Books: Pepys’s Friend

Readers of the diary of Samuel Pepys know the intimate scenes that pop out so unexpectedly among the humdrum entries on office work and financial difficulties— such passages as Pepys’s account of his shamefaced spying on his wife Elizabeth when he thought she was too friendly with her dancing teacher, his love affair with Mrs. Bagwell after he had got her husband a job, with pert Betty after he had married her off to simple Mr. Martin, his adventures with Doll Lane, Jane Welsh, Elizabeth Whittle, Frances Tooker, and various maids who were briefly employed in the Pepys household. But not so many readers know that Pepys’s famed diary has never been published in an unexpurgated version. For the last eight years, in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, Librarian Francis McDougall Charlewood Turner has been making a new transcript of the six volumes of the Pepys diaries, including the “indelicate” passages which previous editors left out.

Not content with the protection of his cryptic shorthand when he confided his amours to his diary, Pepys added further screens by making up a pidgin language of French, Spanish and Latin, with toy words and a freakish kind of lustful baby talk. “She would not suffer that je should poner my mano above ses jupes which je endeavoured,” he wrote of one modest soul. But although Librarian Turner transcribed such passages, Pepys’s secrets are still reasonably safe 270 years after the night Mrs. Pepys caught him with the charming Deb Willet. Talking things over with publishers and college authorities, Librarian Turner decided that the new edition too should be expurgated.

After studying Pepys for eight years, his “admiration for the man has grown into something very like affection.” For Librarian Turner, publishing Pepys’s secrets would be like betraying the confidences of an intimate friend.