How Samuel Pepys really dealt with the plague

One of the more curious effects of this pandemic has been the sudden return to cultural relevance of the 17-century naval administrator and diarist Samuel Pepys. In the week before lockdown, as the public was urged to stay indoors and the newspapers printed disbelieving photographs of rammed parks and high streets, a quote began circulating on Twitter that felt like a warning from history:

On hearing ill rumour that Londoners may soon be urged into their lodgings by Her Majesty’s men, I looked upon the street to see a gaggle of striplings making fair merry, and no doubt spreading the plague well about. Not a care had these rogues for the health of their elders!

– Samuel Pepys, 1664

The quote is fake: there was no “her majesty” during the reign of Charles II, nor was 1664 a bad plague year. Putting those to one side, the hey-nonny flourishes of the language—“a gaggle of striplings make fair merry”—are a far cry from the glinting cut-and-thrust of Pepys’s prose. In fact, the quote came from the Twitter account @pepys_diaries, one of several Pepys impersonations that have sprung up in recent weeks. (Full disclosure: disconcerted as I am to be a part of this sniggering cottage industry, I should admit that I regularly impersonate Pepys for independent magazine the Fence.)

It was a well-intentioned joke, whose authors can't be blamed for it being shared out of context. In truth, the real Samuel Pepys would likely have been the subject of his fake avatar’s disapproval. With Pepys impersonators suddenly ten-a-penny, it’s worth thinking about how the diarist actually lived when the plague was at its peak.

Nothing pleases us more than seeing our own views in the mouth of a venerated historical figure. We’re not alone in this. Fake authorship is an old and inevitably political game, one that Pepys’s forebears and contemporaries played deftly. One of the most popular books of Pepys’s own youth was the Eikon Basilike, a series of devotional letters and texts that were printed, billed and sold as having been written by Charles I before his execution. Historians doubt Charles is the true author—but under Cromwell’s protectorate the book sold like hot cakes.

Pepys’s plague came in 1665, a descendant of the Black Death, now known as the “great plague of London.” It was the last great British plague epidemic, lasting for over 18 months and killing an estimated 100,000 people. That number feels real again today, as we are warned to expect deaths numbering 20,000 or more.

In September of that year the plague was at its peak. It tore through the country killing more than 5,000 people each week in London alone. But Pepys was thriving like never before. Removed to the safety of the countryside, he was busier than ever: a tailor’s son, elevated by a mixture of chance and merit, well on his way to becoming a dignified man of state.

His entry for the 14th of that month shows him caught between moods, weighing personal security and wellbeing against the death that was all around. He had travelled into the city that day, racked with an all-too-recognisable anxiety:

I did endeavour all I could to talk with as few as I could, there being now no observation of shutting up of houses infected, that to be sure we do converse and meet with people that have the plague. 

In London he settled his business with great success, securing his goods and advancing his career again. The day, he wrote, gave him “matter for as much content on one hand and melancholy on another” as any day in his life. In a bravura passage, he went on to describe the effects of the plague in the city. He had seen corpses carried close by him on their way to be buried; he discovered that someone had been dying of the plague at an inn when he was there.

To hear that poor Payne, my waiter, hath buried a child, and is dying himself. To hear that a labourer I sent but the other day to Dagenhams to know how they did there, is dead of the plague; and that one of my own watermen, that carried me daily, fell sick as soon as he had landed me on friday morning past, when I had been all night upon the water [...] and is now dead of the plague.

Here we can see Pepys wrestling with the way epidemics invert our normal intuitions about the opposition between public and private concern. Each victim is to be pitied, but each is also a potential threat. The closer someone is, the more dangerous they become. This can be awkward: before he fled to the countryside, Pepys had found himself among people so anxious about the disease that he had to lie about where he lived. Conversely, many of us are now wrestling with the counter-intuitive notion that the most public-spirited thing to do may be simply looking after ourselves.

At the end of that year, Pepys took stock of the great catastrophe in a typically un-self-deceived fashion: “I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague-time, by my Lord Brouncker’s and Captain Cocke’s good company... and great store of dancings we have had at my cost (which I was willing to indulge myself and wife) at my lodgings.”

This is the other surprise: Pepys’s was a social plague, full of meetings, dancing and drinking. He regularly slept at his friends’ houses throughout the epidemic, and never gave up his merriment—or his unsavoury womanising. What Pepys’s diaries record, in time of plague and out of it, is the busy particularity of our daily lives: their abundant small pleasures and casual fellowships. The day after his trip to London, Pepys was happily beavering away at his office. In the evening he went for a medicinal drink with a companion. The day after that, he was at lunch with three friends, “and very merry we were.” With our own peak still to come, we can’t expect the same pleasures for some time.