Book review: The Lost Diaries of Samuel Pepys has something for everyone

Author Jack Jewers markets the novel as when Bridgerton meets Sherlock

A painting by Hales from c 1695, of
Secretary to the Admiralty and diarist Samuel Pepys. Picture: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

• The Lost Diary of Samuel Pepys
• Jack Jewers
• Moonflower, hb €20.00

Samuel Pepys, like Gentleman Jack almost a hundred years later, wrote his diaries in code. Even when they were deciphered both writers, Pepys and Anne Lister, suffered from moral censorship, as their contemporary “translators” were too prudish to include sexual shenanigans.

In these, slightly more open times, representations of their work include all the language, even the foulest, and all the activities, even the most intimate. Jack Jewers, in his fictional The Lost Diaries of Samuel Pepys, has no scruples. He revels in such phrases as “bull’s pizzle” and delves into as many décolletés as are to hand.

One of the conceits in The Lost Diary of Samuel Pepys is that his wife, Elisabeth, cracked the hidden entries and discovered Pepys’s many infidelities: His visits to bawdy houses and his mistresses. She flounces out of his London home for an unknown address in Devon, abandoning him to the care of his young assistant, Will Hewer. Sam and Will immediately set off on an adventure which takes them to Portsmouth: They are about Charles II’s business, seeking out corruption and investigating the death, and post-mortem gelding, of Elias Thorne, their predecessor as the king’s emissary.

The two men put up in a hostelry wherein, coincidentally, there are useful staff and regulars to further their enquiries. And, of course, a pretty serving wench with a very low-cut bodice to enflame their blood.

Jewers’ rip-roaring yarn is also a bodice ripper: One in which the author makes no attempt to emulate the language of the period, other than reproducing juicy curses. So, the idiom is of today, a stylistic choice that does not seem to sit awkwardly in the world of tall ships and pirates, carriages, and highwaymen.

The Lost Diary of Samuel Pepys by Jack Jewers.

Pepys himself, is jealous of his younger companion, particularly in the matter of women, who stare longingly at Will’s youthful physique. Poor Sam is riven by pain in his groin and terrified by the blood-stained urine, pooling in his chamber pot, before being tossed onto the street below.

But his condition is so embarrassing that he determines to deny a friendly physician the opportunity of examining him or offering a cure.

Samuel Pepys, in real life, had stones in his bladder, a condition suffered by other family members also, and had to undergo an operation, without anaesthetic, to remove the objects.

In The Lost Diary Jewers decides, for some inexplicable reason, to provide a graphic description of this live-saving surgery. It is the stuff of nightmares, a worse torture than anything practised in the Tower of London, or the jails of Holland.

For, it is the time of the Dutch wars, and whilst Pepys and Hewer pursue, somewhat clumsily, their fact-finding mission, the shadow of invasion is looming on the horizon. That is the bigger picture but close at hand, and even more immediate, there are spies and assassins on the streets of Portsmouth in search of hand-to-hand combat. Some of the most belligerent fighters are a gang of women led by the glamorous, Charlotte de Vere.

Once again the shadow of Gentleman Jack becomes apparent. What exactly is the nature of the relationship between the lady and her girls? Jewers has one eye on a TV series, perhaps, since he markets the novel as Bridgerton meets Sherlock. There is something for everyone in The Lost Diary of Samuel Pepys: The diarist is not what he was in his salad days but there is life in the old dog yet.