The Review of English Studies Advance Access published online on October 20, 2009
The Review of English Studies, doi:10.1093/res/hgp073
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press 2009; all rights reserved
‘Men of Sobriety and Buisnes’: Pepys, Privacy and Public Duty
Lincoln College, Oxford
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Abstract |
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This article engages with the critical assumption that the Diary of Samuel Pepys, because it was penned in the privacy of his chamber, should serve as a prime exhibit of the emerging discourse of bourgeois subjectivity. Interpretations which stress the Diary’s textual rendering of a private self most notably neglect Pepys’s keen sense of playing an active part in the social and political changes which swept England in the middle of the seventeenth century. Drawing on a range of contextual material, both literary and historical, the present reading locates the Diary in the context of early modern administrative professionalisation. It proposes that we read the Diary in relation to Pepys’s emerging sense of public duty as well as to his ‘business’ and professional ‘sobriety’ as a civil servant. ‘Sobriety’ and ‘business’, this article suggests, were part of a post-Interregnum ‘cultural lexicon’ (in Quentin Skinner’s sense) which allowed a new generation of professionalised civil servants to articulate their distinct contribution to the ‘business of the Kingdom’. The two terms converge on the notion of a ‘public’ self which fundamentally shapes the Diary’s much-discussed rhetoric of privacy.