I

Price has observed that ‘the shift from vocalization to silent reading’ has been ‘extensively discussed and intensively criticized’.Footnote ²⁹ Yet despite this attention, Sharpe is surely correct to point out that

The evidence of the diary is that Pepys's reading involves far more oral or aural reading than might have been expected. There are frequent examples of reading in the diary that are certainly oral or aural, while often those instances of reading which seem to be silent are ambiguous on closer inspection. For example, the diary has several entries recording Pepys reading when he was likely to be alone, as during his walks to Greenwich and Deptford. But do we have good reason to assume that he always read silently on those journeys? Or is our cultural prejudice in favour of silent reading so strong that we cannot imagine a reason to read aloud when alone? There are some cases where the context makes it all but certain that reading is silent. In this example, Pepys is travelling by coach: ‘Going out of the gate, an ordinary woman prayed me to give her room to London; which I did, but spoke not to her all the way, but read as long as I could see my book again.’Footnote ³¹ On another occasion, Pepys and his wife spend an evening engaged on different texts. Oral reading by one would presumably have distracted the other (although they may have read passages in succession, or have been in different rooms).Footnote ³² Reading aloud in bookshops might also have distracted other readers.

There are also many entries where Pepys does not specify that he was reading aloud and the context is ambiguous. These entries might lead present day interpreters to assume that he was reading silently. But this is not a safe assumption. Throughout the diary, Pepys uses the verb ‘to read’ to mean both ‘to read aloud’ (oral reading) and ‘to listen to someone else reading’ (aural reading). ‘Read’ is used for ‘reading aloud’ so often that it is clear that the ‘aloud’ was not usually considered necessary and only the context makes it clear that the text is read aloud:

There are many entries which suggest that reading when other people were present tended to mean reading aloud. Reading aloud could be a social obligation. The example given earlier suggests that Pepys's silent reading on the coach may have been defiant; the two ‘buts’ in this passage suggest that Pepys thought it unusual, even rude, to read silently in someone else's presence. This impression is confirmed by other accounts of reading on coach journeys as communal entertainment. A satirical text ‘made us good sport’ when Pepys read it to companions on a journey,Footnote ³⁷ while on a different journey a more sober book keeps the company entertained:

Here it would appear that the stranger was reading silently to begin with, but that courtesy demanded that she read aloud when asked.

Reading aloud, then, was commonplace and often even obligatory. It is rare for Pepys to use the word ‘aloud’ when describing reading, yet it is obvious from the context that reading aloud was what happened. There are even signs that it was not considered outside the bounds of normal behaviour to read aloud while alone in a chamber (although it was clearly being done to provoke on this occasion):

The ubiquity of reading aloud makes it unsurprising that ‘read’ often meant ‘read aloud’. Perhaps more striking is Pepys's habitual usage of ‘read’ in the past tense for texts he heard. In 1669, for example, when his weak eyesight made him heavily dependent on his wife for reading, he writes: ‘I spent all the afternoon with my wife and W. Battelier talking and then making them read, and perticularly made an end of Mr. Boyl's book of Formes, which I am glad to have over.’Footnote ⁴⁰

It is really Pepys, rather than Battelier, who ‘makes an end of the book’, as Battelier has not been present on the previous day when Elizabeth Pepys was reading the book to her husband. So ‘making an end of’ is applied to finishing a book whether Pepys is reading it himself or whether he is listening to someone else read it.

This equation of reading with listening shows how often Pepys read aurally (rather than orally or silently). In fact the greater part of the reading he did at home, and some of his reading elsewhere, was aural. Pepys may be untypical in that he spent the later years of the diary worrying about his poor eyesight, which he connected with reading. Yet even in the earlier years of the diary, aural reading is ubiquitous. The diary suggests, then, that ‘read’ may be as likely to mean ‘read orally’ or ‘read aurally’ as ‘read silently’ in seventeenth-century contexts.

There is a distinction in the diary between aural reading as a service from the speaker to the listener, and aural reading as a collective social event. Pepys gives abundant evidence that social hierarchy was crucial in deciding who would read what to whom in a given context. Usually, the person reading aloud is socially inferior to the listener and under an obligation to read what the listener chooses. This has been observed in other contexts; Sharpe describes Lady Anne Clifford hearing her servants read.Footnote ⁴¹ But Pepys gives a useful reminder of how far reading was determined by these hierarchies.

