Kate loveman. Samuel Pepys & His Books: Reading, Newsgathering & Sociability, 1660-1703.

Abstract

Kate Loveman’s Samuel Pepys & His Books is a convincing study of the reading of one of the best-known figures from the Restoration world. In this, it is atypical where it means to be exemplary. Pepys was obsessive about books, reading, book collecting, and his library. His diary entries on his books are familiar. The bequest of his library to his old college at Cambridge, Magdalene, or to Trinity College, in default of his instructions for the care of his library being followed, was so hedged around with directions that the whole is more than its parts. This is in some ways misleading: Pepys secured the future of his library not as such but as how he wanted it to be. Loveman is quite clear about this: Pepys’s heir, his nephew John Jackson, had to spend 21 years preparing his uncle’s library for its new home according to the instructions which Pepys left. The Pepysian Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, is not Pepys’s library, as such, but an idealized and carefully modelled version of Pepys’s library containing the books he left behind. That said, using the Library and a very varied number of sources—including the famous and very familiar diary—Loveman manages to shed new light on Pepys’s reading, drawing on sociology and histories of reading. Many books on the history of reading are illuminating of a very small spot. Loveman’s study illuminates a whole culture—or at least tries to. In this, it is by and large successful, with the caveats that, yet again, we have the reading of one individual, albeit refracted through the reading practices of others known by him and to whom he was known.