The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary

Why does Samuel Pepys’s diary still matter 200 years after it was first published? In her new book, The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary, historian Kate Loveman examines how Pepys’s extraordinary consistency as a diarist has made his writing one of the richest records of everyday life in Restoration England.

Writing almost daily for nearly a decade—a quarter million words populated by over 3,000 individuals—from 1660 to 1669, Pepys’s diary documents everything from politics and scientific discoveries to the court and fashion. Even in times of crisis though, Pepys reveals life’s ordinary concerns, from worrying about the source of hair for wigs during the Great Plague to safeguarding a wheel of expensive Parmesan cheese during the Great Fire of London. He even offers a rare glimpse into contemporary theatergoing, recording audience reactions and his own unfiltered opinions—including about Shakespeare and his plays. Pepys famously dismisses A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

In this episode, Loveman shares how Pepys’s diary has been edited, published, censored, and rediscovered over the centuries, entertaining readers from the Victorian era through the 21st century and the COVID-19 pandemic. Pepys’s daily observations show how careful, habitual record-keeping can transform ordinary life into an invaluable historical resource.

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From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published December 30, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Helen Lennard in Leicester, England, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Kate Loveman is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Leicester and an internationally recognized expert on Pepys and Restoration literature. She is the author of Reading Fictions, 1660–1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture; Samuel Pepys and his Books: Reading, Newsgathering, and Sociability, 1660–1703; and The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary. She is the editor of The Diary of Samuel Pepys for Everyman’s Library.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: These days, pretty much everything you do leaves a trace. Your watch tracks your heart rate. Your phone sees where you go. Your calendar will tell you every appointment you’ve had. And Netflix knows exactly how many episodes of Love Is Blind you’ve watched.

But historians don’t have this kind of rich data for many people in the past. When it comes to 17^th-century England, one person springs to mind.

For nine years during the 1660s, a naval bureaucrat and avid theater goer named Samuel Pepys recorded everything about his life. And I do mean everything, including his unvarnished, often harsh opinions, about Shakespeare.

Pepys’s diary went on to become a crucial historical record of many details about the Restoration, including the great fire on London itself. But it was also a literary scandal. It wouldn’t be published in full until the 1980s.

Professor Kate Loveman of the University of Leicester is a Pepys scholar. Her new book is called The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary.

It follows the centuries-long journey of the diary and the meanings it’s had for readers.

Here’s Kate Loveman, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: So, I woke up this morning, and I looked up entries throughout the 1660s for this day in Pepys’ diary. And the first one I opened was perfect because it began, “In bed all morning thinking to take physique, but it being a frost my wife would not have me.” So, perfect, right? Because one, he wakes up thinking about taking medicine. Does that mean a purge? Because he was so obsessed with his bowels.

KATE LOVEMAN: Yes, that was probably some kind of emetic. I think his wife’s objection might have been that she thought the weather was too cold—

BOGAEV: Too cold for a purge.

LOVEMAN: —rather than simply unhealthy, maybe, to purge. This might have been a Sunday. If he was purging, it was normally a Sunday because you could stay at home.

BOGAEV: Completely preoccupied with his excretions. I love it. But still, it’s been around and widely read for 200 years, and it’s a diary of all things so you learn a lot about Samuel Pepys, the man and his goings on. So, what made you think there was more to learn about him at this late date?

LOVEMAN: Well, I’d been working on Pepys for a while, and I kept finding more interesting stuff. One of the things about him is he didn’t just write his diary. He had a whole lot of other kinds of records and papers that he left behind. So, even though we know his diary very well there were always other things to find.

BOGAEV: I was thinking as I was reading your book that it must be so encouraging to researchers and academics that there can be so much more to find out about such an already well-studied topic. But why are there so many documents and materials? Maybe you could tell us about some of your exciting finds.

LOVEMAN: Yeah. Well, he was a bit of a pack rat, so he liked keeping records. I think they gave him a sense of control. He keeps all sorts of things, including a piece of paper that was struck by lightening on a ship.

BOGAEV: Oh, wow. He kept it because it was struck by lightening?

LOVEMAN: Yes, it was just an everyday letter. Of course, he keeps a lot of correspondence. So, one of the things you can do with the diary is match it up to existing correspondence. When I first started writing about Samuel Pepys, one of the first things I was able to do was identify what had happened to the young woman with whom he had an affair, Deb Willet, who had disappeared from history. I was able to identify a marriage record for her—and her husband crops up in Pepys’s other papers so we know that Pepys was in contact with the family after the diary ended when she was married, in circumstances that are slightly suspicious—well, more than a bit suspicious because he sent her husband off to sea in a way that he often did with people whose wives he was interested in.

