Mr. and Mrs. Pepys
SAMUEL PEPYS, Father of the Royal Navy, and the one man—if indeed there were any one man—who made possible the careers of Blake and Nelson, died in 1703 in the odour of the greatest respectability. Official London followed him to his honoured grave, and he left behind him the memory of a great and good servant of the King in “perriwig” (alas, to become too famous), stockings and silver buckles. But unhappily for his reputation, though greatly to the delight of a wicked world, he had, during ten momentous years, kept a diary. It was written in a kind of shorthand which he seems to have flattered himself would not be interpreted; but by some extraordinary mischance he had left a key amongst his papers. Early in the nineteenth century part of the Diary was translated, and a part published. A staggered world asked for more, and during the next three generations further portions were made public, until by this time nearly the whole has been published, and it is unlikely that the small remaining portions will ever see the light.
Pepys seems to have set down every thought that came into his head as he wrote; things which the ordinary man hardly admits to himself—even supposing that he ever thinks or does them—this stately Secretary of the Navy calmly wrote in black and white with a garrulous effrontery that absolutely disarms criticism. In its extraordinary self-revelation the Diary is unique; it is literally true that there is nothing else like it in any other language, and it is almost impossible that anything like it will ever be written again; the man, the moment, and the occasion can never recur. I take it that every man who presumes to call himself educated has at least a nodding acquaintance with this immortal work; but a glance at some of its medical features may be interesting. The difficulties at this end of the world are considerable, because the Editor has veiled some of the more interesting medical passages in the decent obscurity of asterisks, and one has to guess at some anatomical terms which, if too Saxon to be printable in modern English, might very well have been given in technical Latin. Let us begin with a brief study of the delightful woman who had the good fortune—or otherwise—to be Pepys’s wife. Daughter of a French immigrant and an Irish girl, Elizabeth Pepys was married at fourteen, and her life ended, after fifteen somewhat hectic years, in 1669, when she was only twenty-nine years of age. Pepys repeatedly tells us that she was pretty—and no one was ever a better judge than he—and “very good company when she is well.” Her portrait shows her with a bright, clever little face, her upper lip perhaps a trifle longer than the ideal, bosom well developed, and a coquettish curl allowed to hang over her forehead after the fashion of the Court of Charles II. She spoke and read French and English; she took the keenest interest in life, and set to work to learn from her husband arithmetic, “musique,” the flageolet, use of the globes, and various accomplishments which modern girls learn at school. Mrs. Pepys imbibing all this erudition from her husband, while her pretty little dog lies snoring on the mat, forms a truly delightful picture, and no doubt our imagination of it is no more delightful than the reality was three hundred years ago. I suppose it was the same dog as he whose puppyish indiscretions had led to many a fierce quarrel between husband and wife; Pepys always carefully recorded these indiscretions, both of the dog and, alas, of himself. It is clear that the sanitary conveniences in Pepys’s house could not have been up to his requirements.
Husband and wife went everywhere together, and seem really to have loved each other; the impression that I gather from Pepys’s exceedingly candid description of her is that she was a loyal and comradely wife, with a spirit of her own, and a good deal to put up with; for though Pepys was continually—and causelessly—jealous of her, yet he did not hold that he was in any way bound to be faithful to her on his own side. So they pass through life, Pepys philandering with every attractive woman who came his way, and Mrs. Pepys dressing herself prettily, learning her little accomplishments, squabbling with her maids, and looking after her house and his meals, till one day she engaged a servant, Deb Willet by name, who brought a touch of tragedy into the home. In November, 1668, Deb was combing Pepys’s hair—no doubt in preparation for the immortal “perriwig”—when Mrs. Pepys came in and caught him “embracing her,” thus occasioning “the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world,” as he puts it.
