There is a darker side to Samuel Pepys unfortunately. Either unknown, glossed over or ignored.
Pepys had many admirable qualities but these have to be placed against his extremely bad behaviour towards women. Today he would be called a "sexual predator" and he was almost certainly also a rapist. Unfortunately, women were (and still are in many places) seen as sexual objects and this view was common in the 18th Century.
I became aware of this from watching Guy de la Bédoyère's YouTube video "Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations" [1] where he discussed the good and the bad in Pepys, having just completed a new book about the diary and man. The video is good, as is the channel (he's a historian I was familar with from his Time Team appearances).
I don't like mentioning things like this usually, but for the sake of a true picture, it is worth it.
I suspect most people who read unabridged Pepys for any length of time end up feeling very ambivalent about him as a person. His diary contains the some of the deepest introspection of a human life--both the good and the bad--in the history of literature. Rousseau was a cheap marketer by comparison.
That depth of revelation is one of the things that make Pepys hard to put down, even as you find his personality increasingly disagreeable. It is a truly remarkable work.
Montaigne's Essays are primarily philosophical reflections. He did write a very interesting travel diary recounting his voyage from France to visit the Pope in Rome. [0] That diary has a wealth of observations covering everything from the riches of German towns to the number of kidney stones he passed after drinking the waters at various spas along the way.
If you ever wondered what travel was like in earlier centuries, it's a delightful account but nothing like Pepys. Pepys recorded a vast range of topics from affairs of state to the consistency of his stools (and everything in between).
I mean, yeah, he's a rapist, but I dunno if you're paying attention however this century #metoo is about women generally being of the opinion that yeah, lots of men are what you're calling "sexual predators" and getting away with it.
A rapist is currently President of the United States of America. You likely work with and admire "sexual predators". Works like this diary serve the same purpose as SF shorts, they're holding up a mirror to our world, Sam has wasted days because telephones don't exist and so it's impossible for him to reach a person quickly if they're not where he expected - but "I'm a powerful man so I decided to have sex with a less powerful woman and she couldn't stop me" is one of the top stories in the news site I was just looking at.
> In an incident that is difficult to interpret as anything but rape, Pepys recounts entering the home of a ship’s carpenter—a man very much under his control, since Pepys was a naval official—and noting that, after a struggle, “finally I had my will of her.” His only recorded regret is “a mighty pain” in his finger, which he injured during the apparent assault.
> The victim, identified only as Mrs. Bagwell, had been instructed to offer herself to Pepys by her husband, who thought it would help his advancement. “The story,” notes Tomalin, “is a shameful one of a woman used by two bullies: her husband, hoping for promotion, and Pepys, who was to arrange it. Pepys did not present it in quite those terms, but it is clearly how it was.”
> Another obvious victim of Pepys’s sexual involvements beyond his household was his wife. In 1665, he had married fifteen-year-old Elizabeth St. Michel, the daughter of a French immigrant. Loveman describes the marriage as a “love match, albeit a tempestuous one.” The diary records the couple’s arguments over Pepys’s infidelities, and there were other tensions in the marriage. In an especially heated quarrel over Elizabeth’s management of the household, Pepys gave her a black eye.
> The full record of Pepys’s mistreatment of women is too extensive to detail here. That grim record could fill a book—and, in fact, it has. In The Dark Side of Samuel Pepys, author Geoffrey Pimm explores Pepys’s predations at length, drawing on the diarist’s own accounts of his misdeeds to build the case against him. Pepys, writes Pimm, “faithfully recorded acts of moral turpitude that in later centuries might have caused his name to be blazoned across the newspapers and in some instances, most probably lead him to be arraigned in the courts.”
Ah yes, "affairs" with staff. He has sex with young female servants who, if they resist him can expect to have their employment immediately terminated, it's an enormous power imbalance. It's a problem that you look at that and see an "affair".
OK but taking advantage of a "power imbalance" definitely isn't what I had in mind when reading 'he would be called a "sexual predator" and he was almost certainly also a rapist.' Which perhaps was the goal of using that kind of language.
I'm a bit skeptical. For a start, you seem not to know which century Pepys was from! The link is to a 50 minute video. Perhaps you could briefly explain what leads you to believe Pepys was a rapist.
Pepys attitudes and behaviours in that regard were unremarkable for a man of his time and class. It would have been more surprising - and more worth commenting on - if he’d anachronistically endorsed modern standards of sexual propriety.
The average man in the 17th century did not, when bored on Sunday, attempt to molest multiple random women in church. Even for his time Pepys was, well, a bit much, and he knew it, and felt guilty about it occasionally in the diary.
It's an absolutely fascinating read, and it's well worth reading, but you should not fall into the trap of thinking "well, that's just how it was back then"; Pepys was abnormally badly behaved on a number of axes even for the time.
Pepys wasn't the average man, though. That's why I specified a man of his time and class. He was a successful and increasingly powerful man on the edges of Restoration court and aristocratic culture, in which such behaviour was the norm. It's complicated by the fact that Pepys was well aware that his behaviour was wrong, but hypocrisy and a public/private moral duality was, again, pretty normal in men of his station. That conflict is one of the things that makes him such an interesting figure. What irks me is the rush to focus on his transgressions as though people need to be "warned" that he wasn't a moral paragon by modern standards. That they might somehow be tainted by their encounter with him or be embarrassed if they express interest in or admiration for a bad man. As if that makes him any less fascinating or worth reading.
I barely have a clue about the attitudes and behaviours of the people around me - and yet you think you know not only Pepys' but also his contemporaries' attitudes and behaviours, so much so that you feel comfortable making a generalised comment about people who lived 3-400 years ago. Remarkable! Perhaps you are a historian.
Do you live inside an amish community perhaps? Nobody who at all interacts with the vast majority of American society can say with a straight face that casual sex isn't common and normal. I'm not saying that as a moral judgement, I have no problems with casual sex, but as a basic widespread tendency of said modern, generally liberal society.
Define 'casual sex'. (Perhaps define the opposite too.) And then, think across the breadth of the American people you know and all those other people you don't - across different ages, places, religions, circumstances, etc. And then say that tell me you know that 'casual sex' is the general behaviour and attitude of everyone.
And then, go back to the original point for a bonus, and consider what you know about the general behaviour and attitudes are of the people in England 400 years ago.
IMO it adds a lot: the article is about cuts from the diary, the result being that the picture is distorted. This is half the point of the link isn't it?
Pepys had many admirable qualities but these have to be placed against his extremely bad behaviour towards women. Today he would be called a "sexual predator" and he was almost certainly also a rapist. Unfortunately, women were (and still are in many places) seen as sexual objects and this view was common in the 18th Century.
I became aware of this from watching Guy de la Bédoyère's YouTube video "Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations" [1] where he discussed the good and the bad in Pepys, having just completed a new book about the diary and man. The video is good, as is the channel (he's a historian I was familar with from his Time Team appearances).
I don't like mentioning things like this usually, but for the sake of a true picture, it is worth it.
[1] https://youtu.be/uxaPbPm7sMk?si=W9vIJ_JD-BynAlOp