BOGAEV: Oh, yikes. You have brought up so many pertinent things about him and what you get into in the book but maybe we should take them one at a time. So, before we get to the new stuff, just lay down some basics. Who was Samuel Pepys? What was his background and his profession and circumstances?

LOVEMAN: So, he was born in 1633 in London, and he lived most of his life there. He was the son of a tailor, so he wasn’t from a particularly well-off background but he had some powerful relatives. A combination of his own hard work and help from his relatives meant that he went off to university. He got a scholarship. And then he came back to London and started working as a clerk in Whitehall.

So, when he starts his diary in January of 1660, he’s a clerk trying to look as gentile as he possibly can. But he complains in his first diary entry that he’s indeed very poor. So, the diary that he kept for the next nine and a bit years, charts his social rise, really. He did very well out of the restoration of Charles II.

He got a new Navy job. He worked very hard. And by the end of the diary in 1669, he’s a confidant of the heir to the throne. He’s influential within the Navy and he has written about 1,250,000 words in this diary. Six volumes of closely written shorthand. He stops because he fears he’s going blind, but he doesn’t go blind.

For the rest of his life, he continues to rise in the Navy. He collects books. And when he dies in 1703, he leaves this library, including the diary, behind him. It’s called the Pepys Library, the Bibliotheca Pepysiana, his choice of name. It’s in the Magdalene College in Cambridge.

BOGAEV: Well, kudos on that incredibly concise catch up. Thank you. Why did this guy start a diary in the first place? And was it common then to keep a journal?

LOVEMAN: There was an increasing number of people keeping diaries because literacy had increased—and also keeping a diary was often a spiritual exercise. People were also keeping diaries or starting diaries at the same time that Pepys did because of the turbulent political events. They recognized that these were nationally historic moments and that what happened in the next few months was going to determine whether England went back to being a monarchy or became something else entirely.

So, Pepys probably started his diary, partly because he realized he was living in interesting times. He seems to have used his diary for a lot of different purposes. So, he’s using it to monitor his health. He used it to vent his spleen when he was annoyed with his colleagues. He used it to assess his relationships with other people a lot, in particular, his social status. He didn’t really have anybody that he could talk directly to or confide in about how to be an effective social climber so I think one of the purposes his diary served him was as a way to monitor his social status.

BOGAEV: And apparently maybe it helped him because he really did rise. You already mentioned some of the answers to this next question, but I have to ask it. You said he wrote in shorthand. Why did he do that? And was shorthand in fashion at the time?

LOVEMAN: Yes, shorthand was kind of trendy. People who’d visited England noted that it was a kind of an English thing.

BOGAEV: A fad.

LOVEMAN: Yeah, it had been a fad for a while at this time. People used shorthand to keep notes about sermons when they were listening. Pepys learn shorthand primarily, probably, because it was useful for his work. It was a useful skill for a clerk to have. It meant when he was keeping his diary that he could use less paper. He could perhaps write slightly more quickly than he could if he was writing in long hand. But above all, he seems to have valued it for the secrecy. He talks about it right at the end of his diary as something that is important because it enables him to conceal information.

BOGAEV: Okay, a couple things. First of all, it’s kind of weird if you use the most common shorthand method of the day. Wouldn’t a lot of people be able to decipher it? It’s like using “password” as your password.

LOVEMAN: Yes. He was using a system invented by Thomas Shelton that was really popular so this was not a code. What it would’ve done was prevent most of the domestic servants in his household and his wife from reading this if they came across it. So, anybody who was determined to read this was certainly going to do it. They’d have to identify what form of shorthand it was. So, in that sense, it was a fairly flimsy protection.

He did, as his diary went on, add in other ways of coding some of the sexual passages. One of the things that he did was to start writing his shorthand in a mix of English, French, Spanish, Latin, and occasionally other languages thrown in which makes it rather more difficult to read the shorthand because you don’t know what language it is. He also, on top of that, sometimes started throwing in random shorthand symbols, to further confuse what was being written.

BOGAEV: Wily man. You’re alluding to all of his sexual, I guess you could call them, conquests or attempts, or abusive behavior, really.

LOVEMAN: I tend to use “encounters” because that is relatively neutral. Then you have to sort of specify what type of encounter you’re talking about because there’s a wide range of them. As you say, some are abusive, some appear to have been mutually enjoyed. Some were solo. So, all sorts of sexual material has been documented.

