Shadwell’s The Woman Captain.
No passages in the “Diary” are more valuable than those from which we can gather some idea of the manners of the time in which Pepys lived. It is chiefly, in fact, on account of the pictures of the mode of life among the men and women of the middle classes portrayed in those passages that the book has attained its immense popularity. History instructs, while gossip charms, so that for hundreds who desire to learn the chronicle of events, thousands long to hear how their ordinary fellow creatures lived, what they ate, what they wore, and what they did.
Pepys liked good living, and he was careful to set down what he ate, so that we are able to judge of his taste. This is what he calls a “pretty dinner”—“a brace of stewed carps, six roasted chickens and a jowl of salmon hot, for the first course; a tanzy and two neats’ tongues, and cheese the second.”[311] A good calf’s head boiled with dumplings he thought an excellent dinner,[312] and he was very proud of a dinner he gave to some friends, which consisted of “fricasee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of a lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie (a most rare pie), a dish of anchovies, good wine of several sorts and all things mighty noble and to my great content.”[313] He was very indignant when Sir W. Hickes gave him and his fellows “the meanest dinner (of beef, shoulder and umbles of venison, which he takes away from the keeper of the forest, and a few pigeons, and all in the meanest manner) that ever I did see, to the basest degree.”[314] Pepys liked all kinds of pies, whether they contained fish or swan, but there was one pie in particular that was filled with such a pleasant variety of good things that he never tasted the like in all his life.[315] On two several occasions he records his appreciation of a joint which sounds strange to modern ears—viz., boiled haunch of venison.[316] At special seasons he was in the habit of partaking of the diet appropriate to the festival: thus on Shrove Tuesday he ate fritters,[317] and at Christmas mince pies[318] or plum porridge,[319] plum pudding not having been at that time invented. The meat taken with these sweets was sometimes the orthodox beef, but it was more often something else, as on Christmas day, 1660, when it consisted of shoulder of mutton and chicken.
Breakfast was not formerly made an ordinary meal, but radishes were frequently taken with the morning draught. On May 2nd, 1660, Pepys had his breakfast of radishes in the Purser’s cabin of the “Naseby,” in accordance with the rule laid down by Muffet in his “Health’s Improvement” (1655), that they “procure appetite and help digestion;” which is still acted upon in Italy.
Ale-houses, mum-houses, and wine-houses abounded in all parts of London, and much money must have been spent in them. The charges seem to have been high, for Pepys relates how on one occasion the officers of the navy met the Commissioners of the Ordnance at the Dolphin Tavern, when the cost of their dinner was 34s. a man.[320] We are not told how much Sir W. Batten, Sir W. Penn, and Pepys had to pay when they ordered their dinner at the Queen’s Head at Bow, and took their own meat with them from London.[321]
There is abundant evidence in the “Diary” of the prevalent habits of deep drinking, and Pepys himself evidently often took more than was good for him. Men were very generally unfit for much business after their early dinners; thus Pepys tells of his great speech at the bar of the House of Commons that it lasted so long that many of the members went out to dinner, and when they came back they were half drunk.[322] Sir William Penn told an excellent story which exhibits well the habits of the time. Some gentlemen (?) drinking at a tavern blindfolded the drawer, and told him that the one he caught would pay the reckoning. All, however, managed to escape, and when the master of the house came up to see what was the matter, his man caught hold of him, thinking he was one of the gentlemen, and cried out that he must pay the reckoning.[323] Various drinks are mentioned in the “Diary,” such as mum (an ale brewed with wheat), buttered ale (a mixture of beer, sugar, cinnamon, and butter), and lamb’s wool (a mixture of ale with sugar, nutmeg, and the pulp of roasted apples), among other doctored liquors. Such stuff as this does not indicate a refined taste, and the same may be said when we find that wine was also made up for vitiated palates. On June 10th, 1663, Pepys goes with three friends to the Half Moon Tavern, and buys some sugar on the way to mix with the wine. We read of Muscadel, and various kinds of sack, as Malago sack, raspberry sack, and sack posset, of Florence wine, and of Navarre wine. Rhine wines must have been popular at this time, if we may judge from the numerous Rhenish wine-houses spread about the town. Amongst Pepys’s papers was found a memorandum on the dangers England might experience in the event of a war with France. Lord Dartmouth proposed that we might ruin the French by forbidding their wines, “but that he considers, will never be observed with all our heat against France. We see that, rather than not drink their wine, we forget our interest against it, and play all the villanies and perjuries in the world to bring it in, because people will drink it, if it be to be had, at any rate.”[324] What Lord Dartmouth thought to be impossible was practically effected by the Methuen treaty in 1703, after the signing of which French wines were driven out of the English market for many years by Spanish wines, and it was long thought patriotic to drink port.
Pepys liked to be in the fashion, and to wear a newly-introduced costume, although he was displeased when Lady Wright talked about the great happiness of “being in the fashion, and in variety of fashions in scorn of others that are not so, as citizens’ wives and country gentlewomen.”[325] The Diary is full of references to new clothes, and Pepys never seems so happy as when priding himself upon his appearance and describing the beauties of velvet cloaks, silk coats, and gold buttons. In 1663, he found that his expenses had been somewhat too large, and that the increase had chiefly arisen from expenditure on clothes for himself and wife, although, as already remarked, it appears that Mrs. Pepys’s share was only £12, against her husband’s £55.[326] In fact, our Diarist was at one time rather mean in regard to the money he allowed his wife, although afterwards he was more generous, and even gave £80 for a necklace of pearls which he presented to her.
One of the strangest attempts to fix a fashion was made by Charles the Second, who soon, however, tired of his own scheme. In 1661, John Evelyn advocated a particular kind of costume in a little book entitled “Tyrannus, or the Mode.” Whether the King took his idea from this book, or whether it originated in his own mind we cannot tell, but at all events, on the 17th of October, 1666, he declared to the Privy Council his “resolution of setting a fashion for clothes which he will never alter.” Pepys describes the costume in which Charles appeared on the 15th of October in the following words:—“A long cassock close to the body, of black cloth and pinked with white silk under it, and a coat over it, and the legs ruffled with black rib and like a pigeon’s leg, ... a very fine and handsome garment.” Several of the courtiers offered heavy bets that Charles would not persist in his resolution of never altering this costume, and they were right, for very shortly afterwards it was abandoned. The object aimed at was to abolish the French fashion, which had caused great expense, but in order to thwart his brother of England’s purpose, the King of France ordered all his footmen to put on the English vests.[327] This impertinence on the part of Louis XIV., which appears to have given Steele a hint for his story of Brunetta and Phillis in the “Spectator,” caused the discontinuance of the so-called Persian habit at the English Court.