SYMHC Classics: Samuel Pepys

This 2019 episode takes a closer look the famous diary of Samuel Pepys, and also at who Pepys was beyond his famous chronicle of life in 17th-century London. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:18Holly Frey?

  Happy Saturday. With this week's episode on John Evelyn's fumifugium, we thought we'd bring out our past episode on his contemporary and fellow diarist, Samuel Peeps.

• 2:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  Samuel Peeps also fond of irritating women in public spaces, and sometimes they would stick him with pins. So know that. This episode originally came out on May 29th, 2019, so enjoy.

• 2:46Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 3:00Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 3:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  Samuel Peeps has been something of a recurring character on our show. We have either name dropped him or read bits of his diaries in our episodes on Anne Lister and the pirate Henry Every and the Straw Hat Riots and Britain's Theft of Tea from China and the Body House Riots of 1668, and the belief that the royal touch could cure your scrofula. I have to imagine previous hosts have at some point said something about Samuel Peeps, too, but that's a lot harder for us to track at this point.

• 3:32Holly Frey?

  I think all historians eventually talk about Samuel Peeps.

• 3:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  It all eventually comes back to Peeps. Something that came up in one of these discussions between Holly and me, which was that we had both read selections from Peeps' diary in school, and yet we did not know until working on this podcast how funny it could be. It was like, our experience was the opposite of the Princess Bride, where somebody had gone through the diary and only left in the boring parts. When I started working on this episode, I was also surprised to learn that the funny parts were not the only thing left out of my Samuel Peeps experience in school. Our episode on Anne Lister's diaries talked about how much of them were dedicated to detailing her sexual relationships, and the same thing is true for Samuel Peeps. And parts of his diary are similarly explicit,

• 4:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  like one passage that I was reading as I was researching this caused me to go, whoa, out loud at my desk. We aren't going to be reading that passage, but just like, fair warning.

• 4:32Holly Frey?

  See, I knew there was dirty stuff in the diaries. And I wonder if, and I don't remember exactly what copy I read at various points in my education. I wonder if maybe in my case, some of the funny stuff was there, but I didn't get the comedy.

• 4:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  I think probably every Samuel Peeps thing that I had read had been in an anthology, like not a standalone copy of anything. And I like, I went back and looked as I was working on this to be like, am I, am I like fudging my own memory here? And no, like my Norton Anthology of English literature from back in my college days, like only has a couple of passages. They're only about the fire. They're not funny or racy in any way. And I think that like was the case. Like anything that I was reading was excerpted in another work and not like a standalone, more lengthy thing. Regardless though, we're coming up on the 350th anniversary of Peeps' last diary

• 5:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  entry, which was written on May 31 of 1669. So it seemed like a good time to take a closer look, not just at the diary, but also at who Peeps was beyond his famous chronicle of life in 17th century London.

• 5:43Holly Frey?

  Samuel Peeps was born in London on February 23, 1633. His father was a tailor and his mother was a butcher's daughter. So they were not a particularly prominent or affluent family. Samuel had 10 siblings, but only two of them lived to adulthood. And of those three, Samuel was the oldest.

• 6:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  With the help of other family, Samuel was able to go to school. He went to Huntingdon Grammar School and then moved on to St. Paul's School. From there, he went to Cambridge, where he started a lifelong friendship with John Dryden, who would go on to be England's first poet laureate. Peeps graduated with a BA in 1653.

• 6:21Holly Frey?

  The Peeps family had one connection that served Samuel extremely well. That was Edward Montague, who was Samuel's father's cousin and would eventually become the first Earl of Sandwich. He took an interest in Samuel and hired him as a secretary. Had that not happened, Samuel probably would have pursued a career in law.

• 6:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1655, Samuel married Elizabeth Saint Michelle. She was the daughter of a French Huguenot who had come to England as a refugee. They had a religious ceremony on October 10th, 1655, when Elizabeth was 14 and Samuel was 22. And then they had a civil ceremony on December 1st, by which point she had turned 15.

• 7:01Holly Frey?

  This was definitely a match made for love and not for money. The Saint Michelles had been well off and prominent, but they had fallen on hard times, in part because of her father's religious conversion. Samuel wound up supporting several of them financially. But at the start of his marriage to Elizabeth, he wasn't in a position to do that at all. He couldn't even afford lodgings for the two of them, so they had to live in his room in Montague's quarters at Whitehall Palace.

