Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled SelfFor a decade, beginning in 1660, an ambitious young London civil servant kept an astonishingly candid account of his life during one of the most defining periods in British history. In Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin offers us a fully realized and richly nuanced portrait of this man, whose inadvertent masterpiece would establish him as the greatest diarist in the English language. Against the backdrop of plague, civil war, and regicide, with John Milton composing diplomatic correspondence for Oliver Cromwell, Christopher Wren drawing up plans to rebuild London, and Isaac Newton advancing the empirical study of the world around us, Tomalin weaves a breathtaking account of a figure who has passed on to us much of what we know about seventeenth-century London. We witness Pepys’s early life and education, see him advising King Charles II before running to watch the great fire consume London, learn about the great events of the day as well as the most intimate personal details that Pepys encrypted in the Diary, follow him through his later years as a powerful naval administrator, and come to appreciate how Pepys’s singular literary enterprise would in many ways prefigure our modern selves. With exquisite insight and compassion, Samuel Pepys captures the uniquely fascinating figure whose legacy lives on more than three hundred years after his death. |
Contents
| 3 | |
| 18 | |
Cambridge and Clerking | 36 |
A House in Axe Yard | 65 |
Changing Sides | 93 |
Families | 117 |
Jealousy | 147 |
Death and Plague | 160 |
Speeches and Stories | 253 |
After the Diary | 273 |
Public and Private Life | 292 |
273 | 320 |
Whirligigs | 332 |
The Jacobite | 345 |
A Journey to Be Made | 354 |
Notes | 379 |
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Common terms and phrases
admired Axe Yard became Betty Bodleian Library Brampton brother Bulstrode Whitelocke Cambridge Catholic Charles church clerk Correspondence of Samuel cousin Coventry Cromwell Cromwell's daughter death Diary of Samuel duke of York Dutch earl Edward Montagu Elizabeth England father fleet Gilbert Pickering Hewer Hinchingbrooke Houblon Huntingdon husband J. R. Tanner James Jane John Evelyn July June king king's knew Lady Sandwich later Letters and Second living London Lord Brouncker Lord Sandwich maid married Mary master Michel naval Navy Board Papers of Samuel parliament Penn Pepys Library Pepys's Povey R. G. Howarth Rawlinson MSS Robert Robert Hooke Royal Society royalist Samuel Morland Samuel Pepys Second Diary Seething Lane sent Sept servant ships sister Skinner SP's Street Tangier Thomas tion took Westminster Whitehall wife William young