SYMHC Classics: Samuel Pepys

This 2019 episode takes a closer look the famous diary of Samuel Pepys, and also at who Pepys was beyond his famous chronicle of life in 17th-century London.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. With this week's episode on John Evelyn's Fumafujium,
we thought we'd bring out our past episode on his
contemporary and fellow diarist, Samuel Peeps. Samuel Peeps also fond
of irritating women in public spaces, and sometimes they would
stick him with pins. So know that this episode originally

(00:24):
came out on May twenty ninth, twenty nineteen, So enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey E. V.
Wilson and I'm Polly Frying. Samuel Peeps has been something

(00:48):
of a recurring character on our show. We have either
name dropped him or read bits of his diaries, and
our episodes on and Lister and the Pirate Henry every In,
the Straw Hat Riots and Britain's Theft of Tea from
China and the Body House Riots of sixteen sixty eight,
and the belief that the Royal Touch could cure your scrofula.

(01:09):
I have to imagine previous hosts have at some point
said something about Samuel Peeps too, but that's a lot
harder for us to track at this point. I think
all historians eventually talk about Samuel Peeps. It all eventually
comes back to Peeps. Something that came up in one
of these discussions between Holly and me, which is was
that we had both read selections from Peep's diary in school,

(01:31):
and yet we did not know until working on this
podcast how funny it could be. It was like our
experience was the opposite of The Princess Bride, where somebody
had gone through the diary and only left in the
boring parts. When I started working on this episode, I
was also surprised to learn that the funny parts were
not the only thing left out of my Samuel Peeps

(01:52):
experience in school. Our episode on Ann Lister's diaries talked
about how much of them were dedicated to detailing her
sexual relationships, and the same thing. It's true for Samuel Peeps,
and parts of his diary are similarly explicit. Like one
passage that I was reading as I was researching this
caused me to go whoa out loud at my desk.

(02:13):
We aren't going to be reading that package passage. But
just like fair warning. See I knew there was dirty
stuff in the diaries, and I wonder if and I
don't remember exactly what copy I read at various points
in my education. I wonder if maybe in my case,
some of the funny stuff was there, but I didn't
get the comedy. I think probably every Samuel Peeps thing

(02:36):
that I had read had been in an anthology, like,
not a standalone copy of anything. And I went back
and looked as I was working on this, to be like,
am I like fudging my own memory here? And no?
Like my Norton Anthology of English Literature from back in
my college days, like only has a couple of passages,
They're only about the fire. They're not funny or racy

(02:58):
in any way. And I think that was the case,
like anything that I was reading was excerpted in another
work and not like a standalone, more lengthy thing. Regardless, though,
we're coming up on the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary
of Peep's last diary entry, which was written on May
thirty first of sixteen sixty nine, so it seemed like
a good time to take a closer look, not just

(03:20):
at the diary, but also at who Peeps was beyond
his famous chronicle of life in seventeenth century London. Samuel
Peeps was born in London on February twenty third, sixteen
thirty three. His father was a tailor and his mother
was a butcher's daughter, so they were not a particularly
prominent or affluent family. Samuel had ten siblings, but only

(03:41):
two of them lived to adulthood, and of those three,
Samuel was the oldest. With the help of other family,
Samuel was able to go to school. He went to
Huntingdon Grammar School and then moved on to Saint Paul's School.
From there he went to Cambridge, where he started a
lifelong friendship with John Dryden, who would go on to
be England's first poet laureate. Peeps graduated with a BA

(04:03):
in sixteen fifty three. The Peeps family had one connection
that served Samuel extremely well. That was Edward Montague, who
was Samuel's father's cousin and would eventually become the first
Earl of Sandwich. He took an interest in Samuel and
hired him as a secretary. Had that not happened, Samuel
probably would have pursued a career in law. In sixteen

(04:26):
fifty five, Samuel married Elizabeth sa Michelle. She was the
daughter of a French Huguenot who had come to England
as a refugee. They had a religious ceremony on October tenth,
sixteen fifty five, when Elizabeth was fourteen and Samuel was
twenty two, and then they had a civil ceremony on
December first, by which point she had turned fifteen. This

(04:46):
was definitely a match made for love and not for money.
The sam Michel's had been well off and prominent, but
they had fallen on hard times in part because of
her father's religious conversion. Samuel wound up supporting seven of
them financially, but at the start of his marriage to
Elizabeth he wasn't in a position to do that at all.

