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Title: Samuel Pepys: A Life by Stephen Coote ISBN: 0-340-75124-X Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton General Division Pub. Date: 20 September, 2001 Format: Paperback |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: As with the mind, so with the man
Comment: This is a good time for Pepys. Clare Tomalin's new biography has received lots of attention -- while a new weblog of Pepys' diary has been highly publicized (and is well worth checking out in its own right). I came to Coote's book for the meanest of reasons -- it was cheaper, but I have no regrets. This is a very readable, sometimes rollicking, turn through the details of Pepys' life. Don't expect careful analysis of the literary aspects of the diary nor rich historical background. (This is a popular history in both good and bad senses of the term.) Pepys is front and center on every page of this book and were it not for the extraordinary nature of his life it might have grown tiresome. We are with him in broad strokes and minor flourishes -- from silly infatuations to grand schemes of Royal skullduggery we see remarkable detail of both the man and the time. It is fascinating stuff and Coote doesn't get in the way. The details move quickly and coherently and when the diary itself ends the reader hardly notices. Compiling a detailed account of Pepys' subsequent trials and tribulations from letters and parliamentary reports, our vision of the man remains steady. Perhaps the greatest value of a biography of this sort is that it moves you towards the diary itself. This is no small achievement for Coote and says something about Pepys' himself.
Rating: 3
Summary: The Balance Sheet
Comment: In his biography of Restoration archetype Samuel Pepys, Stephen Coote takes as his theme the diarist's "personal motto": "[A]s is the mind, so is the man"-and so is the book (11).
Coote, who also has written biographies on Sir Walter Ralegh and Charles II, draws upon letters, speeches, parliamentary documents, and naval records to produce a comprehensive account of Pepys's colorful life. Incorporating the city of London as a backdrop, Coote describes Pepys's private affairs and public accomplishments to reveal a quintessential bourgeois gentleman. The reader is given opportunity to view, through Pepys's keen eyes, the world of seventeenth-century England in all its bawdiness, turmoil, opulence, and greatness.
Coote skillfully juxtaposes the two elements of man and city to create a panorama of the time. He evaluates Pepys's intellectual and emotional development in order to reflect the political and cultural tensions in contemporary London. For example, Coote opens his biography with the "saddest sight that ever England saw"-the execution of Charles I, at which the then fifteen-year-old Pepys was present (1). He describes how English society dismissed Cromwellian piety to embrace the decadence of the Stuarts, while simultaneously relating how the young Pepys struggled constantly to reconcile a Puritan upbringing with the temptations present in a loose society: "Beneath the severe surface encouraged by Pepys's homelife ran the deep, sensuous currents of a man whose feelings and sensations were easily stirred" (14). Through Pepys's experiences as a young man and office apprentice, we see the energy and recklessness of an entire people struggling to redefine itself. Throughout his life, Pepys repeatedly found himself at the forefront of this cultural tide. He entered into the service of the Royal Navy just as England was seeking to overcome the Dutch dominance of the sea trade (26). He gained in status and wealth as London society reached a peak of decadence; he did not resist the tantalizing pleasures the city offered: sailing on the Thames, witnessing royal processions at Westminster Hall, and visiting Nell Gwyn backstage at the theatre on the Strand (75, 81, 83). Even in old age, he served enthusiastically as the elected president of the scholarly Royal Society (337).
Pepys recorded such experiences in his Diary, his primary claim to fame. Coote's sections on this work are the strongest and most enlightening in the biography. Coote produces some of his finest writing in his account of Pepys penning his first words:
Pepys was making a balance-sheet of his world.... The young man
brought up in a Puritan household was examining his worldly
state. The historian was writing the history of himself.
Above all, the artist was at work.... Like many great writers,
he knew that he was his own best subject.... (34-35)
In all that he witnessed and experienced, Pepys "resolved...to confide his wonderment strictly to his Diary" (46). Through his analysis of this personal work, Coote reveals Pepys as a man of both method and whim-of a man "keenly aware of the value of order, system and style," but who also possessed an "exhausting conviviality" (12, 76).
Despite the vivacious lifestyle of his protagonist, certain sections of Coote's piece strangely lack drive and inspiration. Chapters five through seven, recounting the experiences of Pepys's midlife years, adhere so strictly to a chronological framework that the narrative slides into a dull cycle of work, play, writing, and work again. Instead of focusing so intently on a year-by-year evaluation, Coote would do well to structure his account around a unique element, such as the Diary.
Readers hoping for a glimpse into the indulgence and intrigue of seventeenth-century London will find Coote's biography delightful. Those seeking a more intellectual challenge will receive solid information and a wealth of detail, but may want to supplement their research with additional works on the period. But readers of all pursuits will identify with Pepys's lifelong desire to better comprehend the yearnings of his own heart and of the society in which he lived.
Rating: 5
Summary: Pepys Outside the Diary
Comment: It is almost certainly true that we would not remember Samuel Pepys without his diary, which is a magnificent blend of emotional candor and brilliant reporting of big events and small seductions. Pepys was, simply, a competent and often brilliant civil servant, even though he was involved in epochal and dramatic governmental changes. He did, however, live for thirty-four years after he had written his last diary entry, and so our picture of him is imbalanced. Stephen Coote has written a new biography, _Samuel Pepys: A Life_ (Palgrave), to correct the distorted picture Pepys unknowingly gave us. It is no small feat that Coote has been able to give almost as lively account of the years without the diary as the years so memorably recorded within it.
Pepys was the son of a London tailor who performed a social rise within his life that was almost unimaginable in his time. Eventually as secretary to the Admiralty, he was simply brilliant at his job. He had been raised Puritan, and although he loved his pleasures, also loved order, efficiency, control, and domination. Some of his innovations were small but useful; no one else is on record as starting the business lunch, but Pepys took his clerks home with him, "by that means I having opportunity to talk to them about business, and I love their company very well." Some innovations shook the navy to its foundations, such as insisting that even a member of the upper class who bought himself an officership in the navy would have to serve a term as midshipmen and pass an examination. A staunch loyalist, he rubbed many Whigs the wrong way, and he was imprisoned in the Tower of London for a year, accused of Popery. It was Pepys's ability, which he had perfected in his years of naval administration, to gather massive quantities of exculpatory information that enabled him to expose and explode the case against him brilliantly.
As Coote says, after the diary, Pepys wrote even private memoranda which would "show him as a public figure. The artist had, perforce, given way to the bureaucrat." His enormous service to the navy would have been what Pepys would have wanted to be remembered for, but his diary has made him immortal. Coote has diligently pursued ancient administrative documents as well as letters to give a bigger picture (even if it is not possible to examine the years after the diary with any hope of Pepys's detail), and has placed him within some of the most complex decades of English history. His explanations of the forces of history in the time are excellent, and his comprehensive portrait of the diarist and the bureaucrat gives us in full one of the most fascinating figures of English history.
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