Pepys’ House at Brampton
CHRISTMAS being the topic, suppose we call upon Mr. Samuel Pepys for testimony. The imperishable Diarist had as keen a faculty of enjoyment as any man who ever lived. He wrote one of the world’s greatest love stories—the story of his own zealous, inquisitive, jocund love of life. Surely it is not amiss to inquire what record be left as to the festival of cheer.
On seven of the nine Christmases in the Diary, Mr. Pepys went to church—sometimes more than once, though when he went twice he admits he fell asleep. The music and the ladies’ finery were undoubtedly part of the attraction. “Very great store of fine women there is in this church, more than I know anywhere else about us,” is his note for Christmas, 1664. But in that generously mixed and volatile heart there was a valve of honest aspiration and piety. One can imagine him sitting in his pew (on Christmas, 1661, he nearly left the church in a huff because the verger didn’t come forward to open the pew door for him), his alert mind giving close attention to the sermon of his favourite Mr. Mills, busy with sudden resolutions of virtue and industry, yet happily conscious of any beauty within eyeshot.
The giving of presents was not a large part of Christmas in those days. In 1662 Mr. Gauden gave Pepys “a great chine of beef and three dozen of tongues,” but this had its drawbacks. Pepys had to give five shillings to the man who brought it and also half a crown to the porters. Drink and food were the important part of the festival. At Christmas, 1660, Mr. and Mrs. Pepys, with Tom Pepys as guest, enjoyed “a good shoulder of mutton and a chicken.” This was a brave Christmas for Mrs. Pepys—she had “a new mantle.” We must remember that the fair Elizabeth, though already married five years, was then only twenty years old. Not all Mrs. Pepys’s Christmases were as merry as that, I fear. On Christmas, 1663, she was troubled by anxious thoughts——
My wife began, I know not whether by design or chance, to enquire what she should do, if I should by any accident die, to which I did give her some slight answer, but shall make good use of it to bring myself to some settlement for her sake.
Why haven’t the ingenious life insurance advertisers made use of this telling bit of copy?
Christmas, 1668, seems to have been poor Mrs. Pepys’s worst Yule, but perhaps it was only her natural feminine frivolity that caused the sadness. Samuel says:
Dinner alone with my wife, who, poor wretch! sat undressed all day, till 10 at night, altering and lacing of a noble petticoat.
This noble petticoat was perhaps to be worn at the play they attended the next day, “Women Pleased.” What a pleasant Christmas card that scene would make: Mrs. Pepys sitting, négligée, over the niceties of her needlework, with Samuel beside her “making the boy read to me the Life of Julius Cæsar.” But we do not “get” (as the current phrase is) Mrs. Pepys at all if we think of her as merely the irresponsible girl. For, at Christmas, ’66, we read:
Lay pretty long in bed, and then rose, leaving my wife desirous to sleep, having sat up till 4 this morning seeing her maids make mince-pies.
Ah, we have no such mince pies nowadays. Mrs. Pepys’s mince pies were evidently worthy the tradition of that magnificent delicacy, for at Christmas, 1662, when Elizabeth was ill abed, Samuel records—with an evident touch of regret—that he had to “send abroad” for one.
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Which brings us back to the Christmas viands. In 1662, besides the mince pie from abroad, he “dined by my wife’s bedside with great content, having a mess of brave plum-porridge and a roasted pullet.” We are tempted to think 1666 was Samuel’s best Christmas. Parson Mills made a good sermon. “Then home and dined well on some good ribs of beef roasted and mince pies; only my wife, brother, and Barker, and plenty of good wine of my own, and my heart full of true joy.” After dinner they had a little music; and he spent the evening making a catalogue of his books (“reducing the names of all my books to an alphabet”), which is probably the happiest task a man of Pepys’s temperament could enjoy.
Christmas Eve, 1667, was evidently a cheerful evening. Mr. Pepys stopped in at the Rose Tavern for some “burnt wine”; walked round the city in the moonlight, and homeward early in the morning in such content that “I dropped money in five or six places, which I was the willinger to do, it being Christmas Day, and so home, and there find my wife in bed, and Jane and the maid making pies.” The evening of that Christmas Mrs. Pepys read aloud to him—The History of the Drummer of Mr. Mompesson, apparently a kind of contemporary Phillips Oppenheim—“a strange story of spies, and worth reading, indeed.” It was only in 1660 that the Christmas cheer was a little too much for our Diarist. December 27, 1660, “about the middle of the night I was very ill—I think with eating and drinking too much—and so I was forced to call the maid, who pleased my wife and I in her running up and down so innocently in her smock.”
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It is painful to this tracker of Mr. Pepys’s vestiges to note that on Christmas Day, 1662, Bishop Morley at the Chapel Royal “made but a poor sermon.” The Bishop apparently rebuked the levity of the Court. “It was worth observing how far they are come from taking the reprehensions of a Bishop seriously, that they all laugh in the chapel when he reflected on their ill-actions and courses. He did much press us to joy in these public days of joy, and to hospitality; but one that stood by whispered in my ear that the Bishop do not spend one groat to the poor himself.” In 1665 we fear that Samuel indulged himself in church with some rather cynical thoughts:
Saw a wedding in the church, and the young people so merry one with another; and strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them.
One could continue for some space recounting the eupeptic Pepys in his Christmas merriments—so large an edifice of pleasing conjecture can be built upon even his slightest notes. One observes, for instance, that on December 27, 1664, when “my wife and all her folks” came “to make Christmas gambols,” Samuel left the party and went to bed. This was very different from his usual habit when there was fun going. He was annoyed also that on this occasion his wife revelled all night, not coming to bed until 8 the next morning, “which vexed me a little, but I believe there was no hurt in it at all, but only mirth.”
So we take leave of the Christmases of the Pepyses; 1668 is the last one recorded—the time when Elizabeth stayed at home all day altering her petticoat. After supper, the boy played some music on the lute, and Samuel’s mind was “in mighty content.” Let us think kindly of the good fellow; and not forget that he coined one of the enduring phrases of English literature—a phrase that is no such ineffective summary of all the lives of men—And so to bed.