Mrs. Pepys was “struck mute,” and was silently furious. Outraged Juno towered over the unhappy Pepys, and so to bed without a word, nor slept all night; but about two in the morning Juno became very woman; woke him up and told him she had “turned Roman Catholique,” this being, in the state of politics at that time, probably the thing which she thought would hurt him more than anything else she could say. For the next few days Pepys is sore troubled, and his usual genial babble becomes almost incoherent. The wrong dating and the expressions of “phrenzy” show the mental agony that he passed through, and there can be no doubt that the joy of life passed out of him, probably never more fully to return. The rest of the Diary is written in a style graver than at first—some of it is almost passionate. He describes with much mental agitation how he woke up in the middle of one night, and found his wife heating a pair of tongs red-hot and preparing to pinch his nose; gone for ever were the glad days when he could pull her nose, and the “poor wretch” thought none the worse of the lordly fellow. Twice had he done so, and, as he says, “to offend.” One would like to have Mrs. Pepys’s account of this nose-pulling, and what she really thought of it. Some people have found the struggle of Pepys to cure himself of his infatuation for Deb humorous; to any ordinarily sympathetic soul who reads how he prayed on his knees in his own room that God would give him strength never again to be unfaithful, and how he appealed again and again to his wife to forgive him, and how he, to the best of his ability, avoided the girl, the whole business becomes rather too painful to be funny, even though the unhappy man has the art of making himself ridiculous in nearly every sentence. Finally, in a fury of jealousy, she forced him to write a most insulting letter to Miss Willet, a letter that no woman could ever possibly forgive, and Pepys’s life appears to have settled down again. His sight failing him[9]—it is thought that he suffered from hypermetropia combined with early presbyopia—he abandoned the Diary just at the time when one would have dearly liked to hear more; and we never hear the end either of Deb or of their married happiness. Reading between the lines, one gathers that probably Deb was more sinned against than sinning, and that Mrs. Pepys had more real reason to be angry about many women of whom she had never heard than about the young woman whose flirtation was the actual casus belli. It is an unjust world. The two went abroad for a six-months’ tour in France and Holland, and immediately after they returned Mrs. Pepys fell ill of a fever; for a time she appears to have fought it well, but she took a bad turn and died. Considering her youth, the season of the year, and that they had just returned from the Continent, the disease was possibly typhoid. Pepys erected an affectionate memorial to her, and was later on buried by her side. He took the last sacrament with her as she lay dying, so we may reasonably suppose that she died having forgiven him, and it is not unfair to imagine that the trip abroad was a second honeymoon. They were two grown-up children, playing with life as with a new toy.
Mrs. Pepys was liable to attacks of boils in asterisks; and a Dr. Williams acquired considerable merit by supplying her with plasters and ointments. On November 16, 1663, “Mr. Hollyard came, and he and I about our great work to look upon my wife’s malady, which he did, and it seems her great conflux of humours heretofore that did use to swell there did in breaking leave a hollow which has since gone in further and further till it is now three inches deep, but as God will have it did not run into the body-ward, but keeps to the outside of the skin, and so he will be forced to cut open all along, and which my heart will not serve me to see done, and yet she will not have no one else to see it done, no, not even her mayde, and so I must do it poor wretch for her.” Pepys is in a panic at the thought of assisting at the opening of this subcutaneous abscess; one can feel the courage oozing out at the palms of his hands as one reads his agitated words. To his joy, next morning Mr. Hollyard, on second thoughts, “believes a fomentation will do as well, and what her mayde will be able to do as well without knowing what it is for, but only that it is for the piles.” Evidently the “mayde’s” opinion was of some little moment in Mrs. Pepys’s censorious world. Mr. Pepys would have been much troubled to see his wife cut before his face: “he could not have borne to have seen it.” Mr. Hollyard received £3 “for his work upon my wife, but whether it is cured or not I cannot say, but he says it will never come to anything, but it may ooze now and again.” Mr. Hollyard was evidently easily satisfied. Of course, there must have been a sinus running in somewhere, but it is impossible to guess at its origin. Possibly some pelvic sepsis; possibly an ischio-rectal abscess. A long time before he had noted that his wife was suffering from a “soare belly,” which may possibly have been the beginning of the trouble, but there is no mention of any long and serious illness such as usually accompanies para-metric sepsis. On the whole, I fancy ischio-rectal abscess to be the most likely explanation. Later on she suffers from abscesses in the cheek, which “by God’s mercy burst into the mouth, thus not spoiling her face”; and she had constant trouble with her teeth. It is thus quite probable that the origin of the whole illness may have been pyorrhœa, and no doubt this would go hard with her in the fever from which she died. Possibly this may have been septic pneumonia arising from septic foci in the mouth; but, after all, it is idle to speculate.