BOGAEV: For people who haven’t read Pepys, why don’t you give us a sense of the kinds of encounters he wrote about.

LOVEMAN: He very rarely writes about sex with his wife. I think that’s the first thing to say. Occasionally he does. So, he’s mostly writing about encounters with a range of women who range from servants in his household to actresses to women who own their own businesses. So, these are women from a variety of different backgrounds. Usually, they are women whom Pepys can exercise some form of power over. These relationships often involve patronage by him, help for their husbands, or, if they are servants in his household, to some extent he’s exercising power over them.

So, when he talks about these relationships, some of them are relationships, some of them are casual encounters. The word that’s used is often “grope” in reporting this but he will use the word “touch.” So, he will talk about “touching” somebody’s thigh. He will also sometimes say that the woman stopped him or that she cried out which means that it wasn’t a touch. It was perceived by her because it probably was a more violent and unwanted approach.

So, he conducts these kinds of transactional relationships with a range of women. Sometimes they are clearly mutually enjoyed. He has a relationship with a woman called Betty Martin, who seems to get quite a lot sexually and financially out of the arrangements.

He sometimes talks about touching—or molesting would be a more accurate word—young girls. One girl whom he refers to as a child, as being little, and as being prepubescent.

So, these are details that it’s quite easy to overlook when you are reading because you need a lot of contextual information to understand who the person is and what’s happening.

BOGAEV: He really comes off as a rapist.

LOVEMAN: There’s at least one moment in the diary where he talks about an assault which sounds like a rape. He has an ongoing relationship with a woman called Elizabeth Bagwell. At one point, he goes round to her house, and essentially, he says he had his will of her, which is a phrase that can be used for seduction, but is also used for rape. And the next entry, he says he’s injured his finger struggling with her so whatever happened on that particular occasion, violence was being used.

BOGAEV: Well, before we cancel Pepys, I’m curious how his diary compares to diaries of other prominent people kept at the time. You do side-by-side comparison at one point.

LOVEMAN: I should say I don’t think Pepys is any danger of being canceled. He went for a hundred years with nobody reading his diary or caring very much about him and he has bounced back from all sorts of things that people have said about him since it has been published. So, the value of this diary doesn’t really lie in our moral estimation of Samuel Pepys, because it is documenting the lives of other people beyond Pepys, if for no other reason than that.

So, you’re asking me about other diaries. So, the diary of his friend, John Evelyn, was being compared with Pepys’s diary right from the point that Pepys’s diary was published. That is a very upright, respectable diary, which Evelyn worked over for his family so, it does not go into the kind of detail that Pepys does.

Another comparison might be the diary of Robert Hook, whom Pepys knew. Robert Hook does record sexual relationships. He mentions he has an affair with one of his servants. He has a sexual relationship with his niece who comes to work for him as a housekeeper.

So, in that sense, it is clear from court records that very often female servants in households were taken advantage of and were not in a position to easily resist the advances of men within the household. But it’s also apparent from other kinds of records that women and girls could be quite skilled in managing this kind of approach or things that could develop into relationships. There were, later on, there were advice books published for them on how to manage their employers.

BOGAEV: Right. So, very much of his time. But it sounds like the diaries are so different in tone. Pepys is just so alive and fresh. You describe him in one instance, when you’re comparing him to his friend John Evelyn, both gave an account of the coronation of Charles II, and you say, Evelyn is about what happened at the Coronation, at this official event, but Pepys is about how it felt to be there.

The most famous example of this for people, again, who haven’t read the diaries is that Pepys wrote about what London was like during the Great Plague in 1665. Also, he wrote about the London fire of 1666. Describe it. Maybe you could read a passage for us?

LOVEMAN: I’ll do a bit about the plague because that’s quite fun. So, this is one of Pepys’s most famous diary entries which is from September of 1665. It’s the 3rd of September. At this point he’s living just outside in Greenwich. He gets up to go to church. So, the entry begins:

[Kate Loveman reads an entry from the diary of Samuel Pepys.]

“Up; and put on my coloured silk suit very fine, and my new periwigg, bought a good while since, but durst not wear, because the plague was in Westminster when I bought it; and it is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plague is done, as to periwiggs, for nobody will dare to buy any haire, for fear of the infection, that it had been cut off of the heads of people dead of the plague.”

BOGAEV: This is what makes him such a treasure for historians, right? I mean, who would’ve thought that people would be worried about what the fashion would be with wigs and the implications of infection.

