The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: Private Revelations from Britain’s Most Famed Diarist

Historian De La Bédoyère (Populus) presents a darkly fascinating new transcription of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, a statesman and notorious womanizer whose private journals offer a shockingly candid glimpse of 17th-century England. Pepys, the author explains in his introduction, was the son of a “modest tailor” who witnessed the Great Fire of London and the execution of Charles I, survived the civil war, and rose through the ranks of Charles II’s government. Pepys also inexplicably “chose to record his private life in graphic and incriminating detail” in a secretive shorthand. Yet Bedoyere argues that “the true extent and implications of Pepys’s self-confessed adulterous activity, including the coercion and sexual violence... have often been... evaded” by previous transcriptions. They are presented here in full, including molestations of servant girls and assaults on his wife. Between these lurid scenes, there are frequent passages of “self-disgust or even loathing,” as Pepys seems to use his diary to both “help expiate his guilt” and “create a titillating record of... pleasure.” Besides the shocking confessions, the diaries are notable for Pepys’s frank assessments of the depravity of Charles II’s court and the horrors of the plague years, as well as for their distinctive form as a kind of proto–stream of consciousness. This unique work of scholarship conjures from the past a captivating if wretched figure. (Apr.)