Honest to a Fault

Samuel Pepys’s journals bear witness to events large and small … and to his own despicable treatment of women.

an article by Danny Heitman published in HUMANITIES Volume 40 Number 3 (Summer 2019)

In 1951, New York writer Helene Hanff fired off a letter of complaint to Marks & Co., a bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road in London that often sold her secondhand copies of the classics through the mail.

Hanff was unhappy with the abbreviated edition of the seventeenth-century diary of Englishman Samuel Pepys she had received, lamenting that it was too short to do him justice. “I will make do with this thing,” she noted with what seemed an almost audible sigh, “until you find me a real Pepys.”

It’s a memorable passage from 84, Charing Cross Road, the acclaimed 1970 collection of Hanff’s correspondence with her cherished bookseller across the Atlantic, which was later adapted for stage and screen.

In her embrace of Pepys (pronounced “peeps”), we can see a model for Hanff’s own writing, which had a Pepysian alertness to the dramatic possibilities of what we prosaically – and perhaps often mistakenly – call “everyday life.” With her commentaries on the characters of her Gotham neighbourhood and her miniature portraits of the Big Apple streetscape, Hanff (1916–1997) was essentially doing for New York what Pepys did for period London, rendering history in the lively lowercase realities of food and fellowship, commerce and sickness, the shifting weather and the march of the seasons.

Continue reading

Labels:
Pepys, journals, everyday_life,

---