The Diary of Samuel Pepys

"Pepys is about politics. He was not a politician in the modern sense, but he was something of a mixture between the politician and the civil servant. A bit of an Alastair Campbell of his time. Pepys writes about the political and court life in the raw, and about commercial life and the relationship between commercial life – particularly the business of building a Royal Navy – and the politics. And also, of course, he gives a wonderful picture of domestic life, warts and all. I’m not a diarist. There are some awful political diarists around now – I didn’t think the Blunkett tapes were particularly interesting, for instance. But Pepys gives you a total flavour of his time. And of his several crafts. Allowing for the fact that these days we don’t execute people who fall out of favour, and that someone falling out of favour is no longer in mortal danger, Pepys gives us many lessons about political life. Also for anyone who is or wants to be a politician he gives us lessons about how to manage other aspects of your life. It’s also a wonderful picture of London – no one else has written remotely as well about London in those days. Well, about relationships and the way that you manage those who, in those days, would have been your masters, and who in these days would be your colleagues. I suppose the modern analogy would be if you are a young politician and you are made PPS [parliamentary private secretary] to some senior minister, how do you deal with issues of divided loyalties? What if you disapprove of something that your minister is doing? What if you feel that you should do something about it but you don’t wish to appear disloyal – partly because disloyalty is not a great idea and partly because it might ruin your career? These are all dilemmas that have been faced by modern politicians – the recent Labour leadership campaign was a very fine example of how loyalties can divide. I think the Miliband brothers are both fine men and that is private grief – it’s extraordinary and I certainly wouldn’t like to run in an election against my sister, because I would feel it was divisive. I’m talking more about the broader loyalties to the Party and to the recent past; the disavowal of everything connected with Gordon Brown, who appears to be an unperson in the minds of most of them. Another book that takes up the same themes is Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall , which is great. I suppose Mantel wouldn’t claim that she is writing fact. She researches enormously well but nevertheless her work remains as historical fiction. The reason why people are still reading Pepys but may not be reading Hilary Mantel in 400 years time is because Pepys is 100 per cent fact and his real-life experience – albeit glossed, because Pepys was a vain and self-important person like lots of politicians. No, correct that, like almost all politicians. I don’t think Pepys was an ethical public servant, but I think he was as ethical as somebody who is on the cusp of politics can be. I think he stands comparison with Peter Mandelson, for example, or Bernard Ingham from Margaret Thatcher ’s day or any of the political fixers. In the members’ dining room in the House of Commons there is a portrait of Charles James Fox who spent almost all of his political career leading the opposition and never became prime minister. It is there to remind one, I suppose, that although he was a very ethical person, his principles were almost a disadvantage in politics. The streak of ruthlessness possessed by highly intelligent and broadly very ethical people like Jim Callaghan or John Major – and maybe Ed Miliband – got them where they ended up, rather than strictly adhering to a code of ethics. I’m dead in favour of politics being ethical but it’s a different kind of ethics really."

"Pepys is a really great person to follow through an epidemic. He records day by day what it’s like to live in a plague-stricken city, and shows us the intertwining of things that are normal and things that are surreal. The plague filters in and out of his narrative. In some entries, he seems totally unaware of it; he doesn’t talk about the plague. But other entries detail his fear that he himself will die and he doesn’t know what will happen to his estate. He describes lurid scenes of walking through the streets of London, of seeing people with plague sores, and of being told that many doctors have died. He asks ‘what will become of us,’ and then in the same entry tells us that he proceeded on to a dinner party where everyone was in good cheer. I don’t think this is because Pepys was a particularly callous person. It’s because that juxtaposition of fear and forgetfulness is, in many ways, what it is like to live through an epidemic. It’s always there, smouldering beneath the surface, but it’s not necessarily all-encompassing. “That juxtaposition of fear and forgetfulness is in many ways what it is like to live through an epidemic” You know, it’s interesting from that perspective to compare Pepys to fictional portrayals of the same plague. For example, I’ve taught Pepys alongside Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year , and it’s clear that in the fictional portrayal, the plague really is all-encompassing. The plague is what the narrator engages with every day. But the way Pepys keeps intertwining his daily experiences that have nothing to do with the medical context and observations of death, destruction and fear, I think, captures something more real about living through an epidemic. In fact, Pepys’ cheerfulness is calming at a time when many of us feel so anxious. Maybe the fact that there wasn’t 24/7 news available to Pepys is what allowed him to retain so much equanimity. Maybe it could be a reminder to disengage from constant coronavirus coverage. I agree. The boredom, that sense of being stuck. We only later realise that Dr Rieux is the narrator of that book, but he is irritated by that behaviour and also totally understanding of it. The way things only gradually change in this fictional plague-stricken Oran, but then start to change quickly feels very relatable now. I thought about recommending that book too, and it’s certainly telling that Camus alighted on living through an epidemic as an ideal stage for an examination of the more general struggles of human existence. But again, as with Defoe, the plague is so overwhelmingly the center of attention in this work of fiction. The sense of claustrophobia in that book, the way the city is totally shut-in … I think that’s part of why I thought Pepys might be a calmer narrator to follow an epidemic with! Yes, easier reading at this time. When I’ve taught it, I found it can be a bit choppy to read the entries online, one by one. I personally like the feeling of getting to turn the page and see what happens. But it does work in all formats, and the free online version has some excellent explanatory notes."

"The diary was written between January 1660 and May 1669 and the picture it paints is one of astonishing detail. It came quite naturally and easily for him to write in that kind of detail, since he had an exact mind and was totally interested in everything that happened. He noticed, for example, that during the Great Fire of London in 1666 pigeons were trapped on the window ledges. He notices the state of fashion, he notices the kind of food and drink people were eating, and the kinds of songs that were being composed all around him. So in that sense it is an invaluable picture of daily life in mid-17th century London and one that has never really been rivalled by any other diarist. I do have some favourites and they are mainly what I call cockney visionaries, including Milton and Turner, Charles Dickens and [the 19th century music hall comedian] Dan Leno. There is William Blake, and I suppose Charlie Chaplin would count as one, too. All these figures have absorbed London culture and absorbed London’s imagination and projected it in various ways in their own work. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter London has always had the reputation of being a city of contrast, where pathos and pantomime meet. That is true in the work of Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, for example. And it is certainly true in the work of Blake. So you can see patterns of the London imagination at work. It is a world of theatre. The grand theatre of the human spirit which London most readily represents, and there is scenic detail and movement and passion and the action of crowds. It is quite different from other cities."