Mrs. Pepys never became pregnant during the period covered by the Diary, though there were one or two false alarms. There is no mention of any continuous or constant ill-health, such as we find in pyo-salpinx or severe tubal adhesions; and such being the case, her sterility may quite likely have been as much his fault as hers.
One cannot read the Diary without wishing that we could have heard a little more of her side of the questions that arose. What did she really think of her husband when he pulled her nose? Twice, too, no less! Stevenson calls her “a vulgar woman.” Stevenson’s opinion on every matter is worthy of the highest respect, as that of a sensitive, refined, and artistic soul; but I cannot help thinking that sometimes his early Calvinistic training tended to make him rather intolerant to human weakness. His judgment of François Villon always seems to me intolerant and unjust, and he showed no sign in his novels of ever having made any effort to comprehend the difficulties and troubles which surround women in their passage through the world. He understood men—there can be no doubt of that; but I doubt if he understood women even to the small extent which is achieved by the average man. Personally I find Mrs. Pepys far from “vulgar”; generally she is simply delightful. True, one cannot concur with her action over the letter to Deb. It was cruel and ungenerous. But she probably knew her husband well by that time, and judged fairly accurately the only thing that would be likely to bring him up with a round turn, and again we have not the privilege of knowing Deb except through Pepys’s possibly too favourable eyes. Deb may have been all that Mrs. Pepys thought her, and she may have richly deserved what she got. After all, there is in every woman protecting her husband from the onslaughts of “vamps” not a little of the wild-cat. Even the gentlest of women will defend her husband—especially a husband who retains so much of the boy as Pepys—from the attempts of wicked women to steal him, poor innocent love, from her sacred hearth; will defend him with bare hands and claws, and totally regardless of the rules of combat; and it is this touch of cattishness in Mrs. Pepys which makes one’s heart warm towards her. For all we know Deb Willet may have been a “vamp.” Mrs. Pepys was certainly the “absolute female.”
Mr. Pepys suffered from stone in the bladder before he began to keep a diary. He does not appear to have been physically a hero; had he been a general, no doubt he would have led his army bravely from the rear except in case of a retreat; but so great was the pain that he submitted his body to the knife on March 26, 1658. Anæsthetics in those days were rudimentary, relaxing rather than anæsthetizing the patient. There is some reason to believe that they were extensively used in the Middle Ages, and contemporaries of Shakespeare seem to have looked on their use as a matter of course; but for some reason they became less popular, and by the seventeenth century most people had to undergo their operations with little assistance beyond stout hearts and sluggish nervous systems.
