Years ago, I attempted to read Samuel Pepys’s diary, but I didn’t make much headway. However, I was reading it without any context. Now that I’ve read Claire Tomalin’s excellent biography of Pepys, I am interested in trying it again.
For one thing, I was not aware that Pepys worked his way up, by his great energy and organizational skills, from a poor beginning to an eminent position in the British admiralty. He was responsible for setting up many of the procedures used today. In the diary’s beginning, he is just a lowly clerk who seems to go out drinking a lot.
But Tomalin’s admiration is for Pepys’s unstinting truthfulness, even when it makes him look bad, as well as the literary and historical value of the diary. In short, he was a marvelous writer who documented significant events in a tumultuous period of British history.
Tomalin’s talent as a biographer is in giving her readers a true feeling for the personality of her subject. Pepys was a pleasure seeker, a womanizer, and not always an honest man, but he was curious, cultured, highly intelligent, dedicated, and faithful to his patrons. Although he had a poor opinion of both Charles II and James II, he served them faithfully, even when it was against his best interests. Pepys turns out to be a very interesting person.
What? Me Read? 
I think Gretchen Rubin often quotes the diaries of Samuel Pepys, which is how I know of him at all. It’s pretty cool to have a such an old and (by the sounds of it) detailed diary still in print so many years later!
I was an English major, so I heard about him a lot, but I think I will maybe put him on my next Classics Club list. That’ll be a challenge!
I read this a few years ago and enjoyed it, but still haven’t tried to read the actual diary. Pepys did seem like an interesting person.
Yes, quite a few years ago, someone was posting a diary entry a day on the internet, and that’s when I tried to read it. I think it might be the kind of project that you didn’t want to read all in one swoop but that you read more of than one entry a day.
I learned of Pepys through the PBS miniseries The Great Fire. It seemed he kept Charles II somewhat grounded by telling him the unvarnished truth.
I’m not surprised. I’ll have to look for that series.
It’s a miniseries, just three or four 1-hr episodes. Some viewers slammed it, but I did like it as I didn’t know anything about the personalities of that period.
OK, thanks!