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In 1672 he was appointed Secretary to the Admiralty, an appointment
he held with one interruption of four years at the end of Charles
II's reign until the Glorious Revolution when he retired from public
life and was later succeeded by his former clerk Josiah Burchett.
As well as being one of the most important civil servants of his
age, he was a widely cultivated man, taking a learned interest in
books, music, the theatre and science. He was elected a Fellow of
the Royal Society in 1665 and later served as President. He died
childless in 1703. His contemporary John Evelyn remembered him as
"universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many
things". Pepys' character seems encapsulated in his Latin motto
mens cujusque is est quisque, which can be translated as "The
Mind is the Man".
Pepys was a lifelong bibliophile and carefully nurtured his large
collection of books, manuscripts and prints, which totalled exactly
3,000 volumes at his death. These comprise one of the most important
surviving 17th-century private libraries, with remarkable holdings
of incunabula, manuscripts and printed ballads. Pepys made elaborate
provisions in his will for the preservation of the library, and
since 1724 it has been kept intact in Pepys' original bookcases
as The Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, carefully
following Pepys' instruction that "the placing as to heighth
be strictly reviewed and where found requiring it more nicely adjusted".
Amongst the most important items in the Library are the original
bound manuscripts of Pepys' diary. The six volumes were written
in one of the many forms of shorthand used in Pepys' time, but after
his death they were thought to be ciphered. After finding the specific
shorthand book in Pepys' library, John Smith was able to put the
diaries in plain English (1819 to 1822). A shortened (and expurgated)
publication appeared in 1825; the complete diary of more than 3800
pages appeared in 1893.
Pepys recorded his daily life for almost ten years in breathtaking
honesty; the women he pursued, his friends, his dealings are all
laid out. His diary reveals his jealousies, insecurities, trivial
concerns, and his fractious relationship with his wife. It is an
important account of London in the 1660s. Included are his personal
account of the restoration of the monarchy, the Great Plague of
1665, the Great Fire of London of 1666, and the arrival of the Dutch
fleet, 1665-1667.
His job required that he meet with many people to dispense monies
and make contracts. He often laments over how he "lost his
labour" having gone to some appointment at a coffee house or
tavern, there to discover that the person he was seeking was not
within. This was a constant frustration to Pepys.
The diary similarly gives a detailed account of Pepys' personal
life. He liked wine and plays, and was a womanizer. He also spent
a great deal of time evaluating his fortune and his place in the
world. He was always curious and often acted on that curiosity,
as he acted upon almost all his impulses.
Periodically he would resolve to cut down on drinking and womanizing
and to devote more time to those endeavors where he thought his
time should be spent. For example, this entry on New Year's Eve,
1661, "I have newly taken a solemn oath about abstaining from
plays and wine..." The following months reveal his lapses to
the reader as by February 17 "And here I drank wine upon necessity,
being ill for the want of it."
The diary gives a detailed account of the pattern of Pepys' life.
Reading it, one cannot help thinking how very much we must all be
alike. His characteristic closing sentence was: "And so to
bed."
In 2002, Claire Tomalin won the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year
for writing the biography Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self. The
awarders called it a "rich, thoughtful and deeply satisfying"
account that "unearth[s] a wealth of material about the uncharted
life of Samuel Pepys", notably providing context for the Diaries
and an account of the 34 years of his life following their end.
In December 2003, his diary, which was at the time being serialised
as a weblog run by Phil Gyford, won an award in The Guardian's Best
of British Blogs, in the specialist-blog category.
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