Why ‘The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations’?

It became clear to me as the work progressed that Pepys was using his diary as a private confessional, even though these revelations were interspersed in amongst more routine events and experiences.

Was there a single moment that prompted you to look at these passages again and when did it dawn on you that our existing transcriptions/translations were still pulling their punches and obscuring the full picture?

My focus originally was only to translate the polyglot passages in the published Latham and Matthews edition. I thought this would be simple. However, I soon discovered that more than a few were untranslatable because they contained ‘words’ that aren’t words and weren’t words when Pepys wrote. Some were real words but made no sense. This really foxed me to begin with, and that was when I decided that I must make entirely new transcriptions.

An example is 20 March 1667. Latham and Matthews have ‘so to Mrs Martin’s whom I find in opposante’. The French word opposante means ‘challenger’ or ‘rival’. In the 1600s it was spelled opposant and it is listed in Cotgrave’s French dictionary which Pepys owned. Either way it makes absolutely no sense in this context, and had Latham and Matthews attempted to translate it they would surely have realized that. When I looked at the shorthand, I remembered that the symbol for ‘op’ also means ‘ap’ and that the terminal dot to indicate a closing vowel in this case meant ‘o’. The word correctly reads aposento, which is the Spanish word for ‘lodging’ and which can be found in Richard Percivale’s 1623 Spanish dictionary. Pepys owned a copy and it’s still in the Pepysian Library. Mrs Martin was at her lodgings. Pepys often uses the English word in similar contexts.

I admit I was mildly incredulous at this discovery, given the standing of the Latham and Matthews edition. While they did not make numerous mistakes like this, the discovery called into question their polyglot transcriptions for the first time. I found several other instances. Given that they claimed to have secured the assistance of a Spanish professor, the errors are difficult to explain.

Do you see your work as a contradiction or as a continuation of the Latham edition?

It’s a continuation. Transcribing and understanding Pepys is a cumulative process. Latham and Matthews felt constrained by the standards of their day. It was clear that their reluctance to confront the polyglot had prevented them from applying the same authoritative analysis they had to the rest of the text. In a few cases I felt that the mistakes were so obvious they might have been deliberate, designed to throw readers off the scent.

Pepys never uses Elizabeth’s Christian name in the diary; her portrait was hacked up,
supposedly by a puritanical member of the staff at Hinchingbrooke; Sam destroyed her
letters to him; as we flirt with the idea of cancelling him, is it time to uncancel her?

It would be wonderful if we knew more about Elizabeth, but unfortunately, absolutely nothing of hers survives beyond a letter or two addressed to her from France and now in Oxford. This means it is impossible to know more about her than is already known.

“The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” Could this be said of Pepys in our own moment? Or is it that we have collectively been too shy of the full, frank, and unsettling  Adult content self-portraiture Pepys left behind?

From the first time that Pepys’s diary was transcribed for publication, the graphic sexual content troubled his editors. They felt it would offend public sensibilities. But it is also clear they were uncomfortable about how publishing it would reflect on them. This subsisted right up to and including the Latham and Matthews edition, which was successfully marketed as definitive and unimprovable, carefully occluding the full truth. Pepys had both good and bad sides. He recorded it all, but until now, his own testimony has been modified and falsified in some way.

Was Pepys’ transactional relationship with sex was more or less unusual for the time?Did it become more usual as the morality of the Restoration era set in?

Much of what we know, or think we know, about seventeenth-century manners and standards comes back to Pepys. That means various notions about what constituted ‘normal’ in 1660s London are used to justify Pepys as only being a man of his times. But those notions normally come from Pepys. So, it’s circular. It’s clear that there were other men who behaved like him, but any proper research into the period into books of the period shows that behaviour like his was against the law and condemned. People who believe Pepys was ‘normal’ and his conduct representative of different standards are usually only basing that on Pepys. If you want to read research into late seventeenth-century attitudes towards sexual consent and violence (including the law) as they relate to Pepys’s actions, try Kate Loveman’s free academic article from 2022 in the ‘Historical Journal’ (especially pp. 1226–34).

You argue that Pepys’ behaviour got worse over time. Do you ever think the Diary could have been a contributing factor – the need to provide sensational content even as he aged and as Sam’s probable sterility became more obvious?

Pepys increased his references to his sexual behaviour and found new ways to make them more difficult to read, like the addition of ‘extraneous’ consonants, an idea he evidently derived from a book by his friend John Wilkins, which Pepys owned. I believe the diary provided him with an outlet, a repository for his ‘collection’ of sexual triumphs and misdemeanours. He felt remorse and shame, but appears to have been unable to resist easily the search for more dangerous and risky action.

If you could ask Pepys one question what would it be, and what’s the one thing you would tell Sam just so as to see his reaction?

I think we’d all like to know exactly how ‘Pepys’ was pronounced back then! But seriously, I think I’d like to know if he ever envisaged someone unravelling his polyglot passages and if so, who he imagined that person might be. I have never thought of what I might tell him, since asking him a question would be impossible. What I would like to know is what he looked like in person. The 1666 painting was posed, in costume, and he wears a wig. He did not look like that in everyday life, and he was also very short.

Do you think there is anything else “new” still hiding in plain sight in The Diary?

I think one would have to say that is always a possibility. Something I realized, which appears to have escaped observation and comment until my book, is that many of the polyglot passages exhibit careful construction with alliteration, rhyme, and even metre. I think I’ve barely scraped the surface of that phenomenon. But the truth is that even the polyglot wasn’t really hiding. It’s all there – all it needed was to be read correctly and translated, using Pepys’s English elsewhere and the dictionaries he owned as guides. Correct readings and the translations are usually obvious.

What are you currently working on?

I’m 68 and I’ve produced nine full-length books since 2014 on top of those that went before. Confessions is the result of over two decades of work learning the shorthand on top of all that. It’s now time sit back and I have no plans to produce anything else for a while. We travel a great deal and that’s the priority. Indeed, I’m answering these questions in Augusta, Western Australia, where the idea for Confessions came to me two years ago and where the book was completed in 2025. However, I will be lecturing on Confessions at the Gloucester Spring Festival on 18 April and at Pepys’s church of St Olave’s in London on 28 May 2026.