• 7:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  In spite of their feelings for one another, which, I mean, they do seem to have genuinely been very fond of each other, and their ages today are highly questionable, but at the time, like, that was, those are pretty normal ages to get married. Their marriage got off to a really rocky start. Elizabeth had some sort of recurring, persistent gynecological problem, and Samuel was in a lot of pain due to stones in his bladder and urinary tract. So from the very beginning, their physical relationship was difficult and probably painful for both of them. Elizabeth's feelings on this aren't really recorded anywhere, but it was hugely frustrating for Samuel.

• 8:04Holly Frey?

  Also, while Samuel was besotted with his wife, he was deeply jealous and possessive. She was lovely, lively, and charming, and tended to attract the attention of other men. As far as we know, Elizabeth was always faithful to Samuel, but she also clearly enjoyed flattery and attention. If Samuel thought a man was paying too much attention to her, or that she was being too flirtatious, he would get angry about it. And aside from that, he could be very critical of her.

• 8:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  All of this together made their relationship really tense. Elizabeth went back home to her family for a few months in 1657, returning to Samuel at Whitehall in December. They finally moved into a place of their own the following August, although their relationship continued to have just serious ups and downs. They both had volatile tempers, Peeps had a lot of affairs, and they were known to fight and even threaten each other when things got really heated. At least in Peeps' diary, though, which is virtually the only source of information that we have about Elizabeth, they also seemed really genuinely fond of each other when things were good.

• 9:08Holly Frey?

  On March 26, 1658, Pepys had a lithotomy, which is a surgical procedure to remove a bladder stone. A surgeon named Thomas Hollier removed a stone that measured about two inches in diameter, which Samuel kept in a specially-made case to show to people afterward. He recovered with no complications, which is incredible considering that there was no anesthesia and the instruments weren't in any way sterile. These surgeries weren't uncommon at the time, but deaths and complications were pretty commonplace. Pepys developed other stones later on, but for a time after this procedure, he was almost symptom-free.

• 9:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  I said in this outline that he recovered with no complications. He and Elizabeth never had any children, and one of the things that people cite as maybe a reason for that is that this procedure might have been successful at removing the stone, but also might have inadvertently made him unable to have children. That's all very speculative, though. Like, we don't know exactly why they didn't have any children. Pepys wrote his first diary entry on January 1, 1660, and he referred to this ailment in the very first sentence, quote, "Blessed be God. At the end of the last year, I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold." We'll talk more about the diary later, especially through this next section of the episode, but this is when he started keeping it.

• 10:30Holly Frey?

  1660 was a big year for Samuel Pepys. He finished his master's degree, and he was part of the fleet that brought King Charles II back to England. Super quick recap. Charles II's father, Charles I, was king during the English Civil Wars, which were a series of conflicts primarily between royalists and parliamentarians. Charles I was executed in 1649, and Charles II was forced into exile in 1651. Oliver Cromwell, who had been a general on the parliamentarian side, became Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Not long after Cromwell's death in 1658, royalists started working out a deal to restore Charles II to the throne.

• 11:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Obviously, it was a lot more complicated than those quick highlights, and also complicated were the loyalties of Pepys patron Edward Montague. Montague had fought on the parliamentarian side, and he had been closely connected to both Oliver Cromwell and his son, Richard, who tried unsuccessfully to follow in his late father's footsteps. Montague had actually advocated for Oliver Cromwell to be crowned as king.

• 11:37Holly Frey?

  But by the spring of 1659, royalists and parliamentarians alike were wondering if Montague's allegiance was shifting. Charles II's representatives made overtures to him, while Parliament stripped him of his Admiralty Commission. And for good reason, he was negotiating in secret for the return of the king. But after a very politically chaotic end of 1659 and beginning of 1660, Montague was reappointed to the Admiralty Commission and made general of the sea along with George Monk, who was actively working to restore Charles II to the throne.

• 12:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Once a deal was negotiated for Charles's return, Montague secured the fleet that traveled to the Netherlands to bring him back to England. And thanks to Montague's influence, Samuel Peeps was on board with that fleet. The fleet landed back at Dover with the king on May 25, 1660. And almost immediately, Charles II made Montague an Earl.

• 12:35Holly Frey?

  That was the beginning of a tremendously eventful decade for Peeps personally and for Britain in general. And we're going to talk more about all of that after a sponsor break.

