An Entrancing Ego: Samuel Pepys

Evelyn was fifteen years older than he, but he wrote him as a contemporary. "Pray remember what o'clock it is with you and me"-"o'clock" when he might have written "time," or even "how old we are." In that sharp specificity the Diary still echoes. Pepys died in 1703, three months after his seventieth birthday.

In her prefatory note, Tomalin writes of her "virtual disappearance into the seventeenth century." She took me with her. I've spent six months on this review as I followed her into the Diary's addictive volumes. She calls it "a work of genius," and puts Pepys "along Bunyan, Chaucer, Dickens and Proust." Stevenson's judgment is cooler; he compares "this unparalelled figure in the annals of mankind" to Montaigne and Rousseau. But Tomalin has earned her right to a concluding hyperbole.

1 SAMUEL PEPYS: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.00.

2 SAMUEL PEPYS AND HIS CIRCLE, by Richard Ollard. National Portrait Gallery Publications. $11.95.

3 THE DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS, ed. by Robert Latham and William Matthews. University of California Press. 11 volumes in paperback, each $24.95.

Copyright Hudson Review Summer 2004
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