(05:06):
He couldn't even afford lodgings for the two of them,
so they had to live in his room in Montague's
quarters at Whitehall Palace. In spite of their feelings for
one another, which I mean they do seem to have
genuinely been very fond of each other, and their ages
today are highly questionable, but at the time like that,
those are pretty normal ages to get married. Their marriage
got off to a really rocky start. Elizabeth had some

(05:29):
sort of recurring, persistent gynecological problem, and Samuel was in
a lot of pain due to stones and his bladder
and urinary tracts, so from the very beginning their physical
relationship was difficult and probably painful for both of them.
Elizabeth's feelings on this aren't really recorded anywhere, but it
was hugely frustrating for Samuel. Also, while Samuel was besotted

(05:50):
with his wife, he was deeply jealous and possessive. She
was lovely, lively and charming, and tended to attract the
attention of other men. As far as we know, Elizabeth
was always faithful to Samuel, but she also clearly enjoyed
flattery and attention. If Samuel thought a man was paying
too much attention to her, or that she was being

(06:11):
too flirtatious, he would get angry about it, and aside
from that, he could be very critical of her. All
of this together made their relationship really tense. Elizabeth went
back home to her family for a few months in
sixteen fifty seven, returning to Samuel at Whitehall in December.
They finally moved into a place of their own the
following August. Although their relationship continued to have just serious

(06:34):
ups and downs, they both had volatile tempers. Peeps had
a lot of affairs, and they were known to fight
and even threaten each other when things got really heated.
At least in Peepe's diary, though, which is virtually the
only source of information that we have about Elizabeth. They
also seemed really genuinely fond of each other when things
were good. On March twenty sixth, sixteen fifty eight, Peeps

(06:56):
had a lithotomy, which is a surgical procedure to remove
a bladderstone. A surgeon named Thomas Hollier removed a stone
that measured about two inches in diameter, which Samuel kept
in a specially made case to show to people afterward.
He recovered with no complications, which is incredible considering that
there was no anesthesia and the instruments weren't in any

(07:18):
way sterile. These surgeries weren't uncommon at the time, but
deaths and complications were pretty commonplace. Peeps developed other stones
later on, but for a time after this procedure he
was almost symptom free. I said in this outline that
he recovered with no complications. He and Elizabeth never had
any children, and one of the things that people cite
as maybe a reason for that is that this procedure

(07:40):
might have been successful at removing the stone, but also
might have inadvertently made him unable to have children. That's
all very speculative, though, like we don't know exactly why
they didn't have any children. Peeps wrote his first diary
entry on January first, sixteen sixty, and he referred to
this ailment in the very first sentence, quote, Blessed be God.

(08:01):
At the end of the last year, I was in
very good health, without any sense of my old pain,
but upon taking of cold. We'll talk more about the
diary later, especially through this next section of the episode,
but this is when he started keeping it. Sixteen sixty
was a big year for Samuel Peeps. He finished his
master's degree and he was part of the fleet that

(08:21):
brought King Charles the Second back to England. Super quick recap.
Charles the Second's father, Charles the First, was king during
the English Civil Wars, which were a series of conflicts
primarily between royalists and parliamentarians. Charles the First was executed
in sixteen forty nine and Charles the Second was forced
into exile in sixteen fifty one. Oliver Cromwell, who had

(08:43):
been at General on the parliamentarian side, became Lord Protector
of England, Scotland and Ireland. Not long after Cromwell's death
in sixteen fifty eight, royalists started working out a deal
to restore Charles two to the throne. Obviously, it was
a lot more complicated than was quick highlights. And also
complicated were the loyalties of Peep's patron, Edward Montague. Montague

(09:07):
had fought on the parliamentarian side, and he had been
closely connected to both Oliver Cromwell and his son Richard,
who tried unsuccessfully to follow in his late father's footsteps.
Montague had actually advocated for Oliver Cromwell to be crowned
as king, but by the spring of sixteen fifty nine,
Royalists and parliamentarians alike were wondering if Montague's allegiance was shifting.

