of the King’s ships’, Pepys — a diligent bureaucrat and ardent in stamping out corruption — rose to become secretary to the Admiralty.
In many ways, it was the ideal kind of post for a diarist. Though not hugely powerful himself he nevertheless had access to those charged with running the country. In that regard, Pepys is the predecessor of diarists like Harold Nicolson, whose career as a journalist and politician gave him a unique glimpse of Britain in the 1930s, including the rise of fascism, the influence of the Bloomsbury group and the Abdication crisis, and Sir Henry Channon, a charmer from Chicago who made a rapid rise in English society between the two world wars. Channon was well aware of the tradition in which he was following. ‘Although I am not Clerk to the Council like Mr Greville nor Secretary to the Admiralty like Mr Pepys, nor yet “duc et pair” as was M. de St Simon, I have, nevertheless, had interesting opportunities of intimacy with interesting people and have often been at the centre of things.’
Channon — or ‘Chips’, as he was nicknamed — was in no doubt that his diaries would one day be made available for public consumption. ‘I sometimes wonder,’ he wrote in November 1936, ‘why I keep a diary at all. Is it to relieve my feelings? Console my old age? or to dazzle my descendants?’ Some fifteen years later he added, ‘I feel that some day they may see the light of day and perhaps shock or divert posterity a little.’ With that in mind he deposited his diaries in the British Museum with the initial instruction that they should not be consulted or published until fifty years after his death. But in the last year of his life he had a change of heart, and he began to edit them himself.
Chips’s ambivalence is echoed by many other diarists, not least the great Pepys, who laboured over his diary in the wee small hours with the light weak and his eyesight failing. He began writing his diary on an auspicious date, the beginning of a new year and a new decade, 1 January 1660, and continued for almost ten years, bringing it to a reluctant close on 31 May 1669, believing that he was about to go blind. In the annals of diarists there has rarely been a more moving entry than that with which Pepys brought down the curtain on his work:
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 undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand; and therefore whatever 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 any thing (which cannot be much, now my amours to Deb are past, and my eyes hindering me in almost all other pleasures), I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, to add here and there a note in short-hand with my own hand.
And so I betake 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 accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!
Ironically, Pepys did not go blind and lived for another thirty-four years. His diary, his lasting memorial, which was written in shorthand, he had bound in leather in six volumes, not the act of a man who did not want to see them preserved. With the rest of his library, they were deposited at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where they lay undeciphered until 1825. In the opinion of O. F. Morshead, editor of a very popular but heavily censored edition of the diaries, the impetus to break the code may have been prompted by the publication in i8i8 of the diaries of Pepys’s contemporary John Evelyn. It is a tradition at Magdalene that Lord Grenville took one of the volumes to bed and by morning had worked out how to translate it. The entire diary was then handed over to John Smith, an undergraduate, who made a complete transcription. Working twelve hours a day, it took him more than three years to make a complete transcription of in excess of three thousand pages. It was, said Smith, ‘very trying and injurious indeed to the visual organs’.
But however onerous the task it was justified by the finished work. Pepys was a fluent, engaging and observant chronicler, combining history, reportage and autobiography in a style reminiscent of a superior novelist who can describe a scene and catch the essence of a character in a few broad and eloquent brush strokes. From his own quirky, irksome and fascinating domestic arrangements to the Great Fire of London and the misery of the Plague, Pepys illuminated the essence of his age better than anyone before or since. His curiosity was boundless, his lack of self-consciousness intoxicating. His diaries show him warts and all, holding back nothing that is unflattering, of which there was much, particularly in regard to his wife, who, in her own ‘diary’, inspired by the feminist scholar, Dale Spender, describes his meanness, infidelity, heavy drinking and abuse. But despite his failings Pepys was a loving husband.
He had the true writer’s ability to drop or raise his tempo as the situation demands. But more often than not he is most affecting when one anticipates it least, whether describing a chance encounter with a shepherd and his son whom he found reading the Bible to one another on Epsom Downs or relaying his disgust at the sycophancy shown to King Charles II when he plays tennis (‘to see how the King’s play was extolled without any cause at all was a loathsome sight’).
In contrast to Pepys, John Evelyn was altogether more reserved and puritanical but while his diary pales in comparison with his more famous contemporary it has its own idiosyncratic appeal. Evelyn came from a family which had made its fortune in gunpowder and he was well enough off to live independently, travelling extensively around Europe, which he recorded colourfully. He made his name with Sylva, a Discourse of Forest Trees, a book on arboriculture, which proved very popular with landowners intent on improving their estates after the Civil Wars and Interregnum.
His diary begins, precociously, in 1620, during the reign of James I, when he was born and from the first he seemed to possess uncanny powers of description. His mother, he recalled, was ‘of proper personage, well timber’d, of a browne complexion; her eyes and haire of a lovely black; of a constitution more inclyn’d to a religious Melancholy, or pious sadnesse; of a rare memory, and most exemplary life; for Oeconomiq pridence esteemed’d one of the most conspicuous in her Country.’
Its final entry (‘The Raine and a taw upon a deepe Snow, hindred me from going to Church.’) was made in January 1706 in the reign of Queen Anne and the year of Evelyn’s death at the age of 85. A large part of it, however, was written in hindsight; only from 1684 onwards did it become a contemporary diary, with Evelyn’s eye for the exotic immediately to the fore. ‘I dined at Sir St: Foxes,’ he recorded on 2 January 1684/After dinner came a felow that eate live charcoale glowing ignited, quenching them in his mouth, and then chanping and swallowing them downe: There was a dog also that seemd to do many rational actions.’
But assiduous though Evelyn was in keeping his diary, it was meant for his eyes only. No publication was ever intended and it only came to light through pure fluke in 1813 when Lady Evelyn, the widow of the diarist’s great-great-grandson, was talking to William Upcott, a librarian and bibliophile, at the family house in Surrey. Asked his hobbies, Upcott replied, ‘Collecting manuscripts and autographs,’ whereupon her ladyship opened a drawer and revealed a pile of manuscripts which had been used for cutting out patterns for a dress. Upcott instantly appreciated their significance and Lady Evelyn volunteered to show him more. ‘Oh,’ she declared, ‘if you like papers like that, you shall have plenty, for Sylva Evelyn and those who succeeded him kept all their correspondence, which has furnished the kitchen with an abundance of waste paper.’ And so the diaries — the Kalendarium — were discovered.
Lady Evelyn herself was unconvinced of their worth, and was reluctant to publish them. But shortly before her death she gave permission to a local antiquary to make the first selection, which appeared in 1818 with the title Memoirs Illustrative of the Life and Writings of John Evelyn, and while they sold well were soon eclipsed by Pepys’s earthier and more appealing diaries. Interestingly, the two men knew each other and commemorated their meetings. For his part, Pepys found the bee-keeping Evelyn to be a merry dining companion, a cut above him intellectually: ‘In fine, a most excellent person he is, and must