LOVEMAN: This bit—as soon as the diary was published—was in the very first edition, and this was one of the bits that was most quoted. I think actually even more quoted in some ways than the Great Fire. People noticed this and they were just astonished, partly, that anybody could be so self-absorbed as to be thinking about wigs.

BOGAEV: Well, there is that.

LOVEMAN: Yes, what you imagine somebody would think be thinking about during the plague, relentless death around you and being miserable—

BOGAEV: Right, and thinking deep shower thoughts, not…

LOVEMAN: Pepys is actually having a rather good time. You know, he’s continuing his affairs. He’s helping run the Navy. He’s going to parties, which he’s really, really enjoying. He says at the end of the year that he’s had one of the best years of his life.

BOGAEV: Right, life went on. It’s the same thing about the London Fire. He gives this vivid description of the London Fire and the devastation, but then he talks about trying to save his Parmesan cheese and that was uppermost in his mind.

LOVEMAN: Well, I’m going to defend Pepys on this point.

BOGAEV: It must have been very expensive.

LOVEMAN: It was expensive and he’d moved all his other goods at that point so he and his colleagues were standing around waiting to see if the fire was going to come and burn their homes down. So, actually, digging a hole and burying things, if nothing else, is a sort of psychologically helpful thing to do. Apparently, according to people who seem to know about this sort of thing, it’s actually quite a sensible thing to do. It would’ve worked; he could have dug up his cheese again if the house had burnt down.

BOGAEV: Dug up his cheese. I have to ask, since we’re a Shakespeare podcast, does Pepys mention Shakespeare?

LOVEMAN: Oh, yes, he does. So, Pepys was a big theater fan, and he’s actually one of our best, perhaps the best, source on what was happening in the theater in the Restoration. He has kind of mixed views of Shakespeare. When his diary was first published, people were quite shocked that Pepys was not in for Shakespeare.

BOGAEV: It wasn’t a great era for Shakespeare. You were getting a very adulterated Shakespeare in the Restoration.

LOVEMAN: He actually liked the adulterated versions better.

BOGAEV: He likes the happy endings.

LOVEMAN: Well, this is Pepys on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He goes to see it in 1662, and he says it’s a play “which I have never seen before, nor ever shall again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw, I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure.”

So, he doesn’t like Midsummer Night’s Dream. He quite likes Hamlet. He’s a big Hamlet fan. And he’s got one of the first records of a performance of Othello, which, although he doesn’t say so directly, probably involved one of the first Restoration actresses playing on stage. This was quite a novelty in 1660 because women hadn’t been playing women on the stage before. So, he records a performance of what he calls, “’The Moore of Venice,’” which was well done.” And he mentions that by the same token, “a very pretty lady that sat by me, called out, to see Desdemona smothered.” Recording audience reactions to plays is something that Pepys does really well.

BOGAEV: Well, I’m going to shift now because a big part of this story is how the diary came to be published in 1825, more than a hundred years after Pepys died. So, what’s the story there?

LOVEMAN: So, Pepys left his diary to Magdalene College, Cambridge. There was not a concerted attempt to investigate it at great length before 1818, at which point it suddenly became of interest, because John Evelyn’s diary had been published and had been a big hit. So, the Master of Magdalene commissioned a student to transcribe the diary.

So, basically there was an almost full transcription, but it was not publicly available. It was kept in the possession of somebody who was closely related to the college, a man called Lord Braybrooke, who became the diary’s first editor, and it was he who decided what the public would see of the diary for a large part of the 19th century.

BOGAEV: So, it finally got published. What kind of impact did it have and did it change people’s impression of the Restoration period?

LOVEMAN: The word they use most often is “entertaining,” and they also use the word “curious.” It was a highly edited version, so a lot of the sex, all of the sex in fact, and a lot of the scandal that Pepys wrote about at court had been cut. But it was still relatively full of scandal, which interested people.

There were conflicting views about how historically important it was. On the one hand, this diary didn’t seem to really change ideas of the Restoration—it was vivid, it was interesting—but people didn’t seem to think it was telling them much they didn’t know about the major narrative of the Restoration or the Fire or the Plague. But you also got people arguing that it did have historical importance because historical importance lay in knowing what people of the middling sort, middling rank people, were thinking, and so actually having what we would now call social history was important.

BOGAEV: But it did also start a craze for journal writing in the mid-19th century.

LOVEMAN: I think it assisted a craze for journaling, right? There was a bit of an interest in publishing diaries in the early 18th century and it had been growing. You do start to see people imitating Pepys. They say, “I’m going to note down dinners like honest Pepys did.” So, yes.