(09:30):
Charles the second's representatives made overtures to him while Parliament
stripped him of his Admiralty commission, and for good reason,
he was negotiating in secret for the return of the king.
But after a very politically chaotic end of sixteen fifty
nine and beginning of sixteen sixty, Montague was reappointed to
the Admiralty Commission and made General of the Sea along

(09:52):
with George Monk, who was actively working to restore Charles
the Second to the throne. Once a deal was negotiated
for Charles's return, Montague secured the fleet that traveled to
the Netherlands to bring him back to England, and thanks
to Montague's influence, Samuel Peeps was on board with that fleet.
The fleet landed back at Dover with the king on

(10:14):
May twenty fifth, sixteen sixty, and almost immediately Charles the
Second made Montague an Earl. That was the beginning of
a tremendously eventful decade for Peeps personally and for Britain
in general. And we're going to talk more about all
of that after a sponsor break. After Edward Montague became

(10:40):
the Earl of Sandwich, he told Samuel Peeps quote, we
must have a little patience and we will rise together.
In the meantime, I will do you all the good
jobs I can. This's worked out really well for Peeps
through the Earl's influence. In the summer of sixteen sixty,
he was named Clerk of the Axe at the Navy
Board that's the administrative board responsible for running the Royal

(11:00):
Navy and keeping it maintained and supplied. This position came
along with a salary and a house, and it also
meant that Peeps became a justice of the peace in
the counties where the dockyards were located. This was the
beginning of a lifelong career as a naval administrator. Peeps
was a very hard worker, but he didn't actually know
anything about the navy like at all. Nearly his entire

(11:24):
experience was going on that voyage to bring Charles the
Second back to England, so at first he mostly just
deferred to the rest of the board, some of whom
had decades of navy experience. But over the next couple
of years, Peeps realized that having a long career in
the Navy didn't necessarily make a person an upstanding naval
administrator or any good at it. He started to see

(11:44):
a lot of laziness and waste and corruption, and he
became especially distrustful of the men whose commands had been
passed down to them through their families, rather than rising
through the ranks based on their merit. But none of
these opinions erased the fact that these men had not
knowledge and experience that Peeps just didn't, so he got
to work trying to close that gap as much as

(12:05):
he could. His own education had been really weak in maths,
so he got a tutor and started learning multiplication tables.
He immersed himself in the terminology and procedures and measurements
that were needed to build, maintain and supply ships. Soon
he stopped following the lead of the more senior board
members and started trying to make things more efficient and orderly,

(12:26):
which really drew the ire of some of his colleagues.
Peeps was taking on additional roles as well. He became
secretary of the committee that ran the English colony at Tangier,
which had been part of Catherine of Braganz's dowry when
she married Charles the Second. He was elected as Fellow
of the Royal Society in sixteen sixty five. The Second

(12:46):
Anglo Dutch War started later that year, and many of
the rest of the board were aging or at sea,
so Peeps found himself overseeing a large part of the
Navy's wartime administration, including setting up a centralized provisioning system.
In the mid sixteen sixties, Peeps witnessed two catastrophes in
very quick succession. The Great Plague of London and the

(13:08):
Great Fire of London. The plague struck London in sixteen
sixty five, although Peep's diary also includes news of the
diseases spread elsewhere in the years before that. On April thirtieth,
sixteen sixty five, he wrote, quote, great fears of the
sickness here in the city, it being said that two
or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us.