In some contexts, Pepys was the servant and therefore the reader. In 1667, for example, Pepys writes of one of his superiors in the navy office, William Coventry, that they discussed ‘my waiting upon him hereafter, it may be to read a chapter in Seneca in this new house which he hath bought’.Footnote ⁴² More often, however, Pepys was the master and his wife and servants were under an obligation to him. He often talks of ‘making them read’ or ‘getting them to read’ to him.Footnote ⁴³ On one occasion he even ‘hires’ his wife to read to him, emphasizing her inferior status (although the word does not imply payment in this context).Footnote ⁴⁴

In fact the diary offers only limited support for the idea that reading can ‘create a social bond, unite people around a book, foster convivial social relations, on the condition that it be neither solitary nor silent’.Footnote ⁴⁵ For Pepys, reading is more likely to reinforce hierarchy than to ‘foster convivial social relations’. I have found only twenty-four examples of reading in company where all are equal participants in the entertainment. In six of these, Pepys reads to his wife as a kindness, sometimes because she is ill. Twice he even chooses the text solely with reference to her tastes rather than his own (for example he buys and reads Scudéry's Artamène, ou le grand Cyrus (1650) for his wife).Footnote ⁴⁶ In another ten instances, Elizabeth Pepys is the reader, but it is clear that she is enjoying the event and not simply reading as a service. Sometimes she is the only reader mentioned, and sometimes it is unclear whether she is sharing the text with Pepys or with a third party or parties.

Other social readings show a preference for humour. Pepys spends an evening with some colleagues laughing at Lilly's prophecies.Footnote ⁴⁷ Some ballads read by Pepys at a funeral make the mourners ‘very merry’.Footnote ⁴⁸ And the unintended puns in a book of recipes provide ‘good sport’ for Pepys and some colleagues in 1663.Footnote ⁴⁹ More than one socially read text is described as ‘witty’.Footnote ⁵⁰ These include communal readings of political satire, which suggest that on some occasions social reading could act as a bond between social equals laughing at their superiors. There are also one or two more serious social readings. Pepys and Captain Cocke spend a ‘great deal of’ a day and evening in November 1665 ‘reading and discoursing over part of’ Stillingfleet's Originae sacrae.Footnote ⁵¹ But the preferred choices for social reading are dramas, romances, and comic texts.

II

Social readings in the diary therefore are heavily outweighed by readings where an inferior is obliged to read to a superior (usually Pepys). This suggests that Pepys's reading was conducted in a rather public setting, not just because he read with others, but because the reading was organized on the basis of rank. At this point it is worth defining the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’, since both terms can be contentious; Sherman has even recommended ‘a shift in vocabulary from “private” to “privy”’.Footnote ⁵²

In what follows, the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ are imagined at opposite ends of a scale measuring the number and status of people who knew what Pepys read or was thought to read. The location of reading, the degree to which knowledge of Pepys's ownership of certain books was public, and the degree to which book ownership and choice of reading mattered to other people are all important variables in determining how far his reading was public or private.

Identifying the locations for Pepys's reading can be difficult; many of the diary's entries do not say where the reading is occurring. But of those entries where the location is stated (or can be deduced) rather more than half are in the home. This might be considered a private location. But there are of course many reasons to think of the home as potentially a rather public venue for reading. Pepys's neighbours in Seething Lane were colleagues and patrons in the adjacent Navy Yard who visited Pepys's home, and important guests could arrive unannounced.Footnote ⁵³ The public nature of his home is illustrated by an episode in the 1670s when Pepys faced a fierce political attack in parliament from Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury accused Pepys of Catholic sympathies, claiming to have seen ‘somewhat, which he conceived to be a Crucifix’ in Pepys's chamber.Footnote ⁵⁴ It is likely, of course, that some rooms in the house offered more privacy than others. Unfortunately in many entries, it is unclear which room is being used. Of the entries I have found which specify a room in the house, most mention the ‘chamber’. This term was sometimes used by Pepys, often with a qualification such as ‘red’, for ‘bedchamber’. But where the context does not make it clear that a bedchamber is in question, it was more often used interchangeably with ‘closet’ and ‘study’ to indicate the room where Pepys kept his books.

