350 Years Ago Today: Samuel Pepys Forgot His Lobsters
And the time he was a placeholder for Ms Kaminska:
While Waiting for Izabella to Tell Us About Roman Brothel Tokens: The Trade Tokens of Samuel Pepys’ London
And a few more but all-in-all and especially considering the times in which he lived, not a lot.
From Quillette:
One of the passions of my reading life—which might seem strange for a youngish man—has been devouring and re-devouring the complete diaries of Samuel Pepys, which, when stacked on top of one another, rise above my knee. If you are late to the Pepys game, it suffices to say that our man, who was born in early 1633 and went on to be England’s chief administrator of the navy and a member of parliament, was king of the diarists. Day in, day out, he kept a record of his life from January 1st, 1660, and continued to do so for about 10 years. He likely wrote for posterity, but he also seemed to write with a maxim in mind: If it was true, he would say it. And so, we have him complaining with regularity about his wife, the cat he contemplates drowning, and his weakness—for Pepys was a born peeper—for young, comely actresses.....MUCH MORE
Strange as my passion for Pepys may be in the age of the meme and an apparent war on literate expression, it has nothing on how obsessed Pepys became with the plague that ravaged Albion circa 1665 – 66. His morbid fascination teaches us something about how we choose to view our own—albeit less gruesome—pandemic in the current age. And that choice is crucial to how we process the horror and adversity of our current circumstances and also the opportunity those circumstances offer for growth. This latter theme was one to which Pepys returned repeatedly, just as he returned to the charnel houses alongside the Thames.
The plague was likely to smite you if you numbered among London’s poor. In most cases, the rich fled the capital, or, like the poet John Wilmot (the Earl of Rochester), they scraped by on luck—Wilmot survived because he happened to be imprisoned in the Tower of London at the time, locked away from the death in the streets. Pepys, on the other hand, could not stay away, despite enjoying the financial means to sit out the plague had he wished to do so. He believed, ardently, in living his life, even as the city’s population grappled with a mysterious threat not dissimilar to the one we face today. And as I watched American college students on spring break, oblivious to the gathering danger and drunk out of their minds, I thought of Pepys mingling among them.
The bubonic plague was carried into human populations by fleas, and these creatures, Pepys boasted in his diaries, did not appear to like the taste of him. If you shared a bed with Samuel Pepys—and Pepys was a bed-sharer—you would awaken the following morning covered with bites, while he would be untouched. Presumably, this gave him the confidence to venture back into London to observe the dead and the dying, where he passed the days trying to reason out causes as he watched humankind twist in a fetid wind of its shared mortality.....
He also dropped in on us in "Resiliance, Brittleness and Catastrophic Failure: Everything Is Fine, Until It Isn't":
"Perhaps the most irrational fashion act of all was the male habit for 150 years of wearing wigs. Samuel Pepys, as with so many things, was in the vanguard, noting with some apprehension the purchase of a wig in 1663 when wigs were not yet common. It was such a novelty that he feared people would laugh at him in church; he was greatly relieved, and a little proud, to find that they did not. He also worried, not unreasonably, that the hair of wigs might come from plague victims. Perhaps nothing says more about the power of fashion than that Pepys continued wearing wigs even while wondering if they might kill him."And some of his correspondence was in "Oxford's Bodleian and the University of Michigan Libraries Release 25,000 Early English (1473-1700) Books to the Internet"
– Bill Bryson, “At Home: A Short History of Private Life”
And some stuff from his time as President of the Royal Society, a couple years after Wren and a couple decades before Newton:
Digitized Minutes of the Royal Society 1686 - 1711
But not nearly as much as I would have thought.
