Bonus Quote of the Day (Samuel Pepys, on a Prior ‘Year of Publick Wonder and Mischief’)

“Thus ends this year of publick wonder and mischief to this nation, and, therefore, generally wished by all people to have an end....[P]ublick matters in a most sad condition; seamen discouraged for want of pay, and are become not to be governed: nor, as matters are now, can any fleete go out next year. Our enemies, French and Dutch, great, and grow more by our poverty. The Parliament backward in raising, because jealous of the spending of the money; the City less and less likely to be built again, every body settling elsewhere, and nobody encouraged to trade. A sad, vicious, negligent Court, and all sober men there fearful of the ruin of the whole kingdom this next year; from which, good God deliver us!”—English government official and master diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), diary entry of Dec. 31, 1666, in Pepys’ Diaries

It’s nice to know that 350 years ago, men worried about matters of state similar to now—foreign enemies, a dysfunctional legislative body, lack of public investment, a dormant economy, a malfunctioning judiciary, even ‘the ruin” of the country—and somehow still survived.

See you on the other side of the calendar in 2017…

Quote of the Day (Samuel Pepys, on the Terrible Start to His 30th Birthday)

“Thence to my Lord Sandwich, who though he has been abroad again two or three days is falling ill again, and is let blood this morning, though I hope it is only a great cold that he has got. It was a great trouble to me (and I had great apprehensions of it) that my Lord desired me to go to Westminster Hall, to the Parliament- house door, about business; and to Sir Wm. Wheeler, which I told him I would do, but durst not go for fear of being taken by these rogues; but was forced to go to White Hall and take boat, and so land below the Tower at the Iron-gate; and so the back way over Little Tower Hill; and with my cloak over my face, took one of the watermen along with me, and staid behind a wall in the New-buildings behind our garden, while he went to see whether any body stood within the Merchants' Gate, under which we pass to go into our garden, and there standing but a little dirty boy before the gate, did make me quake and sweat to think he might be a Trepan. But there was nobody, and so I got safe into the garden, and coming to open my office door, something behind it fell in the opening, which made me start. So that God knows in what a sad condition I should be in if I were truly in the condition that many a poor man is for debt: and therefore ought to bless God that I have no such reall reason, and to endeavour to keep myself, by my good deportment and good husbandry, out of any such condition.”—Samuel Pepys, diary entry February 23, 1663

Samuel Pepys, a naval bureaucrat and perhaps the greatest diarist in English letters, was born on this date in 1633 in Salisbury Court off Fleet Street, the fifth in a line of 11 children born to a London tailor and the sister of a Whitechapel butcher. The surname, by the way, is pronounced “peeps”—a rather apt description, come to think of it, of what he gives us of life in his country in the mid-17^th century, a period of regime change, turbulence, disaster and the fear these all bred.

Pepys’ accounts of the London fire and the plague that also devastated the city have become primary sources for historians of major cataclysms of that time, and his daily descriptions of playgoing and his marital misadventures have filled in the details of social life in his time. But I thought, with this post, to see how he would view events on a day with more personal meaning for him: his birthday.

The whole entry for this day is double in length, at least, what I’ve quoted here. But this portion does give a good sense of the juxtaposition of high and low in Pepys’ world. As the right-hand man of Lord Sandwich (cousin Edward Montagu), head of naval administration, he’s sent at the behest of his mentor (taken sick, and experiencing the treatment-worse-than-the-disease of bloodletting with leeches), on one of those inevitable political-bureaucratic errands that public servants inevitably handle.

As I read the passage, I called to mind my own trip to London late last month, and especially around the Tower of London and Parliament. Those areas are now thronged with tourists, but it was a different atmosphere in Pepys’ time. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (published only 13 years before Pepys’ 30^th birthday) famously described the life of man in a state of war as “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” Less than 15 years after a regicide ended England’s Civil War, Pepys encountered shadows of that state in the figures he encounters on his errand.

Already worried about “these rogues,” this high minister is afraid he’s bumped into a “Trepan.” The word might sound a bit unfamiliar to us, but its context is treacherous. The Oxford English Dictionary, it turns out, defines it as “A person who entraps or decoys others into actions or positions which may be to his advantage and to their ruin or loss.” The sinister aspect of this term might come from something sharp that a hoodlum might hold in the pocket, such as a surgical instrument in the form of a crown-saw, used for cutting out small pieces of bone.

Pepys quit making his diary entries only six years later, when he feared encroaching blindness. It turned out that his fears on this score were as overblown as the ones he felt concerning the “rogues” that he was sure were accosting him on his 30^th birthday. He ended up dying when he was 70. Posterity honors him not for the phantoms he thought he saw, but for the gritty, amusing vignettes he did witness. Biographer Claire Tomalin has called him “The Unequalled Self,” and many have found little reason to argue the point.