BOGAEV: Well, we have him to thank. Another edition came out in 1875. How different was that version from the first? And what did the Victorians make of Pepys?

LOVEMAN: The 1870 edition was the first one that wasn’t done by Lord Braybrooke. It was done by a man called Mynors Bright and he was the first person to publish anything that actually revealed that Pepys had had a sexual relationship with somebody who was not his wife.

BOGAEV: So, they let him sleep around.

LOVEMAN: They allowed him to have one relationship with Deb Willet, his wife’s servant, and there was one passing reference to the moment where Pepys was discovered with Deb Willet by his wife.

BOGAEV: Oh yes, we should dwell on that for just a moment. What happened?

LOVEMAN: Pepys had been having a relationship with Deb Willet for a number of months, and his wife, in October 1668, walked in on him and Deb Willet. And he said—well, I can quote you the 17^th-century bit, he said that, “I was with my main in her cunny.” So, he’s using French there, and using a 17^th-century term for a body part was not something that you could publish, actually, you couldn’t publish it in England before 1959, when the Obscene Publications Act changed.

So, the 19^th-century editions of Pepys either didn’t feature that episode at all, or by the time we get to the 1870s version, it’s just referred to as he was embracing Deb Willet with no details of what that embrace actually involved. But that was quite a difficult thing to cut if you wanted to include anything that followed because it caused tremendous strife in Pepys’ private life and it takes up a lot of the remainder of the diary.

So before the 1870s, they had just cut that episode and cut most of what followed, not entirely successfully, because people sometimes wondered why Elizabeth was behaving strangely in the bits they left.

BOGAEV: She must have come off as quite disagreeable if you didn’t know the cause of her behavior.

LOVEMAN: When they cut Deb Willet pretty much entirely from the diary before 1870, they left in Elizabeth attacking Pepys with hot tongs or threatening to attack him with hot tongs. So, she looks like she’s behaving completely irrationally.

BOGAEV: But in reality, she has every reason to attack him with tongs.

LOVEMAN: Well, we’re only getting part of the story, if we’re missing the cause.

BOGAEV: Right. You track how Pepys’s diary evolved over the ages. It is so interesting. What new trends did it inspire in the early 20th century?

LOVEMAN: So, by the early 20th century, people had started to see Pepys as a kind of every man in a way they hadn’t really done before. What really seems to have changed perceptions of Pepys were the World Wars. So, during the First World War, there was a very long-running parody of Pepys’s diary that imagined Pepys’s responses to the First World War, and that parody was so long-running that it was still going in the Second World War.

BOGAEV: It was called A Diary of the Great Warr by Sam Pepys Junior.

LOVEMAN: Yes, and then in the Second World War, it was again published and seems to have been a bit of a hit. The thing about the Second World War in particular was that people really began to feel the 1940s had these very direct parallels with the 1660s.

So, the 1660s and the 1940s were both times of war. In the 1660s, there had been the Great Fire of London; in the 1940s, there was the Blitz, and one night, in particular, was referred to as the second Great Fire of London. So, people began to feel that Pepys was really a sort of source for dealing with everyday life during this long-running period of deprivation, which was terrifying but which was also really quite boring for a lot of the time, really quite annoying, frustrating.

What people seemed to have really caught onto was the fact that he was somebody who set an example of dealing with the day-to-day grind of war. The fact that you could be frustrated at the price rises. You could be annoyed that the milk hadn’t arrived on time. You could have fights with your spouse, and this was a normal and acceptable way to behave during the war.

That happened again during the COVID-19 pandemic. People turned to the diary partly to understand, you know, what quarantine might be like.

BOGAEV: Right, it’s okay to still think about your Parmesan cheese.

LOVEMAN: Yes, it’s okay to worry about your wig, or in this case, you know, I don’t know what the modern equivalent would be, buying fast fashion?

BOGAEV: Right.

LOVEMAN: Therapy during COVID, yeah. People’s responses to Samuel Pepys, they do change over the years, but there’s some recurring themes, and one of those is that in times of quite extreme national crisis, Pepys’s diary can be turned to for an individual kind of reassurance or for a sense of continuity with the past.

BOGAEV: So, how did an unabridged version of the diary finally get published? And when?

LOVEMAN: There’d been a lot of pressure but it wasn’t until the 1970s.

So, the last big Victorian edition came out in the 1890s and that was the edition that was used throughout most of the 20th century—and it’s still the easiest edition to get your hands on because it’s out of copyright. So, very often when people are buying cheap editions or putting them on the internet, it’s the 1890s.