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• 13:20Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  After Edward Montague became the Earl of Sandwich, he told Samuel Pepys, quote, "We must have a little patience and we will rise together. In the meantime, I will do you all the good jobs I can." This worked out really well for Pepys. Through the Earl's influence, in the summer of 1660, he was named Clerk of the Acts at the Navy Board. That's the administrative board responsible for running the Royal Navy and keeping it maintained and supplied.

• 16:50Holly Frey?

  This position came along with a salary and a house, and it also meant that Pepys became a justice of the peace in the counties where the dockyards were located. This was the beginning of a lifelong career as a naval administrator.

• 17:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Pepys was a very hard worker, but he didn't actually know anything about the Navy, like, at all. Nearly his entire experience was going on that voyage to bring Charles II back to England, so at first he mostly just deferred to the rest of the board, some of whom had decades of Navy experience.

• 17:20Holly Frey?

  But over the next couple of years, Peeps realized that having a long career in the Navy didn't necessarily make a person an upstanding naval administrator, or any good at it. He started to see a lot of laziness and waste and corruption, and he became especially distrustful of the men whose commands had been passed down to them through their families, rather than rising through the ranks based on their merit.

• 17:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  But none of these opinions erased the fact that these men had knowledge and experience that Peeps just didn't. So he got to work trying to close that gap as much as he could. His own education had been really weak in math, so he got a tutor and started learning multiplication tables. He immersed himself in the terminology and procedures and measurements that were needed to build, maintain, and supply ships. Soon, he stopped following the lead of the more senior board members and started trying to make things more efficient and orderly, which really drew the ire of some of his colleagues.

• 18:16Holly Frey?

  Peeps was taking on additional roles as well. He became secretary of the committee that ran the English colony at Tangier, which had been part of Catherine of Bragonza's dowry when she married Charles II. He was elected as fellow of the Royal Society in 1665. The Second Anglo-Dutch War started later that year, and many of the rest of the board were aging or at sea. So Peeps found himself overseeing a large part of the Navy's wartime administration, including setting up a centralized provisioning system.

• 18:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the mid-1660s, Peeps witnessed two catastrophes in very quick succession: the Great Plague of London and the Great Fire of London. The plague struck London in 1665, although Peeps' diary also includes news of the diseases spread elsewhere in the years before that. On April 30, 1665, he wrote, quote, "Great fears of the sickness here in the city, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all."

• 19:17Holly Frey?

  His entries through 1665 and into 1666 detail fear of the plague and death tolls, some of which were enormous. On August 31, he wrote, quote, "In the city died this week 7,496, and all of them 6,102 of the plague."

• 19:36Holly Frey?

  But it is feared that the true number of the dead this week is near 10,000, partly from the poor that cannot be taken notice of through the greatness of the number, and partly from the Quakers and others that will not have any bell ring for them.

• 19:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  For the first few months of 1666, he records numbers that decrease and then increase and then decrease again, then finally noting a day of Thanksgiving for the plague's end on November 20th, although he acknowledges that people were still dying.

• 20:03Holly Frey?

  The plague was in its last months when the fire began on September 2nd, 1666. Peeps chronicled the fire much like he did the plague, detailing people's fears along with what was burning, and the progression of the fire itself and how the city tried to stop it.

• 20:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  The fire affected Peeps for months after it was over. The following February, he wrote, quote, "The weather for three or four days being come to be exceedingly cold again as any time this year. I did within these six days see smoke still remaining of the late fire in the city. And it is strange to think how to this day I cannot sleep at night without great terrors of fire. And this very night I could not sleep till almost 2:00 in the morning through thoughts of fire."

• 20:47Holly Frey?

  The Second Anglo-Dutch War was going on through all of this, and peace negotiations started in August of 1666 and lasted into the following year. As the negotiations progressed, the British government decided to recall the fleet and scale down the navy, while still trying to protect England from a Dutch attack. On March 23rd, Peeps wrote, quote, "At the office where Sir W. Penncombe, being returned from Chatham, from considering the means of fortifying the river Medway, by a chain at the stakes and ships laid there with guns to keep the enemy from coming up to burn our ships. All our care being now to fortify ourselves against their invading us."

• 21:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  So basically, they didn't have enough money to keep maintaining the navy, like, at the strength that it had been while they were more actively at war. But the peace treaty had not been signed yet, so they needed to still have some kind of defense, and they were attempting to do this with a chain stretched across the mouth of the river. But a Dutch force did indeed attack the river midway. That happened on June 9, 1667. They broke through that chain, destroyed some of the ships and captured others, including capturing the fleet's flagship, the Royal Charles. This was disastrous for the navy. It was terrifying for the British people, since it put the Dutch in striking distance of London. Of course, then people questioned the judgment of the king over the whole thing, but the

• 22:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  war did end with the Treaty of Bretta a month later.

