How an uncensored Pepys will make a quiet don immortal

Press, 11 February 1983, Page 16

How an uncensored Pepys will make a quiet don immortal

By

MICHAEL DAVIE,

of the London ‘Observer’

. Few satisfactions in life, one may think, can equal that now available to Mr Robert Latham. He has achieved immortality of the most agreeable kind. The posthumous reputation of almost all men and women is subject to the vagaries of taste and the reassessment of later generations. In 200 years time, Mrs Thatcher may be as little regarded as Lord Bute. Even Florence Nightingale has been taken down from her plinth. But Mr Latham is sure to occupy, if books survive, the same respected niche in 2183 that he occupies now. This month, he brings to a confident conclusion the superb edition of the diary of Samuel Pepys that began to appear in 1970. Nine volumes have been already published. On February 23, the 350th anniversary of Pepys’s birth, two others will complete the set: a companion, which contains biographies, maps, genealogical trees, and much arcane and entertaining information about Pepys’s life and times; and the index, on which Mr Latham and his wife slogged away for four years and a half. All those best qualified to judge have hailed this work as a triumph of English, scholarship; no-one disputes the verdict. Mr Latham considers that Pepys is probably the second best-known writer in the language after Shakespeare. Shakespeare, though, is constantly re-edited; even now an Oxford Shakespeare is being published to compete with the Cambridge Shakespeare. But Pepys, now that he has at last been done in full and unexpurgated form, will stay done for all time. It is the Latham edition that will still be being read at the end of time. Mr Latham seems irritatingly unaware of all this. He ' is a 70-year-old don at Magdalene College, Cambridge, which is Pepys’s old college, and, until last year, librarian of the Pepys Library. The most celebrated items in the collection are Pepys’s diary, written in shorthand, and Charles IPs account, taken down by Pepys, of how he escaped after the Battle of Worcester by hiding in an oak tree. Besides, the library contains 3000 volumes, manuscripts and naval archives purloined by Pepys when Secretary to the Navy, including Sir Francis Drake’s autographed pocket book. Mr Latham’s rooms at

Magdalene are in a modern Lutyens block about three minutes walk from these treasures. He is a compact, neatly-dressed man with a far-off hint of Staffordshire in his accent, courteous and slightly wary of publicity. He works at long, highly-pol-ished tables. The room is tidy, and heated by a device now found only at Oxbridge, the moveable two-bar electric fire. An adjoining room contains files and papers. Here, one thinks, is a wellorganised man (like Pepys). “Latham here,” he had said when I rang up; and when I stated my mission: “I suppose I had this coming to me.”

As soon as we were, seated, however, he explained in detail that he had to make it absolutely plain, without being absurdly modest, that he was the co-ordinator, the general editor, of the work. “I had the sense to see from the beginning that it would take several scholars to elucidate such a wide-ranging text."

So he had been assisted by experts in various fields such as scientific instruments, theatre, music, language, dress, the Plague, and the weather (the Thames often froze over in Pepys’s day, as it never does now).

The idea of a complete edition of all million and a quarter words of Pepys was conceived by the publisher George Bell as long ago as 1926. The Pepys librarian of the time began work on it, but after he had missed his deadline by 17 years, the publishers brought in Mr Latham, in 1950, to speed things up. For the transcription of the Pepys diary with its fiendishly complicated shorthand, they naturally turned to Professor William Matthews, the acknowledged

expert on seventeenth century shorthand. Transcription is an immensely laborious business. Matthews, who sadly died while volumes 10 and 11 were being prepared, was an English academic transplanted to the University of

California. Starting in 1960, he made a microfilm of the entire diary and worked from that. His secret was that he was an expert typist; Mr Latham believes that in youth he actually won a national prize for typing. He transcribed the manuscript and then, to check its accuracy, his wife would read aloud the transcription while he followed her from the manuscript. “When they finished the last word of the last line, they, of course, opened a bottle of champagne.” Matthews was the linguist and transcriber; Latham the historian and explainer of the words. “One of the troubles about Pepys’s shorthand is that he abbreviated

it. writing only the first letter of a word, or the first syllable. You sometimes need an historian to tell you what the rest of a word should be.

