Samuel Pepys Would Have Been Huge on the Internet

At some point during the 31st of May 1669, a learned if bawdy, witty if obscene, educated if scandalous, pious if irreverent rake, raconteur, and libertine who’d recorded over one million words about his life for almost a decade stopped his private scribblings, even though this gentleman named Samuel Pepys would live for more than another three decades. To the best of our knowledge, until that point no Englishman had ever provided such a complete accounting; such a scrupulous interrogation not of the soul, but of a life—a largely secular exercise in tabulating not just wars, but dinners; not just plagues, but nights at the theater. Beginning on January 1st upon the first year of Restoration, Pepys would record everything from when fire immolated the city of London to a particularly enjoyable stew of tripe and mustard. An entry dated March 10th, 1666 confesses that the “truth is, I do indulge myself a little the more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age of my life to do it,” and such a position could be the motto of Pepys’s diary. That document doesn’t reach the rhetorical heights of other 17th-century classics—it has not the poetry of William Shakespeare’s famed soliloquy in Hamlet, nor the intellectual sophistication of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets or George Herbert’s The Temple. Rather, what Pepys offered was something different, but no less impressive—a complete map of an individual human life and mind during that defined period of time. As novelist Philip Hensher notes in The Atlantic, “there is no precedent and no parallel for what Pepys actually did.”

Restoration was inaugurated with ’s triumphant return to London to avenge his father’s regicide, and Pepys would work as administrator of the Navy in the new regime. This was a era of theatricality after a decade of dreary Puritan Interregnum; when ’s and ’s elaborate set-pieces thrilled London audiences, when ’s New Physics transformed the very nature of motion, when wits from to injected English letters with a pump of aphrodisiacs.  An era ruled by an aristocracy that and describe in as being “carelessly demonic, nonchalantly outrageous, cynical in the way that only a class which despises its compromises in as the sort “not to make too much of a fuss about being accidentally spat on by a lady in the theatre—providing the lady was pretty.”