(13:29):
All His entries through sixteen sixty five and into sixteen
sixty six detail fear of the plague and death tolls,
some of which were enormous. On August thirty first, he wrote,
quote in the city died this week seven four hundred
and ninety six, and all of them six thy one
hundred two of the plague. But it is feared that

(13:50):
the true number of the dead this week is near
ten thousand, partly from the poor that cannot be taken
notice of through the greatness of the number, and partly
from the Quakers and others that will not have any
bell ring for them. For the first few months of
sixteen sixty six he records numbers that decrease, and then increase,
and then decrease again, then finally noting a day of

(14:10):
thanksgiving for the plague's end on November twentieth, although he
acknowledges that people were still dying, the plague was in
its last months when the fire began on September second,
sixteen sixty six. Peeps chronicled the fire much like he
did the plague, detailing people's fears along with what was
burning and the progression of the fire itself and how

(14:30):
the city tried to stop it. The fire affected Peeps
for months after it was over. The following February, he wrote, quote,
the weather for three or four days being come to
be exceedingly cold again as any time this year. I
did within these six days see smoke still remaining of
the late fire in the city. And it is strange
to think how to this day I cannot sleep at

(14:53):
night without great terrors of fire. And this very night
I could not sleep till almost two in the morning
through thoughts of fire. The Second Anglo Dutch War was
going on through all of this, and peace negotiations started
in August of sixteen sixty six and lasted into the
following year. As the negotiations progressed, the British government decided

(15:13):
to recall the fleet and scale down the navy while
still trying to protect England from a Dutch attack. On
March twenty third, Peeps wrote quote at the office where
Sir W. Penn come being returned from Chatham from considering
the means of fortifying the River Medway by a chain
at the stakes and ships laid there with guns to
keep the enemy from coming up to burn our ships.

(15:36):
All our care being now to fortify ourselves against their
invading us. So basically they didn't have enough money to
keep maintaining the navy like at the strength that it
had been while they were more actively at war. But
the peace treaty had not been signed yet, so they
needed to still have some kind of defense, and they
were attempting to do this with a chain stretched across

(15:58):
the mouth of the river. But a Dutch force did
indeed attack the River Medway. That happened on June ninth,
sixteen sixty seven. They broke through that chain, destroyed some
of the ships, and captured others, including capturing the fleet's flagship,
the Royal Charles. This was disastrous for the navy. It
was terrifying for the British people since it put the
Dutch in striking distance of London. Of course, then people

(16:21):
questioned the judgment of the king over the whole thing,
but the war did end with the Treaty of Breta
a month later. Peeps, being the administrator who had arranged
so much of the withdrawal, was investigated repeatedly. In the end,
though the officers who made the decisions took more of
the blame than the Navy board, who had figured out
just how to carry out those decisions. Soon, though, Peeps

(16:44):
had other problems to worry about. On October twenty fifth,
sixteen sixty eight, his wife caught him with one of
their maids, Deborah Willett. Deb was eighteen and she had
been hired primarily as Elizabeth's companion, and Elizabeth was of
course outraged. They were not caught talking. Peeps was explicit
in his diary about exactly what was going on. On

(17:05):
October thirty first, he wrote, quote, so ends this month
with some quiet to my mind, though not perfect, after
the greatest falling out with my poor wife and through
my folly with the girl that I ever had, and
I have reason to be sorry and ashamed of it,
and more to be troubled for the poor girl's sake,
whom I fear I shall, by this means prove the
ruin of though I shall think myself concerned both to

(17:29):
love and be a friend to her. In November, Elizabeth
forced Samuel to dismiss Deb from their staff and agree
to never see her again, but he did not keep
that promise. He figured out where Deb had gone and
went to visit and give her some money. It is
not clear whether he continued their affair after she was
out of the household, though, And also, this was not

(17:50):
the only affair that Peeps detailed in his diary. He
wrote about dalliances with his friend's wives, and his wife's
friends and maids in their household, and on and on
and on us and these episodes were not always welcome.
On August eighteenth of sixteen sixty seven, he wrote about
going to church, where he quote stood by a pretty
modest maid, whom I did labor to take by the

(18:12):
hand and the body, but she would not, but got
further and further from me, and at last I could
perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to
prick me if I should touch her again, which seeing
I did for bear, and was glad I did spy
her design, and then I fell to gaze upon another
pretty maid, and a kew close to me, and she
on me, and I did go about to take her