Bed might have offered some privacy, but I have found only two entries that mention reading in bed (perhaps unsurprising given the danger and inconvenience of candles near beds).Footnote ⁵⁵ Insofar as the house allowed solitary reading, then, it was in Pepys's chamber. During the row with his wife discussed earlier he uses his chamber as a place to read aloud in order to demonstrate his indifference to her, implying that the room was more associated with his pursuits than hers. He does read with his wife in the chamber at least once, but mentions that this is because ‘through the badness of my eyes she was forced to read to me’.Footnote ⁵⁶ One of two texts which Pepys regarded with great tenderness, Osbourne's Advice to a son, was read in the chamber, implying a possible connection between tender feelings when reading and a withdrawal from the household.Footnote ⁵⁷ Reading that needed careful examination of illustrations, such as Hooke's Micrographia, is also associated with the chamber, again suggesting that the room was more free from distraction than the rest of the house (or perhaps simply that it had a desk).Footnote ⁵⁸ This impression is reinforced by the choice of the chamber for writing the diary itself.Footnote ⁵⁹ He used his chamber for the now famous instance of pornographic reading, after which he burned the text, implying that the room was chosen for the sake of privacy.Footnote ⁶⁰

Yet he still chose to read this text after dark, suggesting that the chamber could not guarantee solitude. And reading in the chamber is often associated with the early morning or late evening, again suggesting that the choice of this room alone was not enough to guarantee solitude.Footnote ⁶¹ Moreover, in its capacity as a library, rather than just a ‘chamber’, the room had a public character. Sherman has written that: ‘The private library and the solitary scholarly reader are less representations of early modern reality than rhetorical strategies by which early modern subjects negotiated their place in society.’Footnote ⁶² Sharpe has echoed this conclusion: ‘Scholars interested in the constitution of a public sphere in early modern England will need to follow carefully the investigations into those “private libraries” that were semi-public collections.’Footnote ⁶³

Pepys's library was in large measure a vehicle for his reputation. His love of finely bound books has been widely noted, with many entries describing his careful attention to bindings, his prolonged labours in organizing book presses, and his work in cataloguing the collection.Footnote ⁶⁴ These efforts suggest that the library, like other ‘private’ libraries of the time, was a stage for Pepys to display his wealth and learning to visitors.

If the home could not always guarantee solitude for reading, perhaps there were more private locations outside it? He sometimes read in his office, even during the evenings and on Sundays. On many of these occasions he was reading expensive books which belonged to the crown, and he may have chosen the office to keep the books safe. When he ordered Rushworth's Historical collections (1659) from the bookseller, for example, he resolved ‘I shall make the King pay for them’, and seems to have kept the book permanently in his office.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, he used the office for some of his own works as well (such as Love a la mode)Footnote ⁶⁶ so it may have offered some freedom from intruders. He may also have found solitude out of doors. It is telling that the text which inspired the most tender feelings in Pepys, Bacon's essay on fortune,Footnote ⁶⁷ was only ever read in outdoor locations, specifically boats, walks and gardens. Walking or being rowed up and down the Thames for his work may have provided his most private reading opportunities. It is not surprising then that when a setting is specified in the diary for reading, the most common ones outside the home are boats and walks.

Yet apart from a preference for solitude to read Bacon, and a liking for plays, there is little sense that Pepys reserved certain kinds of reading for his solitary journeys. For the most part he chose books which he also read in more public venues, often in social contexts, such as Davenant's Siege of Rhodes (1663). This might be seen as evidence that the public nature of reading at home did not in fact inhibit Pepys's choice of reading. On the other hand, solitude on its own was not enough to guarantee privacy in choice of reading. There is evidence in the diary that mere ownership of particular books, wherever they were read, was a public affair which could enhance or compromise the reader's reputation. Some books may have been bought for display alone. There is no sign, for example, of a desire to read the volume of Foxe's Acts and monuments he bought in 1668.Footnote ⁶⁸

There were other ways to use books to enhance his reputation. In 1661 he spent over four pounds on a Thesaurus graecae linguae as a gift for St Paul's school. The effect on his reputation was still evident two years later when the master, Mr Crumlum ‘did me much honour by telling many what a present I had made to the school, showing my Stephanus in four volumes, cost me 4l.10s.’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Pepys himself was approached as a patron by ‘Mr. Pagan Fisher the poett’ who promised him ‘a book in praise of the King of France with my armes and a dedication to me, very handsome’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Here it is not only the fact of the dedication which is important but its ‘very handsome’ appearance. Elsewhere he considers buying ‘the King's works’, newly printed in folio, as a present for his patron Lord Sandwich, a gift which would allow both Pepys and Sandwich to display their political principles and loyalty to the world in the form of a book.Footnote ⁷¹ In these examples, the diary portrays books as objects of display, public statements of the donor's or receiver's status.

