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Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self | 
 enlarge | Author: Claire Tomalin
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
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Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 690692
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 512
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7 x 1.7
ISBN: 0375411437
Dewey Decimal Number: 941.066092
EAN: 9780375411434
ASIN: 0375411437
Publication Date: November 12, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The seventeenth century saw a revolution in man’s thought, as Isaac Newton and others began the scientific study of the universe around them. At the same time a shrewd young civil servant in London began to observe, with something of the same dispassionate curiosity, the strange object around which, for him, the universe revolved–himself. For ten years, beginning in 1660, Samuel Pepys secretly kept one of the most remarkable records ever made of a human life.
With astounding candor and perceptiveness he described his ambitions and peculations, his professional successes and failures, his pettinesses and meannesses, his tenderness toward his wife and the irritations and jealousies she provoked, his extramarital longings and fumblings, his coolly critical attitude toward the king he served and his watchful adaptation to the corrupt and treacherous life of the court. Pepys’s diary is a magnificent creation.
But there is more to Samuel Pepys than his diary, as Claire Tomalin makes clear in this profoundly original biography. Buttressing it with less familiar sources and other contemporary material, she is able to illuminate his entire life–as a poor London tailor’s son, as a schoolboy rejoicing at the execution of Charles I, as an aspiring clerk with good connections who transforms himself into a royalist, escorting Charles II to England for the Restoration. Then there is the bureaucrat heroically working against the odds to create a modern navy, finding his way through the dangerous years of political and religious conflict (even, at one point, being charged with treason and jailed), peacefully retiring at last with his books and his music and his friends.
It is Claire Tomalin’s unique skill as a biographer to achieve extraordinary intimacy with her subject, and Pepys is no exception. To the endlessly fascinating question of his relations with women, for example, she brings the same insight and freshness of approach that distinguished such highly praised books as Jane Austen and The Invisible Woman. At the same time, the historical context is never less than brilliantly evoked. The result is exemplary, by far the most revealing–and readable–portrait of the greatest diarist in the English language, a man of unmatched interest and importance.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 Wonderful book June 6, 2008
P. Stern
This is literary biography of the first rank -- equal to the greats, like Ellmann on Wilde. A hugely impressive work and a pleasure to read.
The Amazing Rise of a Hard Working Rump Smoocher December 7, 2007
Douglas S. Wood (Monona, WI)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Claire Tomalin's Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self is quite simply one of the best reads in history, biography or any other genre in a long time. It deservedly carried off the Whitbread Book of the Year in 2002. Pepys lived through the tumultuous changes of the 17th century from Charles I to the Commonwealth and back to Charles II and James II and finally through the Glorious Revolution that brought the Dutch William III to the English crown. That century contained plagues, the great London fire, revolution, counterrevolution, and the emergence of science. Pepys experienced it all and for some 9 years wrote a comprehensive, perceptive, and extremely candid diary.
Tomalin's story rather naturally divides into three parts: pre-diary years, the diary years from 1660-1669, and the post-diary years when Pepys reached his greatest heights and suffered his greatest losses, personal and professional. In the first and last parts Tomalin gives us an excellent if fairly standard biography, but one informed by the incredible detail and honesty of the diary years.
When the reader reaches the end of the diary years one feels a sense of deprivation, a sense almost of being cheated. Pepys has drawn the curtain closed and we are no longer privy to the intimate details of Pepys daily activities at court, in the street, in the bedroom. Tomalin's own sense of loss is palpable.
Pepys began life as the son of London tailor and managed to reach the highest levels of English government as an advisor to kings by dint of hard work and obsequious obeisance to a number of benefactors, beginning with Edward Montague. An assiduous rump smoocher was he. Along the way he switched from being a supporter of Cromwell and Parliament to backing Charles II and James II. As a high-level naval official he instituted many practices that made the Royal Navy the greatest in the world. Unfortunately for Pepys, Charles II was a wastrel and James II an open Catholic whose religion cost him his crown. His connection to them cost him some time in the Tower of London.
