Abstract
Why did Samuel Pepys begin, in January of 1660, to keep a journal, which he continued until the last day of May 1669, when he believed himself obliged to stop writing shorthand for fear of going blind? When he began the Diary he was nearly twenty-seven, and had been married to Elizabeth St Michel since 1655. Five months after the final entry his wife died. The Diary, which covers from its inception the fortunes of the restored monarchy, is also the unique history of a marriage. This balance is plain from Pepys’s preliminary note at the beginning of the first volume, which comments on his health, his household, politics and his personal standing and fortunes. He writes the Diary in order to record the moment of change which will totally alter the world into which he had been born and bred.
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Notes
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (1970–83), IX. 564–5.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, ‘Selves in Hiding’, in Estelle C. Jelinek, Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (Bloomington, 1980): 112–32, p. 112.
Louis A. Renza, ‘The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography’, in James Olney (ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, 1980): 268–95, pp. 280–1.
Edwin Chappell, The Secrecy of the Diary: A Paper read before the Samuel Pepys Club, 24 November 1933, privately printed, pp. 3, 4, 6.
Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Samuel Pepys’, Cornhill Magazine, XLIV (July 1891): 31–46, p. 36.
Walter Ong, Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca, 1977), pp. 79, 102–3, on the diary as a form which requires the writer to ‘fictionalize’ readers.
Woolf, ‘Papers on Pepys’, (first published in the TLS, 4 April 1918), Essays, 2. 235.
Coleridge, Marginalia, reproduced in N&Q, First Series, VI, no. 149 (1852): 213–16, p. 214.
Christopher Hill, ‘Samuel Pepys (1633–1703)’, Collected Essays (Brighton, 1985), I. 258–73, p. 258.
The book was H. B. Wheatley (ed.), Occasional Papers Read by Members at the Meetings of the Samuel Pepys Club, vol. I: 1903–14 (Chiswick, 1917).
Marjorie Astin, Mrs Pepys Her Book (1929), Foreword, p. 5.
Dale Spender, The Diary of Elizabeth Pepys (1991), p. 201.
John Morgan, Godly learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge, 1986), p. 21.
Pepys, Diary, IX. 21–2 and n2, and 58; Stevenson, ‘Samuel Pepys’, p. 33; Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (1984), pp. 1–14 and passim.
H. Porter Abbott, Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Ithaca, 1984), p. 86.
Henry B. Wheatley, ‘The Growth of the Fame of Samuel Pepys’, in Occasional Papers of the Samuel Pepys Club, vol. I: 1903–1917: 156–73, p. 168.
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© 1997 Juliet Dusinberre
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Dusinberre, J. (1997). Diaries: Pepys and Woolf. In: Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25644-0_5
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