Conversely, books had the potential to damage reputation. The pornographic work mentioned above is burned on completion ‘that it may not stand in the list of books’.Footnote ⁷² Books could give the wrong political impression. His copy of Selden's Mare clausum had a dedication to the Commonwealth. Having read and enjoyed the book, Pepys wrote that he was ‘ashamed to have [it] seen dedicate[d] to the Commonwealth’Footnote ⁷³ and had the title page changed at a bookseller, after which he declared it ‘very handsome’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Of a short and rather foolish book on building he writes: ‘not worth a turd, that I am ashamed that I bought it’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The shame here probably derives more from public embarrassment than silent self-reproach; the book was bought in the very public venue of a coffee shop. Booksellers were also sociable places where he often met acquaintances who could see his potential or actual purchases.Footnote ⁷⁶

Concern for reputation is also a likely explanation for his patterns of Sunday reading. Pepys has often been portrayed as indifferent to religion,Footnote ⁷⁷ but his observation of Sabbath reading suggests that he had some concern for religious propriety. There is little evidence of devotional reading, but there is a clear differentiation between Sunday and the rest of the week, both in what was read and how it was read. On one Sunday in 1661, he was ill and spent the day indoors: ‘God forgive me, did spend it in reading of some little French Romances.’Footnote ⁷⁸ He was not always so contrite about ‘frivolous’ Sunday reading: ‘So stayed within all day, reading of two or three good plays’;Footnote ⁷⁹ ‘We spent most of the morning talking, and reading of The Siege of Rhodes’;Footnote ⁸⁰ ‘He [Evelyn] read me part of a play or two of his making.’Footnote ⁸¹ But there was a strong preference for reading connected to religion on Sundays, as well as for household Bible readings. In 1660 and again in 1663 he writes of Sunday Bible readings:

These are among the few explicit references to Bible reading. But there are hints that Bible reading of this kind was so regular that it was not worth recording, in the same way that the diary does not record the majority of Pepys's meals. For example, he writes of his new Biblical concordance that it ‘is a book I hope to make good use of’Footnote ⁸⁵ while he is put off a new Bible because, ‘It is like to be so big, that I shall not use it, it being too great to stir up and down without much trouble, which I shall not like nor do intend it for.’Footnote ⁸⁶

More than half of the entries on Fuller's works of religious history record Sunday reading. Stillingfleet's works appear in only two entries, both of them Sundays.Footnote ⁸⁷ The single entry on Walton's life of Hooker (1665) occurs on a Sunday.Footnote ⁸⁸ It is clear that Pepys liked some of these booksFootnote ⁸⁹ but it is also clear that his choice of Sunday reading was constrained by propriety. There are also signs that Sunday reading tended towards substantial and difficult works chosen for personal and professional advancement, such as those of Rushworth, Rycaut, Selden, Wilkins. and Boyle.

Sunday reading, then, gives another example of Pepys's reading choices being private in principle but in practice influenced by public concerns, with propriety influencing reading behaviour in the home as well as outside it. This pattern recalls Woolf's account of the reading of the Chester registrar, Henry Prescott, at the start of the eighteenth century:

