The Letters of Samuel Pepys 1656-1703 (review)

Following up on the excellent and, judging from the recent release of its second edition, very successful volume, Particular Friends: The Correspondence of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn (1997; 2005), Guy de la Bédoyère and the Boydell Press have released a more general and wide-ranging selection of Pepys's letters. In this volume, Bédoyère abandons the strategy that served him so well in Particular Friends, in which he accounted for and reproduced every extant letter between Pepys and Evelyn. Instead of focusing on one particular aspect of the voluminous Pepys correspondence, Bédoyère employs principles of selection that, in the end, are not well-formulated or compelling: "Until the present edition, the only collection of Pepys's letters drawn from all available sources, and covering all aspects of his life, was by R.G. Howarth, published in 1932 in a book scarcely known today" (7). This sentence magnifies how very modest are Bédoyère's own claims for the value of this edition of the Letters. While the volume does make a contribution to Pepys scholarship by including thirty previously unpublished letters, we should also note that Bédoyère includes only a fraction of the extant corpus of Pepys's letters and that most of these have already been published elsewhere.

Bédoyère further expands on the principles behind the selection of Pepys's letters in the following passage:

There is no doubt that several books could easily be compiled that dealt only with the surviving correspondence of the Diary years. However, much of the ensuing correspondence is taken up with the detailed business of the Navy…. Although of technical interest to scholars, these letters make less compelling reading for the layman. Some of these letters have been included but since the content is often similar, protracted and very detailed, most have been omitted in favour of including letters that deal with personal issues and interests.

(31-2)

Bédoyère teases us with the vision of a very interesting and disciplined scholarly volume that reproduces the Pepys letters written during the time of the Diary, but he eschews this project in favor of a selection of letters that is apparently aimed at the casual "layman" reader who is generally interested in Pepys.

This off-hand revelation that the volume is not intended primarily for scholars is evident in a variety of ways. Outside of the publication of the previously unavailable letters, its contributions to our knowledge about Pepys are very limited. For example, Bédoyère does not claim to have made much improvement in the quality of letter transcriptions. While he notes that he did find a few errors in previous editions, in general he argues that during the course of his work "it became clear that there was no good reason generally to doubt the transcriptions made by Tanner, Howarth, Bryant and Heath" (10). Bédoyère also demonstrates little interest in the existing critical scholarship on Pepys. For example, his introductory discussion of Pepys's writing style in the letters, and how it contrasts with that of the Diary, makes little mention of scholars who have previously explored similar issues. His discussion would have benefited immensely by taking account of books by Claire Tomalin and Stuart Sherman, as well as Harry Berger Jr.'s excellent 1998 ELH essay on Pepys, which contains a fascinating exploration of his use of shorthand and its effects on the formation of the distinct prose style in the Diary. Finally, the index is very unhelpful, as it only tracks Pepys's correspondents and other persons mentioned in the letters. Scholars looking for information on a particular subject, say Pepys's views on Tangier or information on his trip to Scotland, would find no help from the index.

In the effort to reach the layman reader, Bédoyère also makes the curious choice of interspersing immense amounts of commentary between letters in...