praise God for sparing you when he didn’t see fit to spare others.

But that’s what’s great about these diaries – we get to see the whole person.  I mean, yes, it’s a mediated access – language choices, revisions, editing decisions – but it’s as inside one’s head as we can reasonably get.  

To go back to Samuel Pepys, we may not always like what we find in there.  For instance, in addition to its passages on the coronation, the plague, and the great fire, his diary is distinguished for its rather frank discussion of his extracurricular sex life.  It’s quite probable that not all of his sexual exploits I mentioned earlier were entirely consensual.  Maybe the most famous affair he had was with one Deborah Willett.  Pepys was in his mid-thirties, well established in the Navy Office. Deborah? Just 17 years old when she entered the Pepys household as a companion to his wife, Elizabeth (whom he had married when she was 14, eight years his junior).

In one memorable diary entry from October 1668, he admits—candidly, awkwardly, even guiltily—to embracing Deborah in his study and being caught in the act by his wife: "coming up suddenly, did find me imbracing the girl con my hand sub su coats; and indeed I was with my main in her cunny. I was at a wonderful loss upon it and the girl also...."  It’s a scene that’s both comic and deeply uncomfortable: Elizabeth bursts in, Pepys stammers, Deborah flees, and everything unravels. When Pepys writes about it afterward, he’s ashamed—sort of. He vows to stop seeing Deborah—sort of. He prays for strength and then falls back into temptation again. It’s messy, raw, and very human.

Poor Deborah was eventually dismissed, but Pepys couldn’t quite let go. He continued to pursue her, even arranging secret meetings afterward. Historians often debate just how consensual this relationship was, given the power dynamic, the age gap, and the era.

What we’re left with is an uncomfortable yet revealing glimpse into private life in Restoration England—a time when public morals and private behavior were often worlds apart. And Pepys, with his compulsive honesty, leaves it all on the page.

Well, Diary, I think those are the major things I’d like to talk about in this episode.  Am I missing anything?  Very probably.  Oh, didn’t mention at all Pepys’ encounter with Margaret Cavendish (she wrote the Blazing World, remember?) or that quite interesting story about the “frantic man” who was paid 40s to have sheep’s blood transfused into his body to see if it calmed his nerves.  Or about all the plays he went to see (he didn’t care for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night).  But I fear this episode will already be quite long, and I wouldn’t want to infringe on my listeners’ valuable time.

And I’d still have to remind them to post a 5-star review if they'd be so kind, repost episodes on their social media feeds – that’s a good idea.  That would help build an audience.  And, as always, the delicate matter of putting my hand out for a bit of cash to keep the show going.

And, of course, to thank them very kindly for their support of every kind.

Well, Diary, I think I’ll sign off for now.