(18:33):
by the hand, which she suffered a little, and then withdrew.
So the sermon ended, and the church broke up, and
my amars ended too, and so took coach and home,
and there took up my wife and to Islington with her.
Oh Peeps. As he was writing about the fallout of
his wife's discovery of his affair, Peeps was also writing

(18:54):
about problems with his eyes. His diary entries record pain,
sensitivity to light, and trouble seeing. He found that drinking
made it worse, but he didn't want to give up drink.
He loved going to the theater, but the light bothered
him there, and he was forced to stop going. He
tried all kinds of compresses and potions and pills to

(19:14):
no effect, and he was granted several months of leave
to try to recover. On May thirty first, sixteen sixty nine,
he wrote his last diary entry, saying, in part quote,
and thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever
be able to do with my own eyes in the
keeping of my journal, I being not able to do
it any longer, having done now so long as to

(19:34):
undo my eyes almost every time that I take pen
in my hand, and therefore whenever comes of it, I
must forbear, and therefore resolve from this time forward to
have it kept by my people in long hand, and
must therefore be contented to set down no more than
is fit for them and all the world to know.
Or if there be anything which cannot be much, how

(19:56):
my amours to deb are past, and my eyes hinder
me in almost all other pleasures, I must endeavor to
keep a margin in my book open, to add here
and there a note in shorthand with my own hand.
And so I would take myself to that course, which
is almost as much as to see myself go into
my grave, for which and all the discomforts that will

(20:17):
accompany my being blind, the Good God prepare me. Not
long after, Samuel and Elizabeth went to the Low Countries
in France, where she contracted some sort of fever. She
died on November tenth, sixteen sixty nine, at the age
of twenty nine. Samuel never remarried, but he did start
an ongoing relationship with a woman named Mary Skinner. Not

(20:38):
long after, she eventually moved into his home and seems
to have acted as his wife in everything but name.
But in spite of this real certainty in the last
diary entry that he was going blind, Peeps did not
lose his sight as he feared that he would, and
his career continued on for almost two decades after his
wife's death. We'll have more on that after another quick

(20:59):
spot to break. As Samuel Peeps was struggling with his
eyesight and traveling with his wife, he was also up
for election to the House of Commons, and that was
an election that he lost. He also started facing rumors
that he was a crypto papist or a secret Catholic.

(21:23):
Catholics were highly suspect in England at this point, and
Peeps had Catholic friends, some Catholic family members, there were
some Catholic books in his library. All of this raised
a lot of eyebrows. The Third Anglo Dutch War started
in March of sixteen seventy two, and Peepe's old benefactor
of the Earl of Sandwich, was killed in action. The

(21:44):
two men hadn't been closed for a while. The Earl
had been caught up in a scandal about the distribution
of wartime prizes, and Peeps had made enough of a
name for himself that he didn't really need the Earl's
patronage anymore. Even so, Peeps was a banner bearer at
the funeral. In sixteen seventy three, Parliament passed a test
Act which banned Catholics and nonconforming Protestants from holding public office.

(22:08):
King Charles the Second's brother, the Duke of York, refused
to take the required oaths that were mandatory for Catholics,
which he was, so he was forced to resign as
Lord High Admiral. Afterward, the King established an Admiralty Commission
and Peeps became its secretary. This was a promotion. It
came with more income, more prestige, and a lot more influence.

(22:29):
On November fourth, sixteen seventy three, Peeps was elected to
the House of Commons, but once again rumors surfaced that
he was secretly Catholic, which led to another investigation. In
the end, he kept his seat, although his work as
an MP mostly stuck to matters of the navy, and
he kept picking up new roles outside the government and
his job with the Admiralty, including becoming a governor of

(22:51):
Christ's Hospital, the Master of the Clothworkers Company, and the
Master of Trinity House. He also worked to reform and
revitalize the name, especially when it came to setting standards
and establishing regulations for how things should be done. He
successfully lobbied for funding to build new ships, convincing the
House of Commons to allocate six hundred thousand pounds for

