Fascinating. Thank you, Guy. Reminds me of reading the journals of James Boswell and the way it transports you to another world. There is an immediacy to diaries, and the way they truncate the distance of time so that you feel contemporary with the author to an unusual degree. I find them entirely beguiling. With the Boswell journals, we see all manner of behaviours that are surprising and personal. I remember an episode in which Boswell catches an STI and has to confront the refined lady from whom he assumes he caught the disease: the way he approaches her and her response are extremely funny and extremely awkward.

1970....My 7th grade History teacher taught on Samuel Pepys diary...this started me on a life long love of historical diaries....and journaling. Thank-you for this video!

Just love your wide range of interests sir.

Is there a complete physical version meaning all diary entries? Most of the ones I found are either 1 entry or just a few of them. I'll probably end up just listening to it here on KZfaq if any channels have uploaded it fully. Excellent work sir.

I’m reading the four volumes of his diaries. Pretty good stuff.😂❤😂

Great video!

Interesting as ever Guy! Looking forward to reading Populus! Wish there was the option to buy a signed copy!

Both Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn are regular go to reads when I want to escape modern life for a while.

That was then and this is now.

To answer your questions at the end. It was not right back then but far more prevalent. Power is a corrupting temptation and for a man with influence and position, he had a double temptation, the natural male one plus his money and influence giving him delusions of rightful power over others. But it WAS wrong, even then and he knew it. The temptation is still there for such men today but education and greater social condemnation has reduced it. Thus we acknowledge that few people are all good or all bad. We must therefore decide for ourselves how it is right to act and suffer the consequences when we give in to temptations we know to be wrong.

He seems to be aware that he was doing wrong, there just wasn't harsh consequences for him if he was careful. Product of his times? Sure, but also not wholly a good one. Still, the window in time his diary gives is well worth the moral censure he deserves from time to time. I am constantly making connections to it, a recent one was when I saw that Barbara Allen was an old song that influenced American country music and thought, did Pepys say he heard that? Sure enough, he was the first person to mention it. That kind of thing happens all the time.

I grew up in Pepys Road. At the time we thought it was named after Samuel Pepys, but later I discovered it named after the Earl of Cottenham, a distant relative of the diarist. (I went to Cottenham Park infants school at the bottom of Pepys Road .) We always called the road "Peeps" Road, as you do in your presentation - but apparently the Cottenham branch of the family who owned land in the area preferred "Peppis". This branch spawned another Pepys diarist - Emily.

I'm just getting into the period, having visited the Jamestown archaeological site where I was often put in mind of what it must have been like for the first female settlers. Apparently even worse than I am capable of imagining. Sounds like pins were the pepperspray of the 17th century.

I just think when reading it, how little people have changed in the past 350 years, until very recently anyway. The other aspect i guess is the concept of love and romance, which was largely constructed in the 18th/19th century.

I can't remember which Queen's corpse he kissed on his Birthday. Definitely not a nice fellow. It's a bit surprising that he survived the stone operation.

He was quite reprehensible. Women now have it bad, but back then? Oh my.

Samuel Pepys was probably typical of his time. His attitude to women is appalling to us, as are the attitudes to slavery in Classical Greece, the, attitudes to the kulaks in Stalinist Russia and the attitudes to Jews in Germany before the war. However, Samuel Pepys's attitude to women is not relevant to his value as a witness to his time and as an insight into the human condition. Unfortunately, there is a shallowness in modern culture that leads to the belief that only 'good' people by 'current standards' have anything useful to say. So Samuel Pepys is less studied today. Soon our culture will shun Plato because he supported slavery writing that it was right for the 'better' to rule over the 'inferior'. Makes me wonder what attitudes we have today that will appall those in the centuries to come. If I was to guess, it would be our passive acceptance of the power of corporations over weapons production, human health and the environment.

I would regretfully say: 'How little things have changed'. Fairly typical upper class/wealthy/influential male behaviour, who feel that rape and molestation is their right.