• 22:15Holly Frey?

  Peeps, being the administrator who had arranged so much of the withdrawal, was investigated repeatedly. In the end, though, the officers who made the decisions took more of the blame than the Navy Board, who had figured out just how to carry out those decisions.

• 22:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  Soon, though, Peeps had other problems to worry about. On October 25, 1668, his wife caught him with one of their maids, Deborah Willet. Deb was 18, and she had been hired primarily as Elizabeth's companion, and Elizabeth was, of course, outraged. They were not caught talking. Peeps was explicit in his diary about exactly what was going on. On October 31, he wrote, quote, "So ends this month with some quiet to my mind, though not perfect, after the greatest falling out with my poor wife and through my folly with the girl that I ever had, and I have reason to be sorry and ashamed of it, and more to be troubled for the poor girl's sake, whom I fear I shall by this means prove the ruin

• 23:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  of, though I shall think myself concerned both to love and be a friend to her."

• 23:18Holly Frey?

  In November, Elizabeth forced Samuel to dismiss Deb from their staff and agree to never see her again, but he did not keep that promise. He figured out where Deb had gone and went to visit and give her some money. It is not clear whether he continued their affair after she was out of the household, though.

• 23:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  And also, this was not the only affair that Peeps detailed in his diary. He wrote about dalliances with his friends' wives and his wife's friends and maids in their household, and on and on and on. And his attentions in these episodes were not always welcome. On August 18th of 1667, he wrote about going to church where he quote, "stood by a pretty modest maid whom I did labor to take by the hand and the body, but she would not, but got further and further from me. And at last I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again, which seeing I did forbear and was glad I did spy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon another pretty maid and a pew close to me and she on me. And I did go about to take her by

• 24:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  the hand, which she suffered a little and then withdrew. So the sermon ended and the church broke up and my amours ended too. And so took coach and home and there took up my wife and to Islington with her."

• 24:34Holly Frey?

  Oh, Peeps. As he was writing about the fallout of his wife's discovery of his affair, Peeps was also writing about problems with his eyes. His diary entries record pain, sensitivity to light, and trouble seeing. He found that drinking made it worse, but he didn't want to give up drink. He loved going to the theater, but the light bothered him there and he was forced to stop going. He tried all kinds of compresses and potions and pills to no effect, and he was granted several months of leave to try to recover.

• 25:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  On May 31st, 1669, he wrote his last diary entry, saying in part, quote, "And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take pen in my hand. And therefore, whenever comes of it, I must forbear, and therefore, resolve from this time forward to have it kept by my people in longhand, and must therefore be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know. Or if there be anything which cannot be much, how my amours to Deb are past and my eyes hindering me in

• 25:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  almost all other pleasures, I must endeavor to keep a margin in my book open, to add here and there a note in shorthand with my own hand. And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave, for which and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me."

• 26:07Holly Frey?

  Not long after, Samuel and Elizabeth went to the Low Countries in France, where she contracted some sort of fever. She died on November 10, 1669, at the age of 29. Samuel never remarried, but he did start an ongoing relationship with a woman named Mary Skinner not long after. She eventually moved into his home and seems to have acted as his wife in everything but name.

• 26:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  But in spite of this real certainty in the last diary entry that he was going blind, Peeps did not lose his sight, as he feared that he would, and his career continued on for almost two decades after his wife's death. We'll have more on that after another quick sponsor break.

• 26:47Speaker 01

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• 27:17Speaker 06

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• 28:00Speaker 06

  This new chicken nugget, reinvented, based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

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• 29:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  As Samuel Peeps was struggling with his eyesight and traveling with his wife, he was also up for election to the House of Commons, and that was an election that he'd lost. He also started facing rumors that he was a crypto papist or a secret Catholic. Catholics were highly suspect in England at this point, and Peeps had Catholic friends, some Catholic family members. There were some Catholic books in his library. All of This raised a lot of eyebrows.

• 30:25Holly Frey?

  The Third Anglo-Dutch War started in March of 1672, and Pepys' old benefactor, the Earl of Sandwich, was killed in action. The two men hadn't been close for a while. The Earl had been caught up in a scandal about the distribution of wartime prizes, and Pepys had made enough of a name for himself that he didn't really need the Earl's patronage anymore. Even so, Pepys was a banner bearer at the funeral.

