Volume 30, Number 16 · October 27, 1983
The Humming Poet
By V.S. Pritchett
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Volume X, Companion
edited by Robert Latham, by William Matthews, compiled and edited by Robert Latham
University of California Press, 626 pp., $35.00 each volume
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Volume XI, Index
edited by Robert Latham, by William Matthews, compiled and edited by Robert Latham
University of California Press, 344 pp., $35.00 each volume
The superb eleven-volume edition of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, transcribed and edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, is now completed by two volumes: the promised Companion and an Index. The Companion fills exhaustively the London background to the diary; it describes the streets and official buildings of the little, half-timber city, has articles on how people dressed, what they ate and drank, the trades, the taverns, the coffeehouses, and the traffic of the carefully mapped streets, and explains the political and religious tensions of the period from Cromwell to the Restoration during the period of the diary and indeed until after Pepys's death. The contributors are scholarly; the Index traces the brief history of almost all the figures of the diary and the huge tribe of Pepys's rural forebears and kinsmen.
Review, 2195 words
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