Volume 15, Number 6 · October 8, 1970
O Calcutta!
By Matthew Hodgart
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
edited by Robert Latham, edited by William Matthews. contributing editors:, by William A. Armstrong, by MacDonald Emslie, by Oliver Miller, by the late T.F Reddaway
California, 3 vols.: Vol. I (1660), Vol. II (1661), Vol. III (1662), 1106 pp., $27.00
So Pepys began his Diary in January, 1660. The third sentence, which is the first of many references to his wife's dysmenorrhea, does not appear in any of the editions, although it is quoted from the manuscript in Arthur Bryant's excellent biography (Vol. I, The Man in the Making, 1933, 1947). The text has always been badly cut until now, and not just for reasons of indelicacy or bawdiness—in fact a surprising amount of mild erotica got through in the nineteenth-century editions, which partly accounts for the book's popularity—but simply to shorten it. Of course Pepys is long-winded and sometimes boring, but no one who likes him would care to lose one sentence; and now we have the whole text for the first time.
Review, 1792 words
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