Diarists
Was a man of some moral
rectitude and therefore often unenamoured of the conduct he observed in court
circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be Tudor architecture,
contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric.
Whose
diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was
the more self-scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with
an alert and quizzical eye. He also described major public events from close
up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London and a naval war against the Dutch.
Though not without his own moral inhibitions and religious gravity,
Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the 1660s,
and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the
changing London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday
life: food, places, singular characters encountered only once. It was written
in cipher for no reader other than himself and gives an often disarming sense of the
writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not decoded until the 19th century.)