III

Historians of reading have noted the pragmatic character of reading in case studies from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries. Grafton and Jardine show Harvey's reading of Livy to be motivated by the ways he can use the text.Footnote ⁹¹ Woolf shows Dudley Ryder's reading, in the eighteenth century, to be constrained by time and utility.Footnote ⁹² Jardine and Sherman describe scholarly readers of the 1590s who were ‘providing a highly specific (though not yet institutionally regularised) form of private service for politically involved public figures’.Footnote ⁹³ Pepys's reading was also dominated by utilitarian motives, and above all by the desire for personal advancement. This motive led him (repeatedly) to Bacon and Osbourne for basic reassurance on how to get on in the world.Footnote ⁹⁴ Often it led him to practical works on the navy, law, or trade, such as those of Selden and Bland.Footnote ⁹⁵ Even reading which seems to be unconnected to Pepys's personal or professional needs was very often chosen with an eye to his standing in the world. A work on recent history, like Rushworth's Historical collections Footnote ⁹⁶ for example, was read not for entertainment, but studied at length and great care: ‘It is a book the best worth reading for a man of my condition, or any man that hopes to come to any public condition in the world that I do know.’Footnote ⁹⁷ The reason for this praise is revealed in a later entry, where he carefully studies Rushworth's account of the fall of Buckingham ‘in order to the fitting me to speak and understand the discourse anon before the King’.Footnote ⁹⁸ An anthology of parliamentary speeches from the reign of Charles I was ‘a very good book for good speeches and arguments of law’ (Pepys would need both skills for crucial speeches in 1668 and 1669).Footnote ⁹⁹ Heylin's Cyprianus anglicus was ‘worth reading, as informing a man plainly in the posture of the Church, and how the things of it were managed with the same self-interest and design that every other thing is, and have succeeded accordingly’ (not perhaps the message that Heylin intended).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Burleigh's letters in the time of Queen Elizabeth have ‘a very fine style at this day and fit to be imitated’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

He also read books which were not directly of use in this way, but which were recommended by powerful men. Lord Sandwich's man presented Pepys with Hooker's Laws of ecclesiastical polity ‘very handsomely bound’ and Pepys wrote that he would read it ‘with great pains and love for his sake’.Footnote ¹⁰² He plans to buy Montaigne's essays when he hears them ‘so much commended’ by ‘my Lord Arlington and Lord Blany’, while his resolve to buy Fulke Greville's life of Sidney arose from hearing ‘my Lord Crew’ read from it.Footnote ¹⁰³

In addition, Pepys chose texts in order to cultivate his acquaintance with their authors. A Mr Bland who hoped to win his support for a campaign on trade law sent Pepys ‘three or four printed things’, one of which Pepys took the trouble to read.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Cowley's poems were a gift from the poet's brother.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Though sometimes unimpressed by the works of his friend Evelyn, he took the trouble to read them nonetheless.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ His devotion to Fuller's works may have received some initial encouragement from acquaintance with the author.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The sociable nature of the booksellers’ shops meant that buying books might very often mean meeting authors, which in turn could influence the choice of texts. In 1668, he meets with ‘Fournier, the Frenchman that hath wrote of the Sea-navigation’ and reports that ‘I could not but buy him.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ On another occasion he encountered Sir John Denham at a bookseller's where Denham allowed him to see some soon to be published verse.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Chance meetings of this kind illustrate the density and range of the social network that bound authors and readers, and the degree to which readers might choose texts in order to cultivate or oblige authors.

Where texts were not written by an acquaintance or recommended by a superior, Pepys desired to esteem what the world esteemed. This is plainest in his struggles with Butler's Hudibras, a text he disliked intensely, but would not give up because it was popular with ‘all the world’. When he first bought it he sold it on quickly because ‘I am ashamed of it.’Footnote ¹¹⁰ But not long after, he was disconcerted to find that the poem's popularity persisted and: ‘It being certainly some ill humour to be so set against that which all the world cries up to be the example of wit – for which I am resolved once again to read him and see whether I can find it or no.’Footnote ¹¹¹ A few months later he had ‘tried by twice or three times reading to bring myself to think it witty’, but he never learned to like it.Footnote ¹¹² The battle with Hudibras alerts us to the degree of diligence Pepys applied to what seems at first glance like leisure reading. He was determined to keep up with Boyle's works though he clearly found it a struggle, writing of the Hydrostatical paradoxes (1666) ‘I will take much pains to understand him through if I can’,Footnote ¹¹³ of the Experiments and considerations touching colours (1664) ‘I can understand but little of it’,Footnote ¹¹⁴ and of The origine of formes and qualities (1666) that he was ‘glad to have [it] over’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The motivation for this slog was surely the desire for respect at the Royal Society, which he joined in 1665.