• 30:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1673, Parliament passed a Test Act, which banned Catholics and nonconforming Protestants from holding public office. King Charles II's brother, the Duke of York, refused to take the required oaths that were mandatory for Catholics, which he was. So he was forced to resign as Lord High Admiral. Afterward, the king established an Admiralty Commission, and Pepys became its secretary. This was a promotion. It came with more income, more prestige, and a lot more influence.

• 31:19Holly Frey?

  On November 4th, 1673, Pepys was elected to the House of Commons. But, once again, rumors surfaced that he was secretly Catholic, which led to another investigation. In the end, he kept his seat, although his work as an MP mostly stuck to matters of the navy. And he kept picking up new roles outside the government and his job with the Admiralty, including becoming a governor of Christ's Hospital, the master of the Cloth Workers' Company, and the master of Trinity House.

• 31:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  He also worked to reform and revitalize the navy, especially when it came to setting standards and establishing regulations for how things should be done. He successfully lobbied for funding to build new ships, convincing the House of Commons to allocate 600,000 pounds for it in 1677. Largely due to Pepys' influence and planning, the strength of the Royal Navy nearly doubled while he was with the Admiralty.

• 32:14Holly Frey?

  He did all this in the face of ongoing accusations that he was a crypto papist. His opponents even went so far as to accuse his clerk of murder. In May of 1679, Pepys and Sir Anthony Dean were accused of leaking British secrets to France, and Pepys was again accused of secretly being Catholic. He resigned his position with the Admiralty, and he and Dean were both sent to the Tower. As this was going on, it was widely believed that Catholics were planning to assassinate the king and put his brother, the Duke of York, on the throne. This so-called popish plot did not exist, but people were certain that it did.

• 32:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  Peeps started trying to put together his defense, but it turned out that the prosecution really did not have much of a case. One of the key witnesses against him was a butler that he had previously fired, and the charges were eventually dropped. Peeps spent the next few years mostly out of the public eye, traveling, collecting books for his library, and acting as a secretary to Lord Dartmouth during an expedition to evacuate the British colony of Tangier after Britain decided to abandon it.

• 33:20Holly Frey?

  Peeps returned to the Admiralty in 1684, in a position that was created for him. That same year, he was elected president of the Royal Society. His biggest claim to fame in this role is that he arranged for the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, with Peeps' imprimatur featured very prominently on the frontispiece. This was, however, funded by Edmund Halley, not by Peeps or the Royal Society. This was because Peeps had already spent the society's budget and some of his own money on the elaborately illustrated History of Fish by Francis Willoughby, which then had been a total commercial flop.

• 33:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Okay, like who we talked about in our Christmas time episode, where we talked about Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol, and how he just really wanted all of these engravings and illustrations. All those things were very, very expensive, and Peeps had run through the whole entire budget. But if you look, there's, I mean, plenty of scans of the, the frontispiece of, of Newton's Principia Mathematica, and it's Samuel Peeps's name is one of the bigger things on that document. In 1685, King Charles II died and his brother, the Duke of York, finally did become king, becoming James II and VII. Peeps continued on with the Admiralty under the new monarch, resuming his plans to strengthen

• 34:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  the Royal Navy while also just endlessly criticizing the people that had been in charge while he was gone. But none of this preparation did the king a lot of good. In 1688, William III, Prince of Orange, overthrew James in the Glorious Revolution. William became co-regent with his wife, Mary, who was also James's daughter.

• 35:03Holly Frey?

  The new administration purged Charles's supporters from office. Peeps resigned, was briefly detained under suspicion for treason, and was ultimately released on medical grounds.

• 35:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Peeps spent most of his remaining life reading and studying and amassing a huge library, which he just continually reorganized and curated. He also published a book, Memoirs of the Royal Navy, in 1690.

• 35:27Holly Frey?

  Samuel Peeps died on May 26, 1703, at the age of 70. He was buried next to his late wife, Elizabeth, at St. Olive Church. He left his 3,000-volume library to Magdalen College at the University of Cambridge with the stipulation that they be kept separate from the rest of the college's collection. Today, those are housed as Peeps Library, which is open to the public and to scholars alike.

