Humanity makes all plain
Richard Ollard
THE LETTERS OF SAMUEL PEPYS edited by Guy de la Bedoyère Boydell, £25, pp. 296, ISBN 184383197X ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The title of this well edited and interesting book is misleading. First it suggests a complete collection, which would, if it were ever accomplished, require several volumes. Second, the letters, though mostly written by Pepys, include a considerable number of those written to him and even occasional papers which are not letters at all but throw light on incidents that were important to his career. These are all well chosen and their annotation makes their significance clear to the reader who is not already a knowledgeable Pepysian.
Pepys’s letters, though always characteristic and generally well expressed, have not the piercing quality of the Diary. His addiction to long, ramifying sentences, so typical of many 17th-century authors, often challenges the reader’s understanding. Yet just when one thinks, particularly in his official correspondence, that pomposity and formal politeness have obscured the meaning beyond retrieval, a sudden stroke of humanity makes all plain.
What then does this collection add to the superb self-portrait for which Pepys will always be known wherever our literature is read? Oddly enough, in spite of the necessary artificiality of much of this in contrast with the heartwarming candour of the Diary, one finished the book with a stronger conviction of his kindness and good nature. There is also in the differing tone and mood of the letters a deeper sense of his awareness of other people than in his brief, sharp delineations of them in his journal. The letters to him also reflect a grateful consciousness that their writers did not think of themselves as items or mere numbers in the crowded mind of a very busy man with a host of interests and relationships besides those of the most effective government servant of his day.
This is by no means thanks to the overbenevolence of his editor who though clearly enjoying and appreciating the personality of his subject is also thoroughly alive to his weaknesses. Guy de la Bedoyère is very much at home in the period and generous in his acknowledgment of other scholars, whose occasional and trivial errors he corrects without condescension. His own are few and small. Among the interesting questions that he raises is the source of Will Hewer’s wealth (p. 72). Very likely Hewer did follow the general practice of his day, and certainly that of his master, in enriching himself. But his uncle, Robert Blackborne, who had occupied a similar position to Pepys’s under the preceding regime and passed on to the service of the East India Company, must have been a man of substance.
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