This preference for what was admired by the world means that even those texts which seem to be chosen purely for pleasure may bear witness to Pepys's guiding principle of utility. On the very rare occasions when he read lyric poetry it seems to have been with specific aims, such as calming a busy mind or indulging a flirtation.Footnote ¹¹⁶ His occasional readings of romances were often a treat for his wife rather than himself.Footnote ¹¹⁷ He was very fond of plays and his delight in Tuke's intricate plotting for The adventures of five hours (1663) seems to have been quite disingenuous. Yet even his readings of plays show some signs of a motive beyond simple pleasure. The afternoon he devoted to memorizing Hamlet's famous soliloquy, for example, was surely an investment in future conversational resources.Footnote ¹¹⁸ And his favourite writers were all conventional choices for the upwardly mobile, as Battigelli's account of recommended reading at the time suggests: ‘By 1672, William Ramesey, physician in ordinary to Charles II, was recommending Dryden together with Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher to would-be gentlemen readers in The Gentlemans Companion.’Footnote ¹¹⁹

IV

So far I have discussed three features of the ‘older model’ of reading: the role of oral/aural reading; the degree to which reading was public; and the extent to which it was utilitarian rather than recreational. The fourth feature mentioned in the introduction is the intensive nature of reading in the past, compared to the extensive reading of later periods. The contrast is based on the range of texts encountered by the reader, as well as the care taken while reading and the frequency of rereading. It is fair to describe Pepys as an extensive reader insofar as he encountered a large number of titles. In this respect he forms a striking contrast to less well-off contemporaries like Bunyan.Footnote ¹²⁰ But in other respects he is closer to the ‘intensive’ readers described by Hall.Footnote ¹²¹ One measure of the relative intensiveness of his reading is the extent to which he browsed in texts. Browsing here is defined as reading brief snatches in succession from different parts of a book in an undirected way, perhaps in order to form a general impression of the text. A number of scholars have depicted seventeenth-century readers as at least occasional browsers. Dobranski, for example, has considered a hypothetical seventeenth-century reader spending time in a bookseller's shop ‘coming across’ copies of Milton's work.Footnote ¹²² Love also states confidently that: ‘The practice of browsing in booksellers’ shops was well established and would have compensated for the severe lack of public libraries.’Footnote ¹²³ Woolf quotes Henry Prescott ‘turning’ a book, and two other readers ‘perusing’, arguing that this ‘suggests a casual and desultory rather than an intense style of reading’.Footnote ¹²⁴ Randall Ingram has uncovered fascinating depictions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers in books of epigrams:

Yet Pepys's diary offers little support for the suggestion that seventeenth-century readers browsed. Dobranski's hypothetical browser, who learned of authors' identities from browsing through title pages, does not resemble the Pepys who picked up literary gossip at the booksellers and knew or knew of almost every author he read. It is true that there are some examples of Pepys acquainting himself with a text or texts under pressure of time. For example, on one visit to the bookseller in 1663 he has a large sum to spend and calls for twenty books in ‘two or three hours’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Yet even this encounter would give him an average of six to nine minutes on each text. This would, of course, not permit a reading of the whole text. But there is no reason to assume that Pepys was calling for texts which he had never previously come across. On the contrary, he often bought books for his library which he already knew, and here he may have been inspecting their appearance as much as their contents. Neither is there any reason to believe that Pepys did not use the six or nine minutes to read a single excerpt from each text carefully, rather than reading several excerpts superficially. Certainly reading for ‘the isolated episode, the portable anecdote’ is a mode of reading common in seventeenth-century readers, and one which is very different from browsing.Footnote ¹²⁷ Finally, the episode with twenty books is unique in Pepys's recorded trips to booksellers. On other visits he spent considerable lengths of time on single texts, often as a prelude to the book's purchase at a later date (a pattern which Woolf identifies in other readers).Footnote ¹²⁸ He spent ‘an hour or two’ on Fuller's history of the Church of England on one occasion, and another hour on a lavishly illustrated Dutch text.Footnote ¹²⁹

On other occasions Pepys's time-restricted readings could be surprisingly thorough. In 1666 he has ‘only a sight’ of a banned pamphlet, yet his response suggests he has become thoroughly acquainted with it.Footnote ¹³⁰ It is true that ‘only a sight’ in this context is likely to mean that he was unable to buy the book and take it home, rather than glancing at it quickly. Nonetheless, the reading was time-constrained yet thorough. On a different visit he ‘meets with’ a text and again seems to have acquired an impressive command of its contents.Footnote ¹³¹ These entries suggest that we should not assume that ‘only a sight’ or ‘met with’ meant to a seventeenth-century reader what they might mean to a twenty-first century one. In addition, browsing, however it is defined, is likely to arise during opportunistic readings, when the reader comes upon a text unexpectedly and knows it cannot be removed. In such cases the only way to gain a knowledge of the whole text is to sample widely but briefly. But opportunistic reading of this kind is very rare in the diary. I have found perhaps fifteen examples, including reading in bookshops, of texts encountered on visits to houses, and an unexpected opportunity to read the Bible during a sermon. It is worth remembering, of course, that places such as coffee houses housed many ephemeral writings which Pepys was certain to have encountered. Nonetheless, however amply London may have been provided with printed and manuscript texts, the diary's direct evidence suggests that they were not so abundant that Pepys often found himself killing time with an unexpected book.