(Portrait of Samuel Pepys by Johann Closterman)

Quote of the Day (Samuel Pepys, With a Study in Terror: London’s Great Fire)

“Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down. Having staid, and in an hour’s time seen the fire: rage every way, and nobody, to my sight, endeavouring to quench it, but to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire, and having seen it get as far as the Steele-yard, and the wind mighty high and driving it into the City; and every thing, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches, and among other things the poor steeple by which pretty Mrs. ———— lives, and whereof my old school-fellow Elborough is parson, taken fire in the very top, an there burned till it fell down: I to White Hall (with a gentleman with me who desired to go off from the Tower, to see the fire, in my boat); to White Hall, and there up to the Kings closett in the Chappell, where people come about me, and did give them an account dismayed them all, and word was carried in to the King.”—The Diary of Samuel Pepys, entry for Sunday, September 2, 1666

Look past the archaic spelling and long sentences that might make this quote slightly foreign to modern readers. Concentrate on the word pictures created by Samuel Pepys, midlevel 17th-century British naval bureaucrat, and you’ll find not merely a diarist with an eye for masterful detail (the sentence on the “poor pigeons” is positively unforgettable) but someone who might be our contemporary as he chronicles how a society, blessed with greater freedom than any other known up to its time, almost collapses because of unexpected stress.

Today’s historians make sure to mention the good that followed the conflagration: the comparatively low loss of life, along with the new, more fire- and plague-resistant city that arose over the ashes of the four-fifths of the urban land area consumed in the three-day blaze. Pepys will have none of that. He knows that, whatever else the Great Fire of London has done, it has already had a deleterious impact on conduct.

Pepys is shocked to discover that nobody tries to quench the fire. Instead, it’s every man for himself, as people rush “to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire.” Because of failure to act and selfishness, nothing is immune from the blaze, “even the very stones of churches.” (In fact, more than 80 churches--including old St. Paul's--would burn to the ground.)

Similarly, although he is better known for description of battles and campaigns, the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, in his classic History of the Peloponnesian War, after a highly clinical account of the plague (now believed to be typhoid fever) that took the lives of one-third of Athens in the summer of 430 B.C., describes, in equally exacting terms, the effect on the civic psyche:

“Men now coolly ventured on what they had formerly done in a corner, and not just as they pleased, seeing the rapid transitions produced by persons in prosperity suddenly dying and those who before had nothing succeeding to their property. So they resolved to spend quickly and enjoy themselves, regarding their lives and riches as alike things of a day. Perseverance in what men called honor was popular with none, it was so uncertain whether they would be spared to attain the object; but it was settled that present enjoyment, and all that contributed to it, was both honorable and useful. Fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain them. As for the first, they judged it to be just the same whether they worshipped them or not, as they saw all alike perishing; and for the last, no one expected to live to be brought to trial for his offenses, but each felt that a far severer sentence had been already passed upon them all and hung ever over their heads, and before this fell it was only reasonable to enjoy life a little.”

We have had hundreds, maybe thousands, more journalists, historians, fiction writers, even bloggers than were present in the ages of Thucydides and Pepys, but I’m not sure any surpassed them in analyzing the moral costs involved when cracks develop in civilization. Technology might have changed over the centuries, but human beings, for better or worse, have not altered so dramatically--something we might bear in mind as we remember the reaction of our own society under the pressure of a fathomless disaster a decade ago. (As this article from my local paper, The Bergen Record, indicates, the much-vaunted civic spirit following 9/11 started to erode by mid-decade. The costs of this decline to our already-divided society are enormous.)

Quote of the Day (Samuel Pepys, on London’s Great Plague)

“The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in. And my Lord Mayor commands people to be within at 9 at night, all (as they say) that the sick may have liberty to go abroad for ayre.”—Samuel Pepys, Diary of Samuel Pepys, describing the Great Plague of London, August 12, 1665

Let’s get this straight immediately: the image accompanying this blog post is not a mistake.
Look past the somewhat archaic diction of this entry in the famous diary of English naval bureaucrat Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) and you’ll discover he’s describing a situation that couldn’t be more contemporary: a health emergency confronting a major metropolis and world capital.

At one point in the Great Plague that gripped London from 1664 to 1666, an estimated 8,000 people died in the British capital in a single week. The dreaded disease was, in fact, the bubonic plague, spread by rats in some of the poorest sections of the city. Ultimately, an estimated 75,000-100,000 of London’s population of 460,000 succumbed to the plague.

Pepys’ diary entries paint a vivid picture of how the rapidly morphing health crisis affected contemporary culture (many people wouldn’t buy then-fashionable wigs because, they feared, the hair had been cut off the heads of disease victims). Most of all, though, what strikes you is that the panic spread because so little was known about the disease’s cause and transmission.

Contrast that with a news item that I wish had drawn more attention and outrage than it did this week: the blistering heat that has doubled Moscow’s normal daily mortality rate, devastated Russia’s stores of grains and, in a series of unforgettable images (like the one in this post), put thousands out on the street of that nation’s capital wearing masks to guard against smog.

I’d like to borrow now a line from an otherwise inarticulate former Presidential candidate, Bob Dole: “Where’s the outrage?” As Russians suffered, many American cities also endured heat waves that for awhile badly strained electrical grids and threatened the lives of the elderly and those with poor bronchial conditions. Yet the U.S. Congress did precisely nothing to move forward a global-warming bill with any sort of teeth.

In a way, we are worse off—and certainly more morally culpable—than the Londoners of Restoration England. Lacking understanding of what plagued them, Pepys and his contemporaries were powerless to stop it.

On the other hand, the first use of the term “global warming” (coined by geochemist Wallace Broecker, in an article for the journal Science) occurred 35 years ago this past Sunday, and, especially in the last two decades, evidence for this climatic change has risen with the temperatures. Yet somehow, we haven’t been able to summon the will to do anything about it.