Cutting for the stone was one of the earliest of surgical operations. In ancient days it was first done in India, and the glad news that stones could be successfully removed from the living body filtered through to the Greeks some centuries before Christ. Hippocrates knew all about it, and the operation is mentioned in that Hippocratic oath according to which some of us endeavour to regulate our lives. At first it was only done in children, because it was considered that adult men would not heal properly, and the only result in them would be a fistula. The child was held on the lap of some muscular assistant, with one or two not less muscular men holding its arms and legs. The surgeon put one or two fingers into the little anus and tried to push the stone down on to the perineum, helped in this manœuvre by hypogastric pressure from another assistant. He then cut transversely above the anus, strong in the faith that he might, if the gods willed, open into the neck of the bladder. Next he tried to push out the stone with his fingers still in the anus; it is not quite clear whether he would take his fingers out of the anus and put them into the wound or vice versa; this failing, he would seize the stone with forceps and drag it through the perineum. As time went on it was discovered that more than three or four assistants could be employed, using others to sit on the patient’s chest, thus adding the peine forte et dure to the legitimate terrors of ancient surgery and surrounding him with a mass of men. Imbued with a spirit of unrest by the struggles of the patient the mass swayed this way and that, until it was discovered that by adding yet more valiants to the wings of the “scrum,” who should answer heave with counter-heave, the resultant of the opposing forces would hold even the largest perineum steady enough for the surgeon to operate; and men came under the knife for stone. Next the patient was tied up with ropes, somewhat in the style we used in our boyhood’s sport of cock-fighting. What a piece of work is the Rope! How perfect in all its works—from the Pyramids—built with the aid of the Rope and the Stick—to the execution of the latest murderer. One might write pages on the influence of the Rope on human progress; but for our purpose we may simply say that probably Mr. Pepys was kept quiet with many yards of hemp. Those who cut for the stone were specialists, doing nothing else; their arrival at a patient’s house must have resembled an invasion, with their vast armamentarium and crowds of assistants. By Pepys’s time Marianus Sanctus had lived—yes, so greatly was he venerated that they called him “Sanctus,” the Holy Man; Saint Marianus if you will. He it was, in Italy in 1524, who invented the apparatus major, which made the operation a little less barbarous than that of the Greeks. This God-sent apparatus consisted mainly of a grooved staff to be shoved into the bladder and a series of forceps. You cut on to the staff as the first step of the operation; it was believed that if you cut in the middle line in the raphe the wound would never heal, owing to the callosity of the part; moreover, if you carried your incision too far back you would cause fatal hæmorrhage from the inferior hæmorrhoidal veins. Having, then, made your incision well to the right or left, you exposed the urethra, made a good big hole in that pipe, and inserted a fine able pair of tongs, with which you seized hold of the stone and crushed it if you could, pulling it out in bits; or if the stone were hard, and you had preternaturally long fingers, you might even get it out on a finger-tip. It was always considered the mark of a wise surgeon to carry a spare stone with him in his waistcoat pocket, so that the patient might at least have a product of the chase to see if the surgeon should find his normal efforts unrewarded. Diagnosis was little more advanced in those days than operative surgery; there are numbers of conditions which may have caused symptoms like those of a stone, and it was always well for the surgeon to be prepared.
This would be the operation that was performed on Mr. Pepys. The results in many cases were disastrous; some men lost control of their sphincter vesicæ; many were left with urinary fistulæ; in many the procreative power was permanently destroyed by interference with the seminal vesicles and ducts. Probably some of us would prefer to keep our calculi rather than let a mediæval stone-cutter perform upon us; we are a degenerate crew. It is not altogether displeasing to imagine the roars of the unhappy Pepys, trussed and helpless, a pallid little Mrs. Pepys quaking outside the door, perhaps not entirely sorry that her own grievances were being so adequately avenged, although the vengeance was vicarious; while the surgeon wrestled with a large uric acid calculus which could with difficulty be dragged through the wound. It is all very well for us to laugh at the forth-right methods of our ancestors; but, considering their difficulties—no anæsthesia, no antiseptics, want of sufficient surgical practice, and the fact that few could ever have had the hardness of heart necessary to stand the patient’s bawlings, it is remarkable that they did so well and that the mortality of this appalling operation seems only to have been from 15 to 20 per cent. Moreover we may be pretty sure that no small stone would ever be operated upon; men postponed the operation until the discomfort became intolerable. It remained for the genius of Cheselden, when Pepys was dead and possibly in heaven some twenty years, to devise the operation of lateral lithotomy, one of the greatest advances ever made in surgery. This operation survived practically unchanged till recent times.
