Samuel Pepys: Yuppie of the 1600s

When one is to read a series of historical journal entries, they expect something profound, weighty, or exciting to bring greater relevance to the source material. In Anne Frank’s diary we learn of a young girl’s maturation under the sadistic Nazi regime. However, when delving into Pepys I was nowhere near prepared for what amounted to gilded banality accentuated by the occasional intrusion of history.

In reading the month of January 1665, I discovered an odd parallel, however. Pepys on multiple occasions details the fashion, monetary status, possessions, or appearance of his friends and colleagues in an exceedingly materialistic way, often focusing away from events to describe status. These repeated incidents reminded me of a book I had read and particularly enjoyed for its striking satire of 1980s consumer culture. The book, American Psycho, uses its egotistical, misogynistic, and insane main character to draw criticism towards the ‘Me’ era fostered by Reaganomics. One of the humorous details of this work is they way in which the main character has a ‘responsibility’ to detail everything by means of aesthetics. This is a prime example of that:

“He takes off the expensive looking Walkman…He continues talking as he opens his new Tumi calfskin attaché case he bought at D.F. Sanders. He places the Walkman in the case alongside a Panasonic wallet-sized cordless portable folding
Easa-phone (he used to own the NEC 9000 Porta Portable) and pulls out today’s paper.”

That excerpt comes from one of the first pages of the work, with the ellipsis removing explicit lines of dialogue from the business shark Yuppie, Timothy Price. What struck me so much about the relation between the two works is that the London of the 1600s is not that radically different from the Wall Street scene of the 1980s. All one would need to do is supplant Wall Street for Downing Street, Brokers for Accountants, CEOs for Royalty, Les Miserables for Vulpone, and Hooke’s Book of the Microscope for The Art of War.

The other parallel between the book, the 1980s, and Pepys’ diary is the general lack of compassion on the behalf of other human beings. Naturally that’s a bit of Hyperbole, but in one instance Pepys shows a complete disregard for the death of a relative, Dr. Tom Pepys, saying that he is little sorry for his passing. Pepys also has a severe disrespect for women, on one occasion, seeing several of them in one day and treating each as a social occasion.

In essence, the point I make deals with Pepys being such an introverted man that he hardly notices the city he lives in is burning around him, going so far as to return to bed during the heat blaze, confident it will not consume his home. He sees plays to seem important, his knowledge is mainly acquired through popular literature, and his profession, while admirable, has been the breeding ground for iniquity for at least several centuries. He was a young urban professional who lived simply to get ahead of the pack, and cared nothing of what he left behind; with the exception of his precious diaries.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,952325,00.html