[HN Gopher] The Diary of Samuel Pepys
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The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Author : pepys
Score : 50 points
Date : 2025-06-08 04:41 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com)
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| https://www.pepysdiary.com/
|
| Posts one diary entry a day, along with commentary from people
| explaining or asking what stuff means.
|
| It's a pretty cool idea...
| rsynnott wrote:
| Also available as a Bluesky feed:
| https://bsky.app/profile/samuelpepys.bsky.social (and I think
| on Mastodon too; Twitter's api changes killed the Twitter one
| AIUI).
|
| Works surprisingly well as a social media feed.
| ilamont wrote:
| Such an important diary from a social and historical perspective.
| When reading about other topics relating to 17th-century Britain
| (such as the Fire of 1666 and the development of the British
| Navy) it is frequently cited.
|
| I don't know if the paywalled article mentions the shorthand he
| used to write it, but that's a fascinating topic on its own. It
| was called Tachygraphy, and was used from the mid 1600s through
| the early 1800s by Pepys, Thomas Jefferson, and Isaac Newton
| among others.
|
| There's a sample on this page:
|
| https://pepyshistory.le.ac.uk/pepyss-shorthand/
|
| This source states Pepys learned it as part of his Navy
| responsibilities as it was an effective way to take notes:
| https://deborahswift.com/who-remembers-shorthand/
| cfraenkel wrote:
| Not really? "I imagine Pepys used Shelton's Shorthand because
| he had to take copious notes of Navy Board meetings and take
| official government minutes."
|
| Since the diary (and so his shorthand use) pre-dates his
| appointment to the Navy Board, this conclusion is a bit of a
| reach....
| emblaegh wrote:
| It's pronounced _peeps_ by the way.
| kurthr wrote:
| The time has long passed for dry aged Pepys.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I found this video ages ago with some scholarly background on
| Pepys, including some beautiful antique volumes of the diary:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VccalarFTU&t=1640s
| sherr wrote:
| There is a darker side to Samuel Pepys unfortunately. Either
| unknown, glossed over or ignored.
|
| Pepys had many admirable qualities but these have to be placed
| against his extremely bad behaviour towards women. Today he would
| be called a "sexual predator" and he was almost certainly also a
| rapist. Unfortunately, women were (and still are in many places)
| seen as sexual objects and this view was common in the 18th
| Century.
|
| I became aware of this from watching Guy de la Bedoyere's YouTube
| video "Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations" [1]
| where he discussed the good and the bad in Pepys, having just
| completed a new book about the diary and man. The video is good,
| as is the channel (he's a historian I was familar with from his
| Time Team appearances).
|
| I don't like mentioning things like this usually, but for the
| sake of a true picture, it is worth it.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/uxaPbPm7sMk?si=W9vIJ_JD-BynAlOp
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > I don't like mentioning things like this usually, but for the
| sake of a true picture, it is worth it.
|
| I'd say you _do_ like it, which is the only reason you did it,
| since it 's _not_ worth it since it adds nothing to the
| context.
| speerer wrote:
| IMO it adds a lot: the article is about cuts from the diary,
| the result being that the picture is distorted. This is half
| the point of the link isn't it?
| fsckboy wrote:
| you two should split the difference: it does add a lot, and
| he does like mentioning it, which is good because it adds a
| lot every time.
| Veen wrote:
| Pepys attitudes and behaviours in that regard were unremarkable
| for a man of his time and class. It would have been more
| surprising - and more worth commenting on - if he'd
| anachronistically endorsed modern standards of sexual
| propriety.
| verisimi wrote:
| I barely have a clue about the attitudes and behaviours of
| the people around me - and yet you think you know not only
| Pepys' but also his contemporaries' attitudes and behaviours,
| so much so that you feel comfortable making a generalised
| comment about people who lived 3-400 years ago. Remarkable!
| Perhaps you are a historian.
| rpmisms wrote:
| You could still confidently say that casual sex is normal
| in America currently, even without a perfect window into
| the soul of every American.
| adamors wrote:
| Thanks for this comment, the book also sounds really
| interesting https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/236044978
| hodgesrm wrote:
| I suspect most people who read _unabridged_ Pepys for any
| length of time end up feeling very ambivalent about him as a
| person. His diary contains the some of the deepest
| introspection of a human life--both the good and the bad--in
| the history of literature. Rousseau was a cheap marketer by
| comparison.
|
| That depth of revelation is one of the things that make Pepys
| hard to put down, even as you find his personality increasingly
| disagreeable. It is a truly remarkable work.