• 35:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  Peeps diaries were part of this collection. During the nine years that he was keeping the diary, Peeps would note each day's activities, often ending with "and so to bed." And then every few days, he would edit them a little bit. He didn't seem to meaningfully change the content, but he'd kind of clean them up a little bit and copy them into a master journal. In addition to writing these in shorthand, he also used a hodgepodge of codes and other languages for the most salacious parts of it. The result was a set of six large volumes containing more than 1 1/4 million words.

• 36:24Holly Frey?

  For more than 100 years after Peeps's death, no one knew what was in these diaries. It was only after John Evelyn's diaries were published in 1818 that scholars started trying to transcribe Peeps as well. Evelyn and Peeps lived at the same time; they were also friends.

• 36:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, they are sort of the two companion diarists of...

• 36:44Holly Frey?

  This time in London. At the time, the people working with the diary thought that it was written in code, and a Cambridge undergraduate named John Smith took on the task of decoding it. King Charles II had dictated an account of his 1651 escape from England to Samuel Peeps. Peeps had taken the dictation in shorthand and then later transcribed it into longhand, intending to publish it. Smith compared these two versions to work out how to transcribe the diaries. This work wasn't actually necessary, though. Peeps was really writing in Thomas Shelton's system of shorthand, and the handbook for it, titled Tutor to Tacheography, was there in Peeps' library as well.

• 37:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  Somebody apparently told John Smith, like, some years later, "By the way, the manual to this was like, it was right there. You didn't really... I don't know what his reaction was."

• 37:38Holly Frey?

  I envisioned some hair pulling and some screaming, but maybe that would just be me.

• 37:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's either hair pulling and screaming or like, that was a fun challenge, though. I don't mind that I did a bunch of totally unnecessary tedious work.

• 37:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  Portions of the transcribed diary were published starting in 1825, with longer editions coming out in the years that followed. A mostly complete edition edited by H. B. Wheatley came out in 10 volumes across 1893 through 1899. In all these 19th century versions, profanity and the most explicit parts are all edited out. There are phrases, sentences, or sometimes whole days removed.

• 38:18Holly Frey?

  Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about the diaries in 1886. He expressed some chagrin at the idea that some parts of them were, quote, "unfit for publication," saying, quote, "We may think, without being sorted, that when we purchase six huge and distressingly expensive volumes, we are entitled to be treated rather more like scholars and rather less like children."

• 38:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  The first edition that didn't edit out the Sex and Profanity came out almost another century later. It was another series of volumes published between 1970 and 1983. So if you have only read the parts of the diary that are in the public domain and are probably also about either the plague or the fire, like we talked about at the top of the episode, you might have a very different impression of this diary than if you read other parts of an unexpurgated version.

• 39:09Holly Frey?

  Just as examples, on October 13, 1660, he went out to see a public hanging, something that he seems to have really enjoyed doing. This one was Major General Thomas Harrison, who had been convicted of regicide in the execution of King Charles I. Peeps wrote, quote, "I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered, which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition."

• 39:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  While on the boat with Charles II during his return to England, Peeps wrote about a dog defecating on the deck, saying, quote, "I went with Mr. Mansell and one of the king's footmen with a dog that the king loved, which, expletive, deleted the boat, which made us laugh, which made me think that a king and all that belonged to him are but just as others are."

• 39:58Holly Frey?

  He also didn't temper his opinions. On September 29, 1662, he wrote, quote, "We saw Midsummer Night's Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life. I saw, I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure."

• 40:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  So yes, Peeps' diaries include a pretty straightforward eyewitness account of several major historical events in the 1660s. But Peeps clearly also thought everything around him was interesting and worth noticing. So these diaries are also a fascinating account of daily life in London, including what people ate and what they saw at the theater and what music was popular, and then little details like discovering that the wig you bought was full of knits, or what to do when you had tummy trouble while you were staying at somebody else's house and the maid forgot to leave you a chamber pot. It's full of all kinds of random things that he saw and was just delighted or surprised by, and of course, all of those many, many affairs.

• 40:59Holly Frey?

  And it's all online for free, except those most explicit parts. If you go to peepsdiary.com, it's been putting up an entry a day at a time since 2013, along with lots of annotations and letters and other information. And there are additions at Project Gutenberg and archive.org as well. So you have plenty to dig through if you want to learn more peeps.

• 41:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  You can just click on some random stuff. You might have a day where he was in the office and everything was sort of just political administrative stuff. Or you might get one about a dog pooping on the deck of a boat. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 42:00Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 42:31Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 43:08Holly Frey?

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• 43:36Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 44:06Speaker 00

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