Pepys Lives!

By Horace Judson

THE DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS. VOL. VI: 1665,

VOL. VII: 1666

A new and complete transcription edited by ROBERT LATHAM and WILLIAM MATTHEWS University of California Press. $25 the pair.

Broach a barrel of oysters, call for sack--be merry, mighty merry! To read Samuel Pepys again in this new edition is a celebration.

March 17, 1666, Pepys commissioned his portrait from the painter John Hayls in Westminster: "I sit to have it full of shadows, and do almost break my neck looking over my shoulder to make the posture for him to work by." The portrait survives. The deep-cut frown line marks an appetite for hard, late work, the genius for politics and administration, by which a London tailor's son became the virtual founder of the British navy at the opening of its 250-year supremacy. The full, recurving, sensuous mouth betrays the man of pleasure. But the eyes, the liquid, curious, direct gaze, speak the passionate observer he was, like a "child to see any strange thing," then living it again vividly in recollection.

He rises by candlelight to take his silly, much oppressed wife on an outing down the Thames. He frets over his accounts, glistens with pleasure to find himself "in the whole, to be worth above 1400 pounds--the greatest sum I ever yet was worth." He gossips of Lady Castlemaine, brought to bed of her fourth child by Charles II.

He investigates the manufacture of ropes and cordage. He is troubled by "great pain in pissing." He bears the first tidings of a victory over the Dutch at sea. A rare occasion, he washes himself "with warm water; my wife will have me, because she does herself." He is elected to the Royal Society and watches Robert Hooke's celebrated demonstrations "upon the nature of fire, and how it goes out in a place where the ayre is not free."

He walks to the Swan tavern to meet Sarah Udall, recording his aims, in bastard French, to "kiss and see mamelles...comgram plaisir." He reports to the royal council on the victualing of the fleet, and is complimented by "the King afterward, who doth now know me so well, that he never sees me but he speaks to me about our Navy business."

On June 7, 1665, "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"--for it was the year of the Great Plague, when between a quarter and a third of London's population died. A year later, September 2, the Pepys' maid "Jane called us up, about 3 in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City"--the first hours of the Great Fire of London, which destroyed half the city.

Pepys' accounts of these great events in these two volumes are the great set pieces of the nine years covered by his diary. But the diarist's true brilliance and worth are to be found in everyday doings. Abridgments, bowdlerizations, fine bindings, one-volume editions of Pepys have appeared in surfeit. But there has not been a complete new edition since H.B. Wheatley's in the 1890s, and that one like all its predecessors was riddled with mistakes, suppressions, minor and major omissions.

The new edition is instantly the only acceptable version. In a joint venture between Pepys' own Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the University of California, the editors have gone back to Pepys' original clear shorthand manuscript, transcribing it entirely afresh. For the first time, everything is printed; even Pepys' emendations and ink blots are noted--for the use of scholars and the reassurance of us all.

This edition has been published in multiple-volume installments since 1970. It will run to eleven volumes, one for each diary year, plus an index and a full book of commentary, The Companion. The historian editors have called in men of excellent learning about things Pepys loved: theater, music, pictures, the streets and alleys, palaces and porches of London. Pepys' pages are helpfully (and thoroughly) cross-referenced and annotated. Nearly as much as Pepys took pleasure in a handsome woman or a new song of his own composing, Pepys loved books. He would have reveled in these.

Horace Judson

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