THE CONFESSIONS OF SAMUEL PEPYS: Private Revelations From Britain’s Most Famed Diarist, by Guy de la Bédoyère
At what moment does a man become a ladies’ man, a ladies’s man a skirt chaser, a skirt chaser a Lothario, a Lothario a libertine, a libertine a pervert, a pervert a groper, a groper a groomer and a groomer a rapist? This ladder of questions is not about Jeffrey Epstein. It approximates the thoughts that impose themselves while one is reading Guy de la Bédoyère’s new book about Samuel Pepys.
Pepys (1633-1703) was the great English diarist of the 17th century. He lived in London, where he was a high-ranking administrator in the navy. His diary, which contains more than a million words in six volumes, spans nine years of his life when he was in his 20s and 30s. It’s been invaluable for historians.
This is in part because Pepys (pronounced “peeps”) had a front-row seat to critical events, such as the Restoration of 1660, which returned the monarchy to Britain; the plague of 1665; and the Great Fire of the following year. What’s best about his diary, however, is that Pepys had fresh eyes for the everyday: He captured so much of what it was like to be alive in London at the time.
He wrote about food (“we had a calf’s head … but it was raw”), colds and other illnesses, theatergoing, barbers, ill-fitting clothes, taverns and ale, hairpieces, managing a household budget (“Since my leaving the drinking of wine, I do find myself much better, and do mind my business better, and do spend less money”), commuting around London by waterway, toilet misadventures, threatening to throw his wife’s dog out the window because it “pist” indoors and being waked too early by his cat.
Pepys was a bit of a bumbler, and often very funny. For example, an entry from January 1661 reads:
A lady spit backward upon me by a mistake, not seeing me. But after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all.
He’d grown up humbly. His parents (his father was a tailor) were not the sort of people whose names would have been hyperlinked in blue in a 17th-century version of Wikipedia. Pepys was vainglorious, jealous, violent, prone to hangovers, scheming — and he was open about these things. The Bloomsbury figure Harold Nicolson perceived all this. In his own diary, in November 1947, Nicolson wrote of Pepys: “It is some relief to reflect that to be a good diarist one must have a little snouty sneaky mind.”
Pepys’s “little snouty sneaky mind,” it’s become clearer in recent decades, fueled a snouty, sneaky sex life. By most accounts he was handsome enough and charismatic. He loved being around women and, though he was married, some of them clearly loved being around him.
But many of his exploits were far darker. Early excerpts and translations of the diary omitted Pepys’s sexual confessions with fig-leaf phrasings. I use the term “translations” because Pepys wrote in shorthand and sometimes, to camouflage the smuttier material, in languages other than English. One editor considered these passages “unfit for publication” and urged his readers to be “a little blind” to Pepys’s faults.
Later editors included more, but by and large they seemed to consider what one called Pepys’s “amorous encounters” to be misdemeanors, dismissible with a wink, and consistent with how powerful men comported themselves during the reign of Charles II, who was notorious for his many mistresses. The consensus was that Pepys was a good man if you did not look too close.
By the time Claire Tomalin’s thorough biography of Pepys was published, in 2002, she knew enough to sprinkle her book with references to her subject’s “disquieting sexual practices” and “sexual rampages.” Tomalin referred to a “sexual attack,” and a “sexual assault.”
De la Bédoyère’s book, “The Confessions of Samuel Pepys,” goes further. The author has performed nearly forensic new translations of Pepys’s diary, drilling down especially on the material in foreign languages. This was essentially a secret code: Pepys was a polyglot who could pun in two languages within a single sentence.
The resulting book, nearly 400 pages, is a sobering document. De la Bédoyère focuses almost entirely on his subject’s sex life, and he delivers, in Pepys’s own words, sorry account after sorry account. He is as relentless as Inspector Javert. It’s difficult to read.
Where to even begin? Pepys routinely groped his maids and servants, whom he seemed to consider fair game. He’d fondle their breasts while they helped him dress and force them to bring him to orgasm. In one indelible scene, he lectures a maid about taking care of her honor while all of this is taking place. He also routinely beat them, and he beat Elizabeth, his long-suffering wife.
He kept mistresses but also pursued any woman unlucky enough to be in his general vicinity — shopkeepers, actresses, other men’s daughters and wives. All were of lesser status, and he operated with impunity. He would forcibly kiss them and try to get them to touch what he referred to as his “thing.” One young woman escaped by threatening to prick him with a pin.
Pepys appeared to demand sex two or three times a day, and threw himself at so many women that, when writing in his diary a few days later, he could not always remember them all. He extorted sex from woman after woman who came to him seeking navy jobs, or other favors, for their husbands. He considered this his due.
What he could not get freely, he was determined to take. Pepys wrote about pulling women out of bed and molesting them while they slept. He describes using “force” or “great force,” so much that sometimes he injured himself, to achieve his sexual aims. The word for this is rape.
The barbarity of that act didn’t seem to register, even when he wasn’t the perpetrator. Late one evening in February 1664, Pepys came upon several men raping a “pretty wench,” a street vendor he had “much eyed lately” himself. “They seemed to drag her by some force, but the wench went, and I believe had her turn served,” he wrote in his diary. “But God forgive me, what thoughts and wishes I had of being in their place.”
Pepys, in other words, was sorry to miss out.
Movingly, and to his credit, de la Bédoyère works to name, and to humanize, many of the women Pepys abused. Why did Pepys write his crimes down? Anaïs Nin believed one keeps a diary to taste life twice. I suspect Pepys got a dirty thrill out of recounting his exploits.
Reading becomes impossible once you start judging writers by their personal defects. If you’re looking to purge your bookshelves of miscreants and bad actors, you might start at the top and pull down Agatha Christie’s novels, for the offensive language, including use of the N-word, in some of them. Or you could go to the back of the alphabet and remove Virginia Woolf (she wore blackface and posed as an African prince as part of a prank).
Or the middle. How about the P’s? Throw out Picasso’s biographies (abuse of women) or pause by the works of Sylvia Plath (antisemitic slurs), Katherine Anne Porter (criticism of the civil rights movement) and Ezra Pound (of course). It’s a sobering proposition. Nearly everyone we admire from the past would repel us with their actions and opinions were they here in front of us.
Once you start ripping down every statue, Ann Beattie observed in her most recent book of stories, soon there will be statues only of Disney characters.
There is much of value in Pepys’s diaries. He was committed to setting down what he did and thought, rather than what he hoped posterity would think he did and thought. He opened the entire folio of his life. It’s what we ask of diarists worthy of the name.
This is no petition to let Pepys off the hook. No one can read him now without confronting the nastiness of his sexual dealings. There’s a permanent, suppurating sore on the corpus of his work.
THE CONFESSIONS OF SAMUEL PEPYS: Private Revelations From Britain’s Most Famed Diarist | By Guy de la Bédoyère | Pegasus Books | 388 pp. | $35
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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