|
| Edit: added unabridged for clarity
| tialaramex wrote:
| I mean, yeah, he's a rapist, but I dunno if you're paying
| attention however _this_ century #metoo is about women
| generally being of the opinion that yeah, lots of men are what
| you 're calling "sexual predators" and getting away with it.
|
| A rapist is currently President of the United States of
| America. You likely work with and admire "sexual predators".
| Works like this diary serve the same purpose as SF shorts,
| they're holding up a mirror to our world, Sam has wasted days
| because telephones don't exist and so it's impossible for him
| to reach a person quickly if they're not where he expected -
| but "I'm a powerful man so I decided to have sex with a less
| powerful woman and she couldn't stop me" is one of the top
| stories in the news site I was just looking at.
|
| Plus ca change
| Exoristos wrote:
| He had affairs with staff and found his wife annoying. Is that
| what you're referring to?
| dash2 wrote:
| I'm a bit skeptical. For a start, you seem not to know which
| century Pepys was from! The link is to a 50 minute video.
| Perhaps you could briefly explain what leads you to believe
| Pepys was a rapist.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| 28 September 1665 is the best diary entry of all time.
| elSidCampeador wrote:
| This made me seek it out, and my oh my. Link for those
| interested - https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1665/09/28/
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| How does nearly every entry have like 30 comments on it??
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| The British had invaded the Netherlands and burned 130 merchant
| ships and killed a few old ladies. This was shockingly
| uncivilized -- no one benefits from the burned goods. During war,
| one may kill soldiers and burn warships, but to burn goods and
| kill old women? Horrible! So, the Dutch shamed the British by
| invading in response-- and while they destroyed their warships,
| they very carefully did not hurt anyone or plunder. And here
| Pepys expresses his shame.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmes%27s_Bonfire
|
| "It seems very remarkable to me, and of great honour to the
| Dutch, that those of them that did go on shore to Gillingham,
| though they went in fear of their lives, and were some of them
| killed; and, notwithstanding their provocation at Schelling, yet
| killed none of our people nor plundered their houses, but did
| take some things of easy carriage, and left the rest, and not a
| house burned; and, which is to our eternal disgrace, that what my
| Lord Douglas's men, who come after them, found there, they
| plundered and took all away; and the watermen that carried us did
| further tell us, that our own soldiers are far more terrible to
| those people of the country-towns than the Dutch themselves."
| June 30, 1667
| Oarch wrote:
| And a few years later we invited them to rule over us, which
| they gladly did.
| robin_reala wrote:
| If you want it as a free ePub I did a public domain production
| for Standard Ebooks a while ago:
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-pepys/the-diary
| floathub wrote:
| Thank you, that is greatly appreciated.
| dcminter wrote:
| A few years ago I downloaded some of the Gutenberg version [0] of
| Pepys' diary which is a transcription of the Wheatley edition
| which contains this rather odd paragraph in the introduction:
|
| _" It has now been decided that the whole of the Diary shall be
| made public, with the exception of a few passages which cannot
| possibly be printed. It may be thought by some that these
| omissions are due to an unnecessary squeamishness, but it is not
| really so, and readers are therefore asked to have faith in the
| judgment of the editor. Where any passages have been omitted
| marks of omission are added, so that in all cases readers will
| know where anything has been left out."_
|
| When I read that I looked it up in Wikipedia [1] and it turns out
| that it's hilariously disingenuous and it absolutely was an
| "unnecessary squeamishness" (i.e. censorship of the "dirty" bits)
| that motivated the omissions.
|
| I therefore picked up a cheap copy of the Latham & Matthews
| complete paperback edition and am rather slowly making my way
| through that. It's in eleven volumes - one for each year plus a
| supplementary overview. I'm still on 1662 but it's very
| entertaining in short doses. This edition, as well as including
| the bits that Wheatley sought to obscure, has rather nice
| illustration of London landmarks on the covers.
|
| There are some other good bits in that Wikipedia page by the way
| - one of my favourites is the stuff about Lord Granville
| painstakingly deciphering a few pages of the "encoded" content
| while the instructions for decoding them were _in the same
| library_ a few shelves away!
|
| Some or all of this may be in the linked article, but alas it's
| paywalled (and archive.today didn't work) so my apologies if I'm
| just repeating its contents!
|
| Pepys' writings nicely precede the stuff about Hooke [2], to whom
| someone linked yesterday, because Hooke collaborated closely with
| Christopher Wren (famously the architect of St Pauls Cathedral in
| London) in the rebuilding of many of the churches destroyed by
| the conflagarion of the city that Pepys observes and writes about
| in 1666.
|
| [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4200
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pepys
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44232699
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(page generated 2025-06-11 23:00 UTC)