THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

publicly hanged, drawn, and quartered at Charing Cross.
Pepys is not merely the most celebrated of the seventeenth-century diarists, he is also the most vivid and the most
entertaining; but he is by no means a unique phenomenon. His century saw an increase in autobiographical writing
which has sometimes been vulgarly accredited to a rise in ‘bourgeois individualism’ and to a concomitant interest in
self-analysis and individual experience. It was a form of self-expression open to both men and women and it was one
that later led on to experiments with fictional first-person narratives (such as those of Daniel Defoe), but it was not
necessarily one that was confined to an urban middle class. Pepys’s origins were certainly bourgeois, but his
employment as Surveyor-General of the Admiralty victualling office opened up to him the world of court politics and
aristocratic manners and his diary carefully records the distinctions between the tastes of ‘Citizens’ and those of the
Restoration court. Two of the most avid chroniclers of themselves and their family connections, Lady Anne Clifford
(1590-1676) and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-73), stemmed from, and married into,
distinguished aristocratic families. The stimulus to record details of the world as it impinged on the individual
consciousness appears primarily to have been religious rather than social. If confined to the literate, it was generally a
classless phenomenon. Contemporary diarists and autobiographers seek to catalogue examples of divine providence,
to count personal blessings, and even to present their financial accounts for God’s scrutiny. Others recognize a
pressing necessity to demonstrate the working-out of divine purpose in private and public history, either to prove the
nature of new beginnings or to find evidence of the imminent end of time.
Lucy Hutchinson (b. 1620), the wife of the regicide John Hutchinson,
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produced her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (published 1806) as a justification of her husband’s
republican career and for the benefit of her children. Although she had contrived to save her husband’s life at the time
of the Restoration by writing a penitent letter to the Speaker of the House of Commons, her private memoir is far
removed from a mood of penitence. It offers a vivid, shrewd, and plainly expressed picture of the life of an influential
Puritan family during the Civil War, with an autobiographical ‘Fragment’ added to it. Lucy Hutchinson’s account of
herself suggests the innate strength and resourcefulness of a much-tried woman, one who in her young days ‘had a
melancholy negligence both of herself and others, as if she neither affected to please others, nor took notice of
anything before her ...’. This tendency to melancholy, perhaps the product of the severe limits imposed on women’s
action in a patriarchal society, is briefly reflected in Margaret Cavendish’s A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and
Life which was added to the original edition of her stories Natures Pictures in 1656. Cavendish, who married the
exiled Marquis (later Duke) of Newcastle in Paris in 1645, was a convinced royalist, a lady-in-waiting to Queen
Henrietta Maria and, like her husband, an accomplished if essentially dilettante writer. She was, according to a
distinctly unimpressed Pepys, known for the ‘antic ... extravagancies’ of her appearance and remarkable only for the
commonplaces she expressed on a visit to the Royal Society. Her True Relation suggests a more vivid and self
analytical character. She admits to being ‘dull, fearful and bashful’ in her youth, but the reverses of family
circumstances during the Commonwealth rendered her, she proudly claims, ‘fortune-proof’; she sees herself in exile
as passing her time ‘rather with scribbling than writing’; she had loved, she claims, ‘extraordinarily and constantly,
yet not fondly, but soberly and observingly’. A far greater mixture of love and pride, self-criticism and self-projection
marks the career of Lady Anne Clifford, by her two marriages Countess of Dorset and Countess of Pembroke. She was
also, by right of succession, the heir to vast estates in the north of England. It was for these disputed rights that she
fought against the browbeating of her first husband, the specious arguments of lawyers, and the bullying of King
James I. Her tenaciousness is evident in the surviving portions of the diary that she kept for the years 1616, 1617, and
1619 (published in 1923). In April 1617, for example, she records of her husband: ‘Sometimes I had fair words from
him and sometimes foul, but I took all patiently, and did strive to give him as much assurance of my love as I could
possibly, yet I told him that I would never part with Westrnoreland upon any condition whatever.’ Elsewhere she
notes of the two great houses of which she was mistress by marriage that ‘the marble pillars of Knole in Kent and
Wilton in Wiltshire were to me often times but the gay arbours of anguish’. Her diary also suggests the profound
spiritual comfort she found in a disciplined Anglicanism and in an informed interest in literature. She refers to her
reading of Chaucer and Sidney, but the range of her tastes is clearer in the Clifford family triptych, the ‘Great Picture’
she had had painted of herself and her immediate kin in the 1640s, where she
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appears surrounded by a select library which includes volumes of St Augustine, Spenser, Jonson, Donne, and Herbert.
Samuel Pepys’s diary covers the years 1660-9, breaking off on 31 May 1669 with a mournful reflection on ‘all the
discomforts’ that would accompany what he had reason to believe was the onset of blindness. He neither went blind,
nor began another diary. The surviving six-volume manuscript, written in the shorthand he had learned as an