Samuel Pepys: A Life

This is a good time for Pepys. Clare Tomalin's new biography has received lots of attention -- while a new weblog of Pepys' diary has been highly publicized (and is well worth checking out in its own right). I came to Coote's book for the meanest of reasons -- it was cheaper, but I have no regrets. This is a very readable, sometimes rollicking, turn through the details of Pepys' life. Don't expect careful analysis of the literary aspects of the diary nor rich historical background. (This is a popular history in both good and bad senses of the term.) Pepys is front and center on every page of this book and were it not for the extraordinary nature of his life it might have grown tiresome. We are with him in broad strokes and minor flourishes -- from silly infatuations to grand schemes of Royal skullduggery we see remarkable detail of both the man and the time. It is fascinating stuff and Coote doesn't get in the way. The details move quickly and coherently and when the diary itself ends the reader hardly notices. Compiling a detailed account of Pepys' subsequent trials and tribulations from letters and parliamentary reports, our vision of the man remains steady. Perhaps the greatest value of a biography of this sort is that it moves you towards the diary itself. This is no small achievement for Coote and says something about Pepys' himself.

It is almost certainly true that we would not remember Samuel Pepys without his diary, which is a magnificent blend of emotional candor and brilliant reporting of big events and small seductions. Pepys was, simply, a competent and often brilliant civil servant, even though he was involved in epochal and dramatic governmental changes. He did, however, live for thirty-four years after he had written his last diary entry, and so our picture of him is imbalanced. Stephen Coote has written a new biography, _Samuel Pepys: A Life_ (Palgrave), to correct the distorted picture Pepys unknowingly gave us. It is no small feat that Coote has been able to give almost as lively account of the years without the diary as the years so memorably recorded within it. Pepys was the son of a London tailor who performed a social rise within his life that was almost unimaginable in his time. Eventually as secretary to the Admiralty, he was simply brilliant at his job. He had been raised Puritan, and although he loved his pleasures, also loved order, efficiency, control, and domination. Some of his innovations were small but useful; no one else is on record as starting the business lunch, but Pepys took his clerks home with him, "by that means I having opportunity to talk to them about business, and I love their company very well." Some innovations shook the navy to its foundations, such as insisting that even a member of the upper class who bought himself an officership in the navy would have to serve a term as midshipmen and pass an examination. A staunch loyalist, he rubbed many Whigs the wrong way, and he was imprisoned in the Tower of London for a year, accused of Popery. It was Pepys's ability, which he had perfected in his years of naval administration, to gather massive quantities of exculpatory information that enabled him to expose and explode the case against him brilliantly. As Coote says, after the diary, Pepys wrote even private memoranda which would "show him as a public figure. The artist had, perforce, given way to the bureaucrat." His enormous service to the navy would have been what Pepys would have wanted to be remembered for, but his diary has made him immortal. Coote has diligently pursued ancient administrative documents as well as letters to give a bigger picture (even if it is not possible to examine the years after the diary with any hope of Pepys's detail), and has placed him within some of the most complex decades of English history. His explanations of the forces of history in the time are excellent, and his comprehensive portrait of the diarist and the bureaucrat gives us in full one of the most fascinating figures of English history.