Pepys’s heroism was not in vain, and was rewarded by a long life free from serious illness till the end. March 26 became to him a holy day, and was kept up with pomp for many years. The people of the house wherein he had suffered and been strong were invited to a solemn feast on that blessed day, and as the baked meats went round and the good wine glowed in the decanters, Mr. Pepys stood at his cheer and once again recounted the tale of his agony and his courage. Nowadays, when we are operated upon with little more anxiety than we should display over signing a lease, it is difficult to imagine a state of things such as must have been inevitable in the days before Simpson and Lister.
The stone re-formed, but not in the bladder. Once you have a uric acid calculus you can never be quite sure you have done with it until you are dead, and in the case of Mr. Pepys recurrence took place in the kidney. When he died, an old man, in 1703, they performed a post-mortem examination on his body, suspecting that his kidneys were at fault, and in the left kidney found a nest of no less than seven stones, which must have been silently growing in the calyces for unnumbered years. Nor does it seem to me impossible that his extraordinary incontinence—he never seems to have been able to resist any feminine allurement, however coarse—may really have been due to the continued irritation of the old scar in his perineum. There is often a physical condition as the basis for this type of character, and some trifling irritation may make all the difference between virtue and concupiscence. This reasoning is probably more likely to be true than much of the psycho-analysis which is at present so fashionable among young ladies. Possibly also the sterility of Mrs. Pepys may have been partly due to the effects of the operation upon her husband.
One unpleasant result to Mr. Pepys was the fact that whenever he crossed his legs carelessly he became afflicted with a mild epididymitis—he describes it much less politely himself, doubtless in wrath. His little failing in this respect must have been a source of innocent merriment to the many friends who were in the secret. He was also troubled with attacks of severe pain whenever the weather turned suddenly cold. At first he used to be in terror lest his old enemy had returned, but he learned to regard the attacks philosophically as part of the common heritage of mankind, for man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Probably they were due to reflex irritation from the stones growing in the kidney. He does not seem to have passed any small stones per urethram, or he would assuredly have told us. He took great interest in his own emunctories—probably other people’s, too, from certain dark sayings.
Considering the by no means holy living of Mr. Pepys, it is rather remarkable that he never seems to have suffered from venereal disease, and this leads me to suspect that possibly these ailments were not so common in the England of the Restoration as they are to-day. It seems impossible that any man could live in Sydney so promiscuously as Mr. Pepys without paying the penalty; and the experience of our army in London seems to show that things there must be much the same as here (Sydney). I often wonder whether Charles II and his courtiers were really representative of the great mass of people in England at that time; probably the prevalence of venereal disease in modern times is due to the enormous increase in city life; probably men and women have always been very much the same from generation to generation—inflammable as straw, given the opportunities which occur mainly in cities and crowded houses.