There had been a lot of pressure, because Pepys was getting increasingly famous and respected, to publish the diary in its full entirety but this didn’t happen until after the Obscene Publication Act was passed in 1959.

So, Magdalene College, who were the custodians of the diary at that point, started investigating whether it would be possible to publish the diary. They took legal advice and the legal advice they got actually still shapes the diary that we read today when we read the full version because the legal advice they got was, “Yes, you can now publish the full diary. We can defend this in terms of the current law if anybody takes us to court. But what you shouldn’t do is translate any of the bits that are in foreign languages. Nor should you tell people what the new bits are if they’re going to prosecute us.” The advice was, “Let us make it difficult for them.”

BOGAEV: Okay.

LOVEMAN: So, today if you read the complete edition you will see that they have not translated a lot of the sexual passages. So, they can still be quite difficult to read. You have to sort of interpret the language and then interpret the 17^th-century context in what’s going on.

BOGAEV: It’s true, that’s true, if they did translate them directly, it might sound like Hustler or something.

Well, one of the joys of reading Pepys now is you can read it online. There’s Pepysdiary.com that released a day-by-day entry. Every day you got a new entry. So, it’s almost like you were living Pepys life as he lived it.

And there was a Twitter version during COVID that a lot of people really, really found worthwhile and helped them through it. But also, there are all these comments. It’s so interactive when you look at Pepys online today.

LOVEMAN: Yeah, Pepysdiary.com is an online community among other things. It’s been going since 2003. They’re now on their third cycle of the diary. So, you know, they had come out, came out over the first 10 years. There was a little bit of pause, it comes out again. And now, they’re on round three. So, what you see when you look at a page of that, is you get Pepys and then you get responses across decades.

BOGAEV: Across decades, right, and some very, very scholarly people

LOVEMAN: Yes, all kinds of different responses. For example, I mentioned a little bit earlier about when Pepys dug his cheese up, that was a sensible idea to bury the cheese. My information on that comes from somebody who had experience with brush fires and commented on Pepysdiary.com and said, “Actually, yes, we used to bury our instruments that deep and that’s a sensible way to proceed if you’re trying to protect something from the fire.”

BOGAEV: That’s probably one of my neighbors here in California.

LOVEMAN: It’s really helpful to have a range of expertise, a range of different people, reading Pepys’s diary because then we see new things in it and we understand it.

BOGAEV: Yes, and as you write, looking at the diary in modern times, it opens up these whole new avenues of inquiry, for instance, about the treatment and views and the daily life of women in Pepys’s time, and servants, and especially Blacks in England during the Restoration.

LOVEMAN: Yes. Pepys writes in passing about a number of Black people who are living in Seething Lane around him. These are often very fleeting references but they are valuable references. When you put them together with his other papers, you can start to build up a picture.

I was interested, for example, in a young man that Pepys mentions in the diary. He is only called Mingo and he’s living next door to Pepys. He’s a young Black man working for a naval official called Sir William Batten. It’s not entirely clear from the diary whether Mingo was enslaved or whether he was free so I was trying to find out anything I could about him and what happened to him. He appears in his employer’s will and he’s left some money and he’s left the rights to tend the lighthouses at Harwich. He seems to have had other ideas. He wasn’t very keen on going to Harwich. He stayed in London and he seems to have stayed working for the Navy. So, I’m interested in his story because he’s somebody who really against the odds managed to work patronage networks and establish himself. You can compare what happens with him and other Black people whom Samuel Pepys came into contact with, or indeed later in his life owned and treated badly.

BOGAEV: Well, you’ve spent so much time thinking about Pepys. In the end, do you like him?

LOVEMAN: I find him endlessly interesting. I think if I didn’t like some of him, he would be unbearable to work with. But, you know, in my work, I have to keep in mind that he’s somebody who can do absolutely appalling things one minute, and then be extremely interesting, and fascinating, and almost charismatic, on the next page. So, one of the fascinating things for me about this diary is how we deal with that, you know? Do we acknowledge the range of this diary or do we focus on particular bits? And I think it’s fine to focus on particular bits if you allow other people to also focus on the bits that they want to focus on.

BOGAEV: Well, this has been so fun. Thank you so much for writing the book. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

LOVEMAN: Thank you very much for having me.

———————

KARIM-COOPER: That was Kate Loveman, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary is out now from Cambridge University Press.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Helen Lennard in Leicester, England, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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