Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin

Just for the record, I will read pretty much any biography written by Claire Tomalin; she has got to be one of the most thorough researchers on the planet. You definitely get the sense with this book that she spent a LOT of time tracking down 450-year-old pieces of paper, some of the details of which get only the briefest most casual of mentions, but if it was relevant/entertaining/interesting, dammit, she was going to make sure she tracked down that 450-year-old bit of paper for you. I read her Jane Austen biography a few years ago as well and really enjoyed it. I kind of want to write to her and suggest other interesting people that I think she needs to write a biography of for me.

So, wow, Samuel Pepys, so so so interesting. The most obvious thing that is wildly unusual about him was the social mobility aspect of his life: he was born, dirt poor, to a tailor and a laundry maid, and by the time he died, had risen to become head honcho of the English navy, regularly hobnobbing with kings and getting asked for advice by all kinds of important Personages, which speaks to a combination of tremendous luck and ferocious ambition that probably didn't come along very often in seventeenth century England. And while the political machinations that are the backdrop of the story, the reason why he is such a fascinating character is of course his diary and the record of his personal life, which (at least in Claire Tomalin's telling of it) reveal to him to be by turns clever/self-deluding, arrogant/curious, sympathetic good company with a love of music and books/a narcissistic corrupt abusive bastard, etc. Claire Tomalin I think likes him, which is good; I couldn't decide. The thing that's hardest, of course, for modern readers (by which I guess I mean me) to get over is his relationship to women; it's hard to remember that it was completely normal then to beat your wife and regularly molest any/all of your female servants, as anyone who did that today would automatically fall into the Major Creep category. (He also had, apparently, no problem describing other people's mistresses as "poxy whores" while enjoying frequent episodes of R&R with a bevy of his own "very agreeable" lady friends.) The family relationships are also very weird by our standards: at one point he hired his sister as a servant and insisted on treating her as such; she wasn't allowed to sit down at the table with them, for instance, and he beat her regularly, and it's quite difficult to wrap your head around how that might possibly have been considered a reasonable thing to do not that long ago.

I read a bit of the Diary as a teenager; this biography made me want to go back and reread it, if only because the Tendency of Mr. Pepys to Capitalization, according to the particular Fashion in Language of the time is so Quaint and Appealing, &c. and also because he discusses all his sexual exploits in this hilarious naughty-schoolboy-hodgepodge of French, Spanish, and Italian.

Ooh, speaking of naughty schoolboys, I also recently reread Stephen Fry's memoir, Moab is My Washpot, and also his novel, The Hippopotamus, which I had accurately remembered as sort of a raunchy version of P.G. Wodehouse. Which made me want to reread some P.G.Wodehouse; you can't pretend that P.G.W. books are in any way consequential, but he has a delicious loopy perfection all his own, and the English language would be the poorer for it without him.