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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2025
This final chapter investigates what Pepys’s famously frank and comprehensive diary does not say – and how readers have dealt, or failed to deal, with those omissions. The focus is on a selection of the people mentioned in Pepys’s papers whose lives are barely mentioned in official documents or who went otherwise unrecorded: his wife Elizabeth, women and girls in whom he had a sexual interest, and certain of the Black people who worked for him or lived near him. Pepys’s diary and his other surviving records contain valuable information on their lives – information which shows Pepys to have been a sexual predator and an enslaver. For a range of reasons, these are aspects of his life missing from his popular reputation. Getting the most from the diary, and using it to explore the lives of others, requires understanding and countering influential traditions about Pepys and how his diary should be read.
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