(23:13):
it in sixteen seventy seven. Largely due to Peep's influence
and planning, the strength of the Royal Navy nearly doubled
while he was with the Admiralty. He did all this
in the face of ongoing accusations that he was a cryptopapist.
His opponents even went so far as to accuse his
clerk of murder. In May of sixteen seventy nine, Peeps

(23:35):
and Sir Anthony Dean were accused of leaking British secrets
to France, and Peeps was again accused of secretly being Catholic.
He resigned his position with the Admiralty and he and
Dean were both sent to the Tower. As this was
going on, it was widely believed that Catholics were planning
to assassinate the King and put his brother, the Duke
of York, on the throne. This so called Popish plot

(23:58):
did not exist, but people were certain that it did.
Peeps started trying to put together his defense, but it
turned out that the prosecution really did not have much
of a case. One of the key witnesses against him
was a butler that he had previously fired, and the
charges were eventually dropped. Peeps spent the next few years
mostly out of the public eye, traveling, collecting books for

(24:20):
his library, and acting as a secretary to Lord Dartmouth
during an expedition to evacuate the British colony of Tangier
after Britain decided to abandon it. Peep's returned to the
Admiralty in sixteen eighty four in a position that was
created for him. That same year, he was elected President
of the Royal Society. His biggest claim to fame in

(24:41):
this role is that he arranged for the publication of
Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, with peeps imprimature featured very prominently
on the frontispiece. This was, however, funded by Edmund Halley,
not by Peeps or the Royal Society. This was because
Peeps had already spent the Society's budget and some of
his own money on the elaborately illustrated History of Fish

(25:04):
by Francis Willoughby, which then had been a total commercial flop. Okay,
like we talked about in our Christmas Time episode where
we talked about Charles Dickens and a Christmas Carol and
how he just really wanted all of these engravings and illustrations.
All those things were very, very expensive, and Peeps had
run through the whole entire budget. But if you look,

(25:24):
there's i mean plenty of scans of the frontispiece of
Newton's Princeship of Mathematica, and it's Samuel Peeps's name is
one of the bigger things on that document. In sixteen
eighty five, King Charles the Second died and his brother,
the Duke of York finally did become king, becoming James

(25:46):
the second and seventh. Peeps continued on with the Admiralty
under the new monarch, resuming his plans to strengthen the
Royal Navy, while also just endlessly criticizing the people that
had been in charge while he was gone. But none
of this operation did the king a lot of good
In sixteen eighty eight, William, the third Prince of Orange,
overthrew James and the Glorious Revolution. William became co regent

(26:09):
with his wife Mary, who was also James's daughter. The
new administration purged Charles's supporters from office. Peeps resigned, was
briefly detained under suspicion for treason, and was ultimately released
on medical grounds. Peeps spent most of his remaining life
reading and studying, and amassing a huge library which he
just continually reorganized and curated. He also published a book,

(26:33):
Memoirs of the Royal Navy, in sixteen ninety. Samuel PEAPs
died on May twenty sixth, seventeen oh three, at the
age of seventy. He was buried next to his late
wife's Elizabeth, at Saint Olive Church. He left his three
thousand volume library to Magdalen College at the University of Cambridge,
with the stipulation that they be kept separate from the
rest of the college's collection. Today, those are housed as

(26:56):
Peep's Library, which is open to the public and to
scholar alike. Peep's diaries were part of this collection during
the nine years that he was keeping the diary. Peeps
would note each day's activities, often ending with and soda bed,
and then every few days he would edit them a
little bit. He didn't seem to meaningfully change the content,
but he kind of clean them up a little bit
and copy them into a master journal. In addition to

(27:19):
writing these in shorthand, he also used a hodgepodge of
codes and other languages for the most salacious parts of it.
The result was a set of six large volumes containing
more than one and a quarter million words. For more
than one hundred years after Peep's death, no one knew
what was in these diaries. It was only after John

(27:40):
Evelyn's Diaries were published in eighteen eighteen that scholars started
trying to transcribe Peeps as well. Evelyn and Peeps lived
at the same time. They were also friends. Yeah, they're
sort of the two companion diarists of this time in London.
At the time, the people working with the diary thought
that it was written in code, and a Cambridge undergraduate

(28:02):
named John Smith took on the task of decoding it.
King Charles the Second had dictated an account of his
sixteen fifty one escape from England to Samuel Peeps. Peeps
had taken the dictation in shorthand and then later transcribed
it into longhand, intending to publish it. Smith compared these
two versions to work out how to transcribe the diaries.

