Diary Of Samuel Pepys

Diary of Samuel Pepys (1949) by Samuel Pepys
G. Bell and Sons — ISBN: none
Condition: Good
As sold by Crappy Old Books

Some books politely inform you about history. The Diary of Samuel Pepys invites you straight into it, wig first, with the ink still wet on London’s anxieties, vanities, disasters, dinners, gossip, and social manoeuvrings. Pepys did not so much “live through interesting times” as keep a remarkably detailed running commentary on them, which is much more useful for posterity and considerably more entertaining for the rest of us.

Here we have a 1949 G. Bell and Sons edition, and although only two of the original three volumes are present, they survive in Good condition, neatly protected in plastic covers like respectable veterans of several decades’ shelf life. In other words, this is not the full constitutional settlement of Pepys, but it is still more than enough to bring you face to face with one of the greatest chroniclers of everyday greatness and absurdity in the English language. Missing one volume somehow feels appropriate, too. Pepys himself would probably have mislaid something important while being extremely efficient in every other respect.

And what a companion he is. Pepys is endlessly famous for recording great public events—the Great Fire of London, the Plague, naval matters, court affairs, and the sort of national upheavals historians like to arrange into chapters—but his true genius lies in noticing the smaller, more human details. He worries about money, status, career advancement, meals, clothing, social embarrassment, domestic life, and the thousand tiny vanity projects that make civilisation possible. He is, in effect, a 17th-century civil servant with the soul of a social climber, the observational instincts of a novelist, and the diary habits of someone who absolutely would have overused a notes app had one been available.

What makes Pepys so irresistible is that he is not posed on a marble pedestal pretending to be History. He is gloriously mixed. Ambitious, clever, petty, curious, worldly, occasionally self-satisfied, often perceptive, and almost always readable, he gives us the past not as a solemn pageant but as a place where real people hurried about trying to get on, look respectable, avoid disaster, and have a decent dinner. Which, when you think about it, is really all most centuries amount to.

This edition has that wonderfully solid mid-century air about it too: the sort of book produced when publishers still assumed that the public might want substantial literature in sturdy form, and that owning good editions of important works was part of a properly furnished intellectual life. It belongs to that world of serious shelves, sensible dust jackets, and quiet confidence. The protective plastic covers only add to the charm. Someone, somewhere, thought these volumes worth preserving against time, tea stains, and the general indignities of domestic existence. They were right.

Naturally, there is also something faintly comic about reading Pepys now. Here is a man carefully noting the dramas of his age, never suspecting that centuries later readers would pore over his private observations with the same fascinated energy now usually reserved for leaked messages and scandal memoirs. The difference, of course, is that Pepys could actually write, and his world involved rather better coats.

So this set is ideal for the reader who likes history not as a sequence of dry pronouncements, but as a living theatre of plague carts, office politics, royal spectacle, urban catastrophe, and intensely observed human folly. It is also perfect for anyone who enjoys the feeling of owning books that look as though they belong in a proper study, preferably one containing dark wood, a globe, and a faint sense of moral overconfidence.

In short, this two-volume remnant of The Diary of Samuel Pepys remains a deeply attractive thing: incomplete, yes, but still full of life, intelligence, and historical mischief. A Good set with plastic protective covers, it offers not just a window into Restoration England, but a reminder that people have always been complicated, vain, industrious, ridiculous, and endlessly worth writing down. Which is fortunate, because Pepys wrote an awful lot of them down.

Keep browsing: See more Biography books Other books by Samuel Pepys