Ignoble as was Pepys, he yet showed real moral courage during the Plague. When that great enemy of cities attacked London he, very wisely, sent his family into the country at Woolwich, while he remained faithful to his duty and continued to work at the navy in Greenwich, Deptford, and London. I cannot find in the Diary any mention of any particular attraction that kept him in London during those awful five months; he would, no doubt, have mentioned her name if there had been such; yet candour compels me to observe that there was seldom any one attraction for Mr. Pepys, unless poor Deb Willet may have somehow mastered—temporarily—his wayward heart. But, as might have been expected, he was little more virtuous during his wife’s absence than before; indeed, possibly the imminent danger of death may have led him to enjoy his life while yet he might, with his usual fits of agonized remorse, whose effects upon his conduct were brief. We owe far more to his organizing power and honesty—not a bigoted variety—than is generally remembered. His babble is not the best medium for vigorous description, and you will not get from Pepys any idea of the epidemic comparable with that which you will get from the journalist Defoe; yet through those months there lurks a feeling of horror which still impresses mankind. The momentary glimpse of a citizen who stumbles over the “corps” of a man dead of the plague, and running home tells his pregnant wife; she dies of fear forthwith; a man, his wife, and three children dying and being buried on one day; persons quick to-day and dead to-morrow—not in scores, but in hundreds; ten thousand dying in a week; the horrid atmosphere of fear and suspicion which overlay London; and Pepys himself setting his papers in order, so that men might think well of him should it please the Lord to take him suddenly: all give us a sense of doom all the more poignant because recently we went through a much milder version of the same experience ourselves. The papers talked glibly of the influenza as “The Plague.” How different it was from the real bubonic plague is shown by the statistics. In five months of 1665 there died of the plague in the little London of that day no less than about 70,000 people, according to the bills of mortality; in truth, probably far more; that is to say, probably a fifth of the people perished. There is no doubt that the bubonic plague kept back the development of cities, and therefore of civilization, for centuries, and that the partial conquest of the rat has been one of the greatest achievements of the human race. What is happening in Lord Howe Island, where it is exceedingly doubtful whether rats or men shall survive in that beautiful speck of land, shows how slender is the hold which mankind has upon the earth; and wherever the rat is able to breed unchecked, man is liable to sink back into savagery. The rat, the tubercle bacillus, and the bacillus of typhoid are the three great enemies of civilization; we hold our position against them at the price of eternal vigilance, and probably the rat is not the least deadly of these enemies.
I need not go through the Diary in search of incidents; most of them, while intensely amusing, are rather of interest to the psychologist in the study of self-revelation than to the medical man. When Pepys’s brother lay dying the doctor in charge hinted that possibly the trouble might have been of syphilitic origin; Pepys was virtuously wrathful, and the unhappy doctor had to apologize and was forthwith discharged. I cannot here narrate how they proved that the unhappy patient had never had syphilis in his life; you must read the Diary for that. Their method would not have satisfied either Wassermann or Bordet. Another time Pepys was doing something that he should not have been doing at an open window in a draught; the Lord punished him by striking him with Bell’s palsy. Still again, at another time he got something that seems to have resembled pseudo-ileus, possibly reflex from his latent calculi. Everybody in the street was much distressed at his anguish; all the ladies sent in prescriptions for enemata; the one which relieved him consisted of small beer! Indeed, one marvels always at the extraordinary interest shown by Pepys’s lady-friends in his most private ailments. London must have been a friendly little town in the seventeenth century, in the intervals of hanging people and chopping off heads.
But the great problem remains: Why did Pepys write down all these intimate details of his private life? Why did he confess to things which most men do not confess even to themselves? Why did he write it all down in cypher? Why, when he narrated something particularly disgraceful, did he write in a mongrel dialect of bad French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin? He could not have seriously believed that a person who was able to read the Diary would not be able to read the very simple foreign words with which it is interspersed. Most amazing of all: Why did he keep the manuscript for more than thirty years, a key with it? One thinks of the fabled ostrich who buries his head in the sand. The problem of Pepys still remains unsolved, in spite of the efforts of Stevenson in Familiar Studies of Men and Books. Stevenson was the last man in the world to understand Pepys, but more competent exegetists have tried and failed. One can only say that his failing sight—which Professor Osborne of Melbourne attributes to astigmatism—has deprived the world of a treasure that can never be sufficiently regretted. No man can be considered educated who has not read at least part of the Diary; in no other way is it possible to get so vivid a picture of the ordinary people of a past age; as we read they seem to live before us, and it comes as a shock to remember that poor Pall Pepys—his plain sister—and “my wife” and Mrs. Batelier—“my pretty valentine”—and Sir William Coventry and Mercer, and the hundreds more who pass so vividly before us, are all dead these centuries.
If this little paper shall send some to the reading of this most extraordinary book, I shall be more than satisfied. The only edition which is worth while is Wheatley’s, in ten volumes, with portraits and a volume of Pepysiana. The smaller editions are apt to transmute Pepys into an ordinary humdrum and industrious civil servant.