Two hundred years ago this month, Samuel Pepys’s diary was published to great acclaim. Readers of the first edition in 1825 relished Pepys’s ‘honest’ observations and ‘private anecdotes’. While writing his journal in the 1660s, Pepys had worked hard to keep it secret. He knew he was placing his livelihood at risk by recording seditious criticisms of his superiors, along with details of his own bribe-taking and sexually explicit accounts of his ‘amours’. There was much that, when writing, he did not intend anyone to see and much that in the 19th century was wildly unsuited to publication. How Pepys’s secret diary nonetheless came to be published and celebrated is a tale of astuteness and cunning.
That cunning started with Pepys himself. Before he died in 1703, he resolved that his diary should find readers. When he bequeathed his library to Magdalene College in Cambridge ‘for the benefitt of Posterity’, the diary was among the volumes. Pepys had written it using Thomas Shelton’s shorthand. To a reader unfamiliar with Shelton’s method, the diary consisted of reams of opaque symbols with odd words in longhand. However, also among the books preserved in Pepys’s library were copies of Shelton’s printed manuals describing the method. Pepys left his fine library under the guardianship of the college’s master. His will set specific conditions on how the books could be used: only the master could take one from the library and only as far as the master’s lodge. Any breach of these stipulations would cause the college to forfeit its right to the library.
Pepys’s explicit intention was to preserve the books together; his implicit intention was to control who could read them. It would require privileged and prolonged access to Magdalene College for anyone to read the diary, and it would be the master who would determine what, if anything, might be published.
It was not until 1818 that steps were taken towards the publication of what became the first edition. The diary of Pepys’s friend John Evelyn had just proved a publishing success, which made Pepys’s six-volume journal intriguing. However, its contents were unknown to its custodians. Pepys’s shorthand system was at this point unrecognised. The master of Magdalene at the time, George Neville, sent the first volume off to his uncle Lord Grenville in Buckinghamshire. Grenville managed to work out enough of the opening pages to decide that the journal would make ‘an excellent accompaniment to Evelyn’s delightful Diary’. He advised Neville to hire ‘some man who for the lucre of gain’ might quickly transcribe the whole. Grenville wanted his own involvement hidden: ‘it might not be right that [the transcriber] should know the MS to have been in my possession.’ Since Neville and Grenville had breached the legal covenant allowing Magdalene to keep Pepys’s library, it was indeed wise to keep shtum.
A Cambridge student named John Smith was duly hired to transform Pepys’s shorthand into English prose. This ended up requiring three years of ‘arduous labours’, for which he was paid £200 (not much lucre). Smith was credited as the ‘decipherer’ in the first edition, which was how he wanted to be known. His right to this title was later disputed. In the 1850s, Grenville’s nephew wrote to the press to argue that the glory of ‘deciphering’ the diary should be Grenville’s. At issue here was whether Smith had enjoyed the benefit of a ‘key’ to the shorthand made by Grenville during his initial work on the diary and so acted merely as a transcriber (something wrongly portrayed as a simple task). Smith wrote to defend himself: Grenville had provided no such key. The diary, Smith said, had been ‘brought into its legible state by my sole exertions’, although others had reaped the profits. The editor of the paper judged Smith to have been the ‘real revealer of Pepys’.
It has generally been assumed on this basis that Smith worked largely from scratch and that, throughout, the shorthand system remained unrecognised. What Smith did not say (but which scrutiny of his transcript reveals) is that he had identified Shelton’s system and was working with the benefit of one of Shelton’s manuals – probably from Pepys’s library. He kept the fact he had located a shorthand key private, thereby magnifying his achievements and keeping his expertise on Pepys’s manuscripts exclusive.
The version of Pepys’s diary eventually presented to the public was edited by Neville’s brother Lord Braybrooke. Braybrooke decided which parts of Smith’s transcript should be printed. The text he published was only a quarter of the whole. He was upfront with readers that he had made cuts. In his preface, he stated that, since Pepys was given to documenting ‘the most trifling occurrences’, it had been ‘absolutely necessary to curtail the MS materially’. Yet, once again, there was strategic silence at work here. In his preface, Braybrooke did not indicate that Pepys’s conduct had been at all objectionable or that parts of the manuscript were too obscene to print. This edition contained no references to bribe-taking and no ‘amours’. Braybrooke did not want to discredit Pepys’s good name or his own brother’s college.
The final player in the publishing process, however, was not so committed to these objectives. The diary’s publisher, Henry Colburn, was selected by Neville and Braybrooke because he had produced Evelyn’s diary. He was also known as the ‘prince of puffers’ thanks to his underhand advertising methods. Within days of the diary’s publication, a Colburn-owned newspaper offered an ostensibly impartial review, which recounted examples of court scandal from the edition. It then just happened to mention that the manuscript contained episodes relating to Pepys’s own behaviour that ‘the reverend editor has with great propriety suppressed’. This statement was, on the face of it, intended to reassure purchasers as to the edition’s politeness. As was no doubt intended, however, it also incited speculation about which vices had been kept out of the published edition, and so increased the diary’s fame.
The diary’s guardian, its decipherer, its editor and its publisher all used dissimulation to get Pepys’s journal into print and encourage an enthusiastic reception. From the first, the diary was celebrated as a remarkably honest account of Pepys’s life, yet it was only through strategic shiftiness that the book became such a publishing triumph.