Andrew Doyle is the author of “Free Speech and Why It Matters” and “The New Puritans.”
Samuel Pepys was, famously, an extraordinary diarist, offering a vivid first-hand account of life in Restoration England from 1660 to 1669. He was an eyewitness to the Great Fire of London in 1666 and recorded fascinating details of the ravages of the bubonic plague. His diaries were also intensely personal, with entries that echo familiarly across the centuries, whether recounting his rivalries and triumphs in his job as a naval administrator, his frustrations (can’t find a coach in the rain!), his delight in friends or boredom with dull sermons.
But anyone expecting infallibility will be disappointed. These diaries are not objective accounts of historical events, but history filtered through a singular and unmistakably human temperament. This quality explains their flaws, but also their enduring fascination. It also accounts for frequent discomfort over Pepys’s diaries, because they are the work of someone with apparently little sexual restraint. They were routinely censored by those transcribing from his shorthand in the 19th century. An unexpurgated version, including licentious episodes that he had disguised by using French and sometimes Spanish, wasn’t published until 1970.
This squeamishness over the diaries has never gone away. Recently, Hinchingbrooke School in Cambridgeshire — where Pepys was an alumnus — decided that one of its pastoral houses should no longer bear his name. This is just the latest example of an institution rewriting or minimizing aspects of its own history to fulfill the moral expectations of the present day.
Putting the past on trial is a foolish exercise. It involves flattering ourselves with an illusion of moral superiority while ignoring the obvious truth that ethical standards change over time. Besides, a historical diary is not a self-help book. We do not read Pepys to learn how best to live our lives, but for the exhilaration of experiencing a long-dead world through another person’s eyes.
Up until now, Hinchingbrooke School has been proud to advertise its association with the great writer. They have yet to name a replacement for Pepys House, but they may struggle to find a figure of unimpeachable virtue. And if moral purity really is to be the standard, they might want to reconsider the name of Cromwell House, given that Oliver Cromwell was responsible for the massacre of thousands of Catholics in the 17th century during his Irish campaign. But I suppose I shouldn’t give them ideas.
The shaming of the dead is one of the most asinine pastimes of today’s culture warriors. We have seen their shrill demands enacted in the renaming of streets and buildings, the removal of statues and the “decolonization” of curriculums. At the University of Liverpool, a student housing block named after the prime minister William Gladstone was rebranded in 2020 because of his father’s slaveholding in the Caribbean. Yet Gladstone himself became an advocate of emancipation, calling slavery “by far the foulest crime that taints the history of mankind”; apparently speeches early in his political career and the sins of his father were enough to see him condemned.
In the United States, countless episodes of colleges and institutions removing now-disapproved of names include Princeton University’s scrubbing of President Woodrow Wilson’s name from its public policy school in 2020. His racist views, repugnant today, were unexceptional in his time.
It is notable that the ire of activists never seems to be directed at Karl Marx, whose repeated use of the most objectionable racial slurs in his personal correspondence is curiously overlooked. Meanwhile, protesters in Portland, Oregon, in a 2020 demonstration that organizers called an “Indigenous Day of Rage,” tore down statues of former presidents Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.
In so many of these cases, the rules appear to be unevenly applied. The Guardian newspaper in Britain, for instance, has published numerous opinion pieces supporting the tearing down of statues of the slave trader Edward Colston and the imperialist mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, and yet the publication itself was founded by John Edward Taylor, a man who made his fortune from the cotton trade. The Guardian’s early editorials openly supported the Confederacy, opposed abolition and denounced Abraham Lincoln. To be fair to the Guardian, in 2023 it did commission an article outlining its connections to slavery, but the newspaper stopped short of calling for its own discontinuation.
It should be obvious that Pepys House at Hinchingbrooke School is not so named as an endorsement of the man’s sexual behavior. None of this is really about the past at all; it’s about the ideological obsessions of the present. Changing the names of streets and buildings won’t alter the reality that our ancestors lived within entirely different moral frameworks. It is true that Pepys held attitudes toward women that most of us would now find repellent, but he had the disadvantage of being born in 1633. In all such cases, we would do well to keep in mind the opening line of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel “The Go-Between”: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
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