It is true that Pepys was a larger-than-life figure, spending his fruitful and eventful life in London in the late 1600s socialising with the movers and shakers of Parliament and nobility; but also that he was a decidedly human man, with an appetite for big dinners and apparently 'his own and others' young servant-girls'.
He was also troubled for most of his fairly long life (he lived to be 70) by kidney stones, for which he eventually had surgery for in March 1658. Given what medical conditions were like at the time, and that this was considered at the time to be a risky operation, one can only wonder at the pain he must have been in to consider surgery of this nature necessary. It is typical of the nature of the diary that he refers to it as "my old trouble", as if it is a rather trying Wodehousian aunt instead of an excruciating and debilitating complaint.
The main difficulty I had with the diary is the immense numbers of people that Pepys knew, in both his professional (he worked his way up through the civil service, eventually becoming Secretary of the Admiralty as well as being MP for Harwich and also serving as Fellow and president of the Royal Society) and personal life. Even with a fairly good grasp of the history of the period (which I freely admit I don't have) , I could see that this lsit would become overwhelming. Without footnotes, I would have not begun to be able to piece things together at all. Sometimes, he refer's to people in a slightly roundabout way - in this case, this is due to Pepys being deliberately circuitous as he was aware that he had enemies and his diaries could be used against him.
As a historical resource, though, the diary is extremely valuable and as such will stay on a bookshelf somewhere. There are diary entries regarding the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London (1666), of which he wrote several pages. It is interesting to note that his first response to the fire was "I thought it far enough off, that I went back to bed again, and to sleep". It is only later, when Jane, his wife, rouses him with the news that "300 houses have burnt down" that he "made myself ready presently" and "walked to the Tower (of London)" so he could get a better view. Throughout this entry there is a sense of unhurriedness, and this is common for the diary as a whole: even as a young man he mentions going to the office as if it were more of a coffee-house or a gentleman's club than a place of work.
In summary, then, whilst Pepys' style is pleasing and dryly humerous and his life full of adventure, many of his diary entries refer exclusively to what he had for dinner or to the day to day mundanities of life. In one sense, this does add to the completeness and a feeling of a life being recorded but in another makes one wonder what the unabridged diary is like, if entries such as
"I am told this day that Parliament hath voted 2s per annum for every chimney in England, as a constant revenue for ever to the Crowne" March 3rd, 1661
made the concise edition, how detailed must the full edition be? The best conclusion I can draw is that the Diary of Samuel Pepys is not a book I could recommend as a page turner, but more one to sit on a shelf or by a bedside for dipping into when one has a few minutes and is not sure what to read and definitely as something useful to have to hand in case of wanting to know of life in London in the 1660s.
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