claire tomalin samuel pepys the unequalled self

He stopped the diary out of fear for his eyesight, and said that abandoning it was a form of death.Samuel Pepys is the astonishing biography by bestselling author Claire Tomalin 2002 WHITBREAD BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Immaculately well done. She threatened to shame him, waved red-hot fire tongs at him, kept him awake raging at him. In the preceding weeks his wife had found him with her maid, his 'hand in her cunny'. She had some sort of vaginal boils he, recurring gall stones. Both had tempers that flared to violent rows. Their marriage was at all times problematic. It troubled him that they remained childless, even after attempts to combat infertility by drinking sage tea and changing the level of the bed so their feet were higher than their heads. He was 26, she was 19, and they had been married five years. Pepys began the diary on 1 January 1660, with the entry that his wife, Elizabeth, was not pregnant. Part of her intention is to direct her reader to his work. She describes him as 'the most ordinary and extraordinary writer we will ever meet'.

This 'secret masterpiece' places him, in her view, alongside Milton, Bunyan, Dickens and Proust. Her admiration for him is as a diarist of genius. She is keen to reveal everything there is to know about the inner man and his outer world. She invites us to be startled, amused and quickly to move on. With Tomalin we revisit the scene as modern tourists. Pepys recorded an incident in April 1664 when he chanced on his boss's wife, Lady Sandwich, as she sat on a chamber pot. Palliatives of oil of earthworms, cinnamon and chicory make matters worse. Her description of his surgical process is awful in its vividness. For example, in her acknowledgments she thanks the Real Tennis Club of Cambridge for giving her the diameter (2in) of the real as opposed to modern tennis ball, which Pepys's kidney stone (removed in May 1658) equalled. Claire Tomalin, in her turn, applies unflinching scrutiny to the whole of his life.

Pepys watched himself behaving well or badly and, for 10 years from 1660, wrote the details down. The 'unequalled self' of the subtitle is from an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson commending the 'unflinching sincerity' of self-disclosure in Pepys's diary. This boook is a great achievement and a huge pleasure.

Claire tomalin samuel pepys the unequalled self