“A simple capital X could mean Exchange or Exchequer. With luck. I could resolve the question, because I knew the sort of business he was at that time dealing with.” The linguist's job was often to expand the abbreviation of words. A recurrent problem was how to expand the letter “h”. Should it be expanded to “hath” or “has”? Pepys uses “h” in both the 1660 s and the 1680 s. Thus it was determined that “h” should be “hath” in the earlier and “has” in the later diary. The form was just on the point of changing. Previous editors were not aware of the problem. Why had nobody done the job earlier, since the manuscript had been sitting in Magdalene since 1724 and only half of it had been published before the present edition?

Mr Latham thought that perhaps people had been deterred because they recognised that it would be “a very long job.” Fear of prosecution, owing to the explicitness of the diary, might have had something to do with the delay. “The law changed, with Roy Jenkins’s Obscene Publications Act of 1959.” I expressed , surprise. Had we really had to wait for that Act before complete publication of Pepys was possible? "Well, it made it safer, anyway.”

The publishers confirm that in ' 1960 Gerald (now Lord) Gardiner Q.C. was asked for a legal opinion on this. He said it would be all right provided all the previ-

ously suppressed passages were published. "It would take the prurient-minded a week to find out which the hitherto excluded passages are."

I asked Mr Latham how he felt about Pepys, having spent so long in his company. Did he like him? Mr Latham reflects for several seconds.

"I like the diarist. I suppose I would have liked him in person. He must have been so full of humour. But he was so selfish to his wife. One can't approve. He had a strict, overbearing side to his character — useful in dealing with errant naval officers.” Professor Matthews had carried out exercises in writing Pepysian shorthand to determine how long Pepys spent writing the diary. He concluded that “Pepys showed great mental discipline and toughness.”

How about Mr Latham’s own methods of work? “I am industrious. I am happiest when working, and I always try to do a good morning’s work.” He said he couldn't have done the job if his academic job had not been, for much of the time, in London.

“Pepys mentions many small shopkeepers, all of whom had to be identified. I was lucky. Living in the same town as Pepys and his small shopkeepers, I could go to the parish or other archives.” He had made much use of “that wonderful institution,” the Institute for Historical Research in Russell Square. “It has an open-access library, almost entirely of printed primary sources, and a tearoom: two essentials for historical research.”

To some degree the editing consisted of a series of very small tasks that could be fitted into spare half-hours. “I used to carry a little packet of notes of things to look up."

He went into the next room and emerged from among the files and boxes with a handful of slips of paper on which were the drafts of some of his innumerable footnotes, in a neat hand. One query, one slip of paper. How did he define the ideal footnote? “A good footnote must relate to the situation mentioned in the text as well as to the person or persons mentioned. I remember one dinner party at a tavern when four men met. One of them had just come from Algiers, a captain. I discovered that the lives of all of them had crossed in Algiers, so the footnote defined the connection of those four with Algiers, but I didn’t biographise. The more precise the focus of a footnote, the better.” Information not immediately needed by the reader

has been hived off into the companion, in volume 10. “Otherwise there would have been a danger of asphyxiating Pepys. The reader has the right to know these things, but is ill-served if the editor is constantly popping up and telling him things he doesn't want to know.” Mr Latham allows himself quiet jokes. Sir Charles Porter, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, 1690-6, "was dissipated and drunken and ‘had the good fortune to be loved by everybody’ (North)." On Pepys’s drinking habits, Mr Latham says that from about 1662 Pepys was increasingly concerned to discipline himself. “The diary shows his steady, or occasionally unsteady, progress.”

I had wondered whether Mr Latham might suffer terrible withdrawal symptoms now that his great enterprise is finished; but he has, as one

might have anticipated, arranged matters beautifully. He stopped being Pepys librarian last year, but for the next four or five years, as general editor, will be occupied in finishing a catalogue of everything in the library. By the time that’s done, he will be 75, and ready, perhaps. to contemplate immortality.

Footnote: In 1967, the Inland Revenue heard about the new edition and sent Mr Pepys, care of his publishers, an income tax form. The story made the front page of the “Daily Mirror,” which quoted an Inland Revenue spokesman as saying: "We were given the surname only of a taxpayer named Pepys, not his Christian name. If there is no one named Pepys at this address, the letter should have been returned unopened.”