(28:23):
This work wasn't actually necessary though. Peeps was really writing
in Thomas Shelton's system of shorthand, and the handbook for it,
titled Tutor to Tachiography, was there in Peep's library as well.
Somebody apparently told John Smith, like some years later, by
the way, the manual to this was like, it was
right there. You didn't really I don't know what his

(28:44):
reaction was to this. I envisioned some hair pulling and
some screaming, but maybe that would just be me either
hair pulling and screaming or like. That was a fun challenge,
though I don't mind that I did. A bunch of
totally unnecessary portions of the transcribed diary were published starting

(29:05):
in eighteen twenty five, with longer editions coming out in
the years that followed. A mostly complete edition, edited by HB. Wheatley,
came out in ten volumes across eighteen ninety three through
eighteen ninety nine. In all these nineteenth century versions, profanity
and the most explicit parts are all edited out. There
are phrases, sentences, or sometimes whole days removed. Robert Lewis

(29:29):
Stevenson wrote about the diaries in eighteen eighty six. He
expressed some chagrin at the idea that some parts of
them were quote unfit for publication, saying, quote we may think,
without being sorted, that when we purchase six huge and
distressingly expensive volumes, we are entitled to be treated rather
more like scholars and rather less like children. The first

(29:50):
edition that didn't edit out the sex and profanity came
out almost another century later. It was another series of
volumes published between nineteen seventy in nineteen eighty three. So
if you have only read the parts of the diary
that are in the public domain and are probably also
about either the plague or the fire, like we talked
about at the top of the episode, you might have

(30:12):
a very different impression of this diary than if you
read other parts of an unexpurgated version. Just as examples,
on October thirteenth, sixteen sixty, he went out to see
a public hanging, something that he seems to have really
enjoyed doing. This one was Major General Thomas Harrison, who
had been convicted of regicide in the execution of King

(30:34):
Charles the First, Peeps wrote, quote, I went out to
Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered,
which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any
man could in that condition. While on the boat with
Charles the Second during his return to England, Peeps wrote
about a dog defecating on the deck, saying quote, I
went with mister Mansell and one of the King's footmen

(30:56):
with a dog that the king loved, which explative leaded
the boat, which made us laugh, which made me think
that a king and all that belonged to him are
but just as others are. He also didn't temper his opinions.
On September twenty ninth, sixteen sixty two, he wrote quote,
we saw Midsummer Night's Dream, which I had never seen before,
nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid,

(31:19):
ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life. I
saw I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women,
which was all my pleasure. So yes. Peep's diaries include
a pretty straightforward eyewitness account of several major historical events.
In the sixteen sixties. But Peeps clearly also thought everything
around him was interesting and worth noticing, So these diaries

(31:42):
are also a fascinating account of daily life in London,
including what people ate and what they saw at the
theater and what music was popular, and then little details
like discovering that the wig you bought was full of nits,
or what to do when you had tummy trouble while
you were staying at somebody else's house and the maid
forgot to leave you a chamber pot. It's full of
all kinds of random things that he saw and was

(32:02):
just delighted or surprised by, and of course all of
those many many affairs, and it's all online for free,
except those most explicit parts. If you go to peepsdiary
dot com. It's been putting up an entry a day
at a time since twenty thirteen, along with lots of
annotations and letters and other information, and there are additions

(32:24):
at Project Gutenberg and archive dot org as well, so
you have plenty to dig through. If you want to
learn more Peeps, you can just click on some random stuff.
You might have a day where he was in the
office and everything was sort of just political administrative stuff,
or you might get one about a dog pooping on
the deck of a boat. Thanks so much for joining

(32:49):
us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us
a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com,
and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.