November 22, 2004

• Amazing stuff, but I can't quite muster the enthusiasm to be a daily reader.
• I've been reading it since inception. Love that gear.
• pretty effing boss link, petebest. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to have some sack and, perhaps, a few handfulls of nuts.
• My favorite thing is to leave it a few days or a week & then sit down with a nice plate of food & catch up with all the goings-on & have a munch at the same time. Speaking of which, the guy ate some crazy shit. The commentary makes it all the more worthwhile. Some of the posters are a bit dense, others eccentric but there are some like our own Languagehat who add to the knowledge immensely. Wooh. Deja vu.
• sweet
• Just in case you're wondering (because I'm sure you are), I read this really interesting article last year which explained one of the reasons Pepys's diary is so fixated on where he goes and who he meets - it's like a social tally. Other diaries, like Ralph Josselin's are religious - keeping track of religious thoughts, and/or God's providences, but this is social. He was in a sense keeping track of his progress within London society. And after he made it, he got bored and stopped keeping his diary. It's an invaluable resource, in any case.
• Uh, can someone please give me a synopsis of this diary before I spend many minutes wading through it and decide I don't like it? (Example: "The Diary of Samuel Pepys is a ____ that enthralls the reader with ____ and ____. Inspired by ____, the diary chronicles ____ and serves as a contemporary commentary on ____.")
• I wonder if he ever shared any sack with Captain Cocke?
• that's a fantastic link, petebest, ))) for you!
• Well, Possum, it is insanely long and consists mostly of "I went here and had dinner with A,B and C" - but he does have a lot of sex, and not always with his wife. Does that pique your interest?
• He also sees and describes the Great Fire of London, and I visited the Church which he stood at - very cool. It's All Hallows (I think) near the Tower of London - the church for the Port Authority, with all sorts of memorials to sailors inside. It was badly damaged in the Blitz - they had heartrending photographs of what it looked like with its east wall ripped away. If you are ever wandering on that side of London, I would highly recommend visiting.
• Can only read this at intervals, once or twice a month, as time allows. Great link, pete.
• "The Diary of Samuel Pepys is a diary that enthralls the reader with sex and masterbation. Inspired by the life of Samuel Pepys, the diary chronicles the life of Samuel Pepys and serves as a contemporary commentary on the life of Samuel Pepys." Hope that clears things up.
• Didn't he partly stop because of failing eyesight, jb, or am I misremembering? Apart from the accounts of stuff like the Great Fire of London, I think the appeal of Pepys lies in his amazing frankness about himself - he carefully records himself being a complete paranoid bastard to his wife or shamelessly screwing poor Mrs Bagwell (did I imagine that name?)as part of a timber deal with her husband. I also find his energetic but irregular lifestyle fascinating. No nine to five - he seems as likely to drop in at the office and do some work at three o'clock in the morning as any other time. Work and home are just two elements in a list of activities which follow each other more or less randomly and irrespective of the time of day. I have the advantage of being on the spot here - I could easily stroll around many of the streets Pepys mentions in my lunch hour, and drop in on one of the innumerable pubs. But of course I spend the time reading Mofi instead.
• The eyesight problem is also my recollection, so I don't think you're misremembering, Plegmund; I suppose it's possible some other information's re his vision's come to light recently.
• He claimed that he stopped because he was worried about his eyesight becoming worse. Remember, this is the 1660s long before anyone knew about what really caused most illnesses. In fact, long before anyone knew about hygeine, healthy eating, or anything else for that matter. The only light sources were lamps, after dark, & it was a common belief that squinting at text in half light damaged one's sight. Due to his job in the Admiralty, he wanted to retain his sight for obvious reasons. Pepys was a witness to history. It's not all just the social grind (which was really a way of gathering information - Pepys had an important job as an assistant to Lord Sandwich - the father of the guy IIRC who gave his name to that bread thing what you eat) & wandering about London etc talking to people was one of the only real ways of networking. Aside from that, the diary is chock full of amazing historical facts about period clothing, food, weaponry & war (recently in the diary there was a pitched battle between the French & Dutch IIRC on the London streets over who got pride of place in a procession - people were killed!), public executions, sex, politics, & most notably the early British navy. Pepys, it turns out, is the guy responsible for largely reinvigorating the British navy & instigating far more professional standards of training for its officers, & much else besides. He was a witness to the coronation of Charles II, the Great Fire of London, & we get an almost modern insight via him into the lives of people all those years ago. He & his wife also suffered from some nasty diseases, in fact Pepys celebrated his survival from being 'cut for the stone' on the anniversary every year - he had been operated on prior to the beginning of the journal for kidney stones - an operation performed without anasthetic & without any kind of knowledge of hygeine at all which most people did not live thru. On top of this, he drank like a fish (cos you couldn't drink the water in them days), knew people of remarkable historical import, & was a codemaster - the diary itself wasn't even translated until the 1800s. It's bawdy, frank, and remarkably modern. I've learned more about the period (useful for my own fiction writing) than any other studies I've undertaken in years. Course, if history bores the crap out of you, then forget it.