Pepys's terms for reading overlap with those used by other readers in the seventeenth century. An example of this is ‘look over’, also identified by Love.Footnote ¹³² Pepys uses a wide range of such terms, including: ‘fell to reading’ and ‘fell a-reading’; ‘made an end of’; ‘read over’; ‘read in’; ‘looked over’; ‘read of’; and ‘read out of’. It is tempting to take expressions like these at face value. Woolfe, for example, concludes that the use of ‘turning’ and ‘perusals’ ‘suggests a casual and desultory rather than an intense style of reading’.Footnote ¹³³ This may be true, but Pepys's example enjoins caution in interpreting these terms. It is not clear, for example, whether Pepys uses ‘read over’ when the text is being reread, when it is being given a careful first examination or both. But the term does not seem to imply, as a present day reader might assume, a swift and superficial reading aimed at completing the text in one sitting:

To ‘look over’ might also be thought to imply a swift, selective or superficial reading. Yet there are signs that Pepys uses the expression for books with a high proportion of images, such as maps, and it may imply that Pepys really did look at the books as material objects rather than reading them as texts. Here for example he is looking at an expensive and lavishly illustrated text at a booksellers: ‘Spent an hour looking over Theatrum Urbium.’Footnote ¹³⁶ The amount of time spent on one book here – an hour – may suggest careful examination rather than idle browsing. The expression is used elsewhere in bookshops, pictureshops, and libraries.Footnote ¹³⁷ Again, this might mean that he is browsing through books. But it might also mean that he is examining the books as objects, sometimes as potential additions to his library: ‘Thence to the Exchange, that is, the New Exchange, and looked over some play-books, and entend to get all the late new plays.’Footnote ¹³⁸

There are tantalizing suggestions that ‘read in’ had a specialized meaning. Sometimes the term seems to be used for reading an extract or extracts from the text without attention to the whole text or the sequential order of extracts: ‘After dinner to read in Rushworths Collections about the charge against the late Duke of Buckingham.’Footnote ¹³⁹ Again, it is impossible to be certain what exactly the term implied, or even if it was simply a synonym for ‘read’. But there is enough evidence to suggest that it may be unwise to assume we know exactly what these expressions meant. ‘Fell to read’ and ‘made an end of’ are of course less uncertain; their usage may suggest that Pepys used the diary to record when he began and when he finished a text, and therefore that he thought it important to complete certain texts. ‘Fell to read’ therefore may not neccessarily mean ‘starting to read a text wherever the reader left off on a given occasion’ but ‘started the text for the first time’.

The evidence from Pepys on intensive reading is patchy and uncertain. He encountered a high number of texts compared to many of his peers. But a careful examination of his terminology offers little unambiguous evidence of browsing. His terminology also suggests that it may be worth revisiting evidence for browsing by other readers in the period. The epigrammist's preface quoted by Ingram may be a special case; it is easy to imagine the most dedicated of intensive readers needing only ‘two lines’ to judge the quality of a book of epigrams. But where other seventeenth-century readers are concerned, it may be that expressions like ‘turn over’ do not imply browsing.

V

I have argued that the case of Pepys supports an account of reading history where reading in earlier periods was more oral, more public, and more utilitarian than in later periods. On intensive versus extensive reading, the evidence is inconclusive, with Pepys encountering many titles, in accordance with the extensive model, but showing few definite signs of the browsing that might also be expected in an extensive reader. How did these features of his reading affect the way he interpreted texts? An examination of his critical remarks on texts suggests that the dominance of oral and aural reading, and the public nature of his reading, in that he read texts by authors he knew, or knew of through other influential readers, and his utilitarian motives for reading were important influences on his interpretations.

