Samuel Pepys endures as one of the most famous figures of the seventeenth century. Through his Diary millions of readers have relived the Restoration, the Fire of London, the Plague, and other important events of the period. He knew some of the most influential people of his age, including Isaac Newton and Boyle, and he moved in the highest political circles during the reigns of both Charles II and James II.
But Pepys’s spirit was ‘very poor and mean as to bearing trouble’, and he was a self acknowledged coward. He sold two black servants into slavery and watched starving seamen demonstrating outside the Navy Office while manipulating Navy funds for his own benefit. He was violently jealous of his wife, yet he was never faithful.
For Pepys was two men; at once the warm, supremely human confessor of the Diary, and an extraordinary hypocrite. Previous biographers have tended to rationalise the darker side of his character or to explain away his conduct as socially acceptable in his day. Vincent Brome’s biography is the first attempt to face up to the contradictions in Pepys’s personality.
The Other Pepys is a gripping, frank yet sympathetic portrait of an intriguing and complex man.
With eight pages of black and white illustrations