• Plegmund et al - you're probably right about the eyesight thing. I was just repeating what I had read in this article, which was more interested in why he was keeping the diary to begin with (considering that most diaries from the period are religious, which this one isn't). So he talks about exciting things (fire, coronation, battles, etc), but when he talks about the everyday stuff, it's usually about his social calendar (of all sorts). Though I'm wary of statements like "you couldn't drink the water" - I don't know, but that sounds like one of the classic historical myths you have to think twice about. I was just seeing pictures the other day of pumping stations from the Thames, from the 17th century, and was told by my advisor that water was considered okay so long as it was moving. I don't doubt that they drank like fish, of course. Beer was a major form of nutrition for the labouring classes. But then, to a North American, the English still drink like fish :)
• Thoroughly defended Nosey - thanks! Here you can have your +1 back. Personally, I like it as a bookmark that I visit every day - it's sort of a "what was ol' Sam up to this day in 1661" (or whenever) Can anyone speak to the code it was originally written in? Not the "mirror" style of Leonardo presumably . . .
• He wrote the diary in shorthand. According to the epilogue of Claire Tomalin's "The Unequalled Self", the diary ended up in Cambridge with the rest of his library, but no-one attempted a rigourous translation until 1819 when a Cambridge undergraduate named John Smith started on the task, which was to take him three years. It may have helped had he known the shorthand scheme that Pepys had used, which was detailed in another of the books in the library. Various versions of the diary were published in the second half of the nineteenth century, but edited out the more "unseemly" parts of Pepys' life (gotta love those Victorians). The publication of the unexpergated version had to wait until 1976. I've recently Tomalin's book, and was considering starting on the diary itself. Cheers for the link petebest!
• "Though I'm wary of statements like "you couldn't drink the water" - I don't know, but that sounds like one of the classic historical myths you have to think twice about." This is what we're told on the Pepys site, so I had assumed it to be true. I'm pretty sure they have a page there that goes into great detail on this with linked sources etc, but from memory, cholera & malaria (the ague) were still rampant. Pepys never mentions drinking water, he usually drinks wine or ale (which in most cases was not very alcoholic anyway), & probably milk. They didn't know about boiling stuff. Then again, just cos he didn't mention it, doesn't mean he didn't do it. He doesn't mention eating many veggies either, but I'm sure vegetables were a major part of most meals. As for *why* he wrote the journal.. that's a good question. It seems he considered himself a bit of a smart fellow, above the norm, & presumably kept the diary because he thought himself special.. nobody really knows, I think that's one of the great questions.
• Yes, vegetables were a big part of the 16th and 17th century diet, as we know from cookbooks. Sometimes we (historians) forget, because they were recorded in account books (such as from poorhouses) as much as bread, beer or meat, though, because they were more likely to be grown in gardens and thus not paid for in cash. Also, where an record might not a "meat broth" served, that broth probably had a lot of vegetables and greens is it, but they weren't important enough to record. I found the bit on water, which notes that though the water was piped in, it would still have been often stagnant (in cisterns), and "a drink of choice for the city dweller". I can definitely believe that - many people today don't drink tap water if they can afford not to. But at the same time, water would have still be drunk by those who could not afford better, made into tea and coffee without boiling that long. Cholera might have been a problem, but I think dystentry would have been worse, at least for the young. Malaria is from mosquitoes which breed in stagnant water, but I've only heard of them as a problem in the fens or salt-marshes, such as in Essex. (I have reead one theory that malaria appeared in the Fenlands c. 1500 due to increased brackishness in the water, only to disapeer again in the 19th century due to draining.) In general, mortality was much higher in cities, due to crowding and bad sanitation, such that all relied on in migration to keep up their numbers. I guess I am always just a bit wary of folk history of the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries that is passed from person to person, because I keep coming across cases when it is either been mixed up somewhat, or is totally off. The famous example (that I used to believe) is that people married young - they married as late as we do, and for similar reasons (needed to work to get a good living, a house, etc). I did just hear a paper, for example, from a professor studying living standards, that beer wasn't that much less alcoholic. Strong beer, which kept best, was about 12%, while small beer would have been around 4-5%. He didn't say whether they watered the beer or not. (Same paper as where I heard about the lack of recording on vegetables, etc.)
• The Thames was very marshy & stagnant back then, Mr. Historian. Get back to me when you know whether they watered the beer or not.
• Hmm. I don't think the Thames was ever marshy in London - the soil is pure clay. It is also quite strongly tidal - at some times of day it goes backwards - but never, I think, stagnant. Surely too cold for malaria, anyway? It is true, though, that the river was much wider and shallower until Bazalgette built the new sewers and the Embankment in the nineteenth century. My understanding is that before that time it operated as both sewer and drinking-water source, though I think there were also wells in various districts. I think there were different grades of beer in Pepys's day, but I don't think any of them were weak by our standards. People must have drunk water (or tea or whatever), surely - I don't think it is possible to survive by drinking beer alone, since its diuretic properties mean it has a net dehydrating effect.
• Aw, shit. Never heard of Lambeth Marsh, I take it? Poplar East Marsh & Hackney Marsh, too, although not right next to the river, of course. Also Wapping Marsh (drained about a century before Pepys) - I assume these places were not so named merely whimsically. ;) Basically, as I understood it (& I freely admit I could be wrong) the annual flooding of the river was what really caused a lot of problems, irrespective of the silt & clay - the meadows flanking the river would be flooded, creating a seasonal marsh-like environment, if not an actual one (let's not split hairs about what makes up a marsh - I'm talking about wetlands, basically) - & I assumed that some of these areas trapped a lot of water once the level dropped. The London Basin was not as deep as it now is, one imagines. Most of Kent used to be marshy, I was taught (I grew up there) - but of course, this was only school history lessons & therefore probably inaccurate. I'm sure that much reclamation took place from when the Romans took the place over, & later by the Saxons with their great earthworks, but before then, as Conrad notes in heart of darkness, it was one of the dark places of the earth & a foetid piss-hole if ever there was one. In Pepys' day one imagines the polluting of the river & tributaries, the old sewers & cess pits would have been great breeding grounds for mosquitos - source of the ague. The East End was a horrid damp place up until early last century & beyond. Reclamation of these marshlands increased apace from around Pepys' time until well into the 18th C.
• That's interesting that London was marshy - I haven't read Mary Dobson's Contours of death and disease in early modern England (I really should), which discusses disease in marshy areas (as well as in cities). I had heard of the Essex marshes (and obviously the Fenlands, as kamus well knows), but the London ones are new to me. Did that adversely affect the harbour? I'm not a historian, just a beginning Ph.D. student in seventeenth century English history. Which means that if you name something about the 17th cent, I can probably name a book I haven't read about it yet (but will really soon...I promise). I was surprised by the beer thing too, but just heard about it a few weeks ago from a visiting Senior Lecturer who was speaking on the living standards of the labouring poor. (It's not published, or I would give the reference). I don't know where he got his information exactly (whether he read it elsewhere, or worked it out himself), but he did mention that they know what the beer was like because they have the recipes. I can't remember how many grades of beer - definately strong beer and small beer. (I once read a case of a woman whose husband claimed she lied about how much beer she was making, because she didn't want him to know she was making strong beer to get very drunk on). The labouring poor also apparently ate a hell of a lot more (even in poorhouses) in the late 17th/early 18th centuries than most historians have thought (inclusing meat and beer) - apparently most estimates were based on surveys in the late 18th century when food prices were that much higher, and people worse off.
• Well yes, fair point Nostril, I suppose. The marshes you name are mostly associated with other rivers such as the Lea, or with local springs (I find to my surprise that there was once a spa-type arrangement offering 'medicinal water' in Lambeth), and I'm not sure they would have been within the boundaries of Pepysian London - but this is nit-picking. I concede the general case for marshy bits. The vision of London sitting in a malarial fen still seems a bit misleading, though.
• Yeah, that's true, they have the beer recipes, which I forgot about before. Hmmm. Well, something tells me that there must have been some middle ground (forgive the pun) between the alcoholic beverages & less alcoholic ones. Something nagging in my memory about watering down the stuff, it being frowned upon but something that occurred during transport to varying degrees. I was only having a wee jab at you with the historian thing, as is my wont (to be an arse). No doubt you've forgotten much more than I'll ever know about the subject. As for London & the harbours.. I think I read somewhere that the docklands were often in disarray due to the wet conditions (although I'm not sure which parts of the shore were affected in which era). Can't remember exactly, but there were various stages of reclamation & improvement over the years along the Thames. Travel & commerce were affected by the state of the river, sometimes being too dangerous to launch. Interesting thing about the clay that Plegmund mentions, it was this very stuff that preserved the great pilons sunk into the river bed by very early inhabitants. The building of the old London Bridge is a remarkable subject in its own right; amazing how long the underlying structure survived.
• "The vision of London sitting in a malarial fen still seems a bit misleading, though." Yeah, fair comment. I didn't mean to imply that it was all a big swamp, just that there were swampy bits. Must find that link @ Pepys site to the maps of the day - stunned me just how small it was then, & how much meadowland was spread out where now it's a massive city.
• Diphtheria and typhoid are two of the nastier diseases spread by sweat/waste from infected human beings, and was/is endemic everywhere sewage gets itno water supply systems. London's water system was at times contaminated, and in fact, one nineteenth century outbreak abruptly stopped when common public wells in one area were closed. People still die from these diseases, but before efficient sewer containment and water treatment, annual death rates were high. The understanding of just how diseases are transmitted is a relatively recent development in human history. When you hurl the contents of chamberpots into the street, as was formerly common practice, or when runoff from privies/outdoor earth closets gets into the water supplies, then people will get sick and many will die if medical knowledge is also limited, as it was back then. No one can tell simply by looking at a glass of water with the naked eye whether or not it contains harmful bacteria and is safe to drink. Placement of outhouses too close to wells continues to be a problem in many parts of the world. These diseases are not eradicated, merely held in check.
• When you hurl the contents of chamberpots into the street What, we're not supposed to do that anymore? Y'know that would explain the looks i get from the neighbors.