There are many diaries, but few that are as perceptive and honest as Pepys' or as fruitful at sweeping in the details of daily life in mid-1600s England. According to Tomalin, Pepys diary gives more detail about the life of young working class girls and women, the maids, cooks, and serving girls, as almost any other source. Pepys also had a strong appetite for women and he did not hesitate to use his position to get what he desired, which he also details in his diary.
Pepys' diary and his own achievements show him as a remarkably energetic man with a strongly curious mind. Although not a scientist himself Pepys had a curious mind and also belonged to the Royal Society serving a term as its president. Pepys displays a willingness to work and to fawn as necessary in order to advance. The diary also shows him as a frequent sexual harasser (although his behavior may have been within the norms of the day at least as far as the men were concerned). And while he excelled at his work, he also was not above taking a bit of an "inducement" on the side. We would call these payments bribes, but Pepys seems to have viewed them more like service charges and he seems not to have acted contrary to the navy's best interests. These bribes were usually in pound notes (often sizeable), but he also had a long-running arrangement with a ship's captain for free access to the sexual favors of the captain's wife (Her name: Mrs. Bagwell!).
What is truly remarkable is that we know all these things and know them to be true for a certainty only because Pepys wrote them in his diary, a diary that it is generally believed Pepys fully intended to be publicly read some day (he included the six volumes in his library that he bequeathed it to Magdalene College, Cambridge).
Highest recommendation.
Pepys is the best! January 9, 2007
Kathryn (Massachusetts)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I loved this book. I still love this book. On a recent trip to London I found myself thinking about Pepys around the city, seeing things, going places, meeting people. He is so interesting to himself, and to Tomalin, and now to me! She does a superb job telling the story with no intrusions from her self--it's all Pepys all the time. If you can read, you'll love it!
A Truly fascinating Man July 22, 2006
J. Chippindale (England)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is another fascinating historical biography that reads more like a novel than a stuffy factual book. Virtually everyone knows the name of Samuel Pepys. Ah yes, he's the man who wrote the diary. This is of course true, but do they actually know anything about the man behind the name of Samuel Pepys. What for instance were his feelings on the politicians of the day. What were his own ambitions and aspirations.
Pepys was a naval administrator and friend and confidant of some of the most famous and powerful people in London . Sex, the plague, music, marital conflict, naval life, public executions and incarcerations in the Tower of London. These are just some of the colourful events in the life of a man famous for his writing of a diary.
The book contains a wealth of interesting material about the life of a man who's name goes before him. Everyone knows his name, but few know of the life of the man himself.
 Peeping at the unpleasant side of Pepys April 20, 2005
Shalom Freedman (Jerusalem,Israel)
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
This overpraised biography of Pepys tends to underplay his character flaws. Tomalin is over-forgiving of Pepys betrayals of friends and family, of his frequent physical and sexual abuse of women including his own wife. Pepys betrayal of his brother and sister his frequent cruelty to those members of his family who could not serve his social climbing goals make very questionable the heroic image Tomalin provides of him. She surely overrates his greatness as a writer and explorer of the self.
Pepys is a diarist of tremendous curiosity who is capable of recording his own intimate acts with a certain kind of objective impersonality.
Since Pepys is famous for his sexual antics I expected this biography would make some effort at real analysis of his character. It does not do this but contents itself but relating and celebrating his exploits. Reading this work we thus know much about what Pepys did without necessarily understanding who he really is.
Pepys unpleasant side was also revealed in his greatest career year, the Plague Year . While one of every six people in London were falling victim to the Plague Pepys was happily recording his advances in career. A very hard worker, and a masterful
bureaucrat he nonetheless does not show a broad and humane sympathy for others.
For those who love English social history , for those who want to know a great deal about Restoration England, for those interested in understanding how bureaucracy works, and how people get on and by in the world, this biography is outstanding. But for those who wish to understand human character in depth, including that of Samuel Pepys this book it seems to me is as lacking as Pepys himself was.
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