Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume 22: May/june 1663
Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume 22: May/june 1663
Translated by Mynors Bright
You will not find a more honest narrator in English literature. Samuel Pepys records everything: his lusts, his anxieties, his petty jealousies, his boundless curiosity about warships and theatres and the price of butter. This volume chronicles May and June 1663, where Pepys wrangles with his wife's dancing instructor (a man who has awakened something fierce and irrational in him), manages the family estate at Brampton, and tend the simmering tensions at the Navy Board that will soon erupt into war with the Dutch. Through it all runs his unending appetite for London: its plays, its gossip, its courtly maneuvering. Pepys is vain, insecure, and occasionally cruel. He knows this about himself and writes it down anyway. That transparency is what makes the diary not merely a historical document but a literary masterpiece. It is seventeenth-century life rendered with the intimacy of someone who cannot stop watching, judging, wanting, recording.