Many of the diary's assessments use the same critical assumptions as a present day reader might: ‘I reading a play of Flechers, being A wife for a month – wherein no great wit or language.’Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Here the text is assessed independently of the author. It is assumed that the reader of a comedy expects wit and perhaps something out of the ordinary in the kind of language used. However, many other entries suggest that for Pepys an assessment of the text was very often an assessment of the author as a man (or, very rarely, woman). Here texts are a kind of script that can only be interpreted if their context of delivery is imagined, for example a public address to a great man. This recalls Erasmus's advice on letter writing, repeated by Pepys's beloved Osborne. A letter writer should ‘consider what is fit to be said, were the Party present, and set down that’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ From this point of view, a text is to be admired if its performance by the reader or author would be deemed successful in observing the social proprieties with respect to a concrete audience and suitably moving or instructive as the case may be. This is surely related to the importance of reading aloud in his enjoyment of texts.

The public nature of his reading meant that Pepys knew many of the authors he mentions and so it is perhaps unsurprising that he referred to some living authors by title, such as ‘Mr Graunt’. Even the dead Francis Bacon was ‘my Lord Bacon’ while another highly prized author, Francis Osborne, was ‘my father Osborne’. But the degree to which the text is judged as if it were a verbal performance by the author is even more obvious where Pepys is not impressed. Of George Mackenzie's Religio stoici, Pepys writes not that it is well or badly written, but ‘In some places he speaks well, but generally is but a sorry man.’Footnote ¹⁴² John Heydon, author of a satire on Osborne's Advice to a son, is condemned as ‘a simple Coxcombe’ on the evidence of his text being ‘nonsense’.Footnote ¹⁴³ In assessing a work on music, again it is the man he thinks of rather than making an independent assessment of the book; in 1668 he searches for ‘Marsenne in French, a man that hath writ well of music.’Footnote ¹⁴⁴

This blend of text with author may explain the dominant role of propriety in Pepys's judgements of texts. Rather than casting himself as an ideal reader, taking on a neutral or non-specific social identity, he read in his actual role of well-educated and upwardly mobile servant of the crown. Consequently, he was irritated by texts which addressed an audience in a socially inappropriate way. This is evident in Pepys's assessment of John Bland's Trade revived (1660). Pepys writes that ‘being no scholler’ Bland ‘knows not the rules of writing orderly’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ On examination the text is very well ordered by present day standards. Indeed its organization of ideas could almost be described as bulleted.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Why did Pepys find it disordered and unscholarly? Part of the answer may be in the epistle dedicatory, where Bland declares ‘This discourse is not published in expectation of reward or applause from any’. Instead it is dedicated ‘to all such and only to such as do really desire the prosperity of this Nation and its Commerce’. Sharpe has pointed out that dedications were ‘not simply, or even primarily, a matter of financial support’:

Pepys had been petitioned by Bland to read the text and clearly saw him as inferior in rank to himself. Bland's bold refusal to dedicate the work to anyone, therefore, can be seen as audacious cheek. In this light, the work's stark opening and organization, immediately setting about his argument without introducing himself first, adds to the offence. The ‘disorder’ is the impropriety of a man of low rank addressing a group of gentlemen and courtiers in person, demanding their attention for his subject without any opening remarks. A vulgar and sycophantic life of the queen mother was ‘so sillily writ that we did nothing but laugh at it’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Descartes's account of music, like Bland's work on trade, is clearly but baldly organized around abstract topics, with no preamble to conciliate the audience: ‘I understand [it] not, nor think he did well that writ it, though a most learned man.’Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Dryden's Defence of an essay of dramatick poesie is a response to Howard's attack on the essay. Dryden goes to great pains to appease Howard, to an extent which strikes Pepys as improperly self-abasing. His verdict is: ‘mighty silly in behalf of Howard’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Tobias Gentleman's Englands way to win wealth has ‘some things good’ but is ‘very impertinent’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Again, the impertinence seems to be that Gentleman, despite his name, was a ‘Fisherman and Marriner’ who presumes to address high-ranking and educated readers. He instructs his noble dedicatee that ‘you shall not thinke your selfe disparaged’ and admits his low rank with little apology: ‘I am no Sholler, but borne a Fishermans Sonne by the Sea-side, and spending my youthfull time at Sea about Fisher affaires, whereby now I am more skilfull in Nets, Lines, and Hookes, then in Rethorick, Logicke, or learned bookes.’Footnote ¹⁵² Henry King's sermon on the anniversary of Charles I's death is ‘mean’, not it seems because of the quality of argument or style in themselves, but because the concrete context of preaching to the court on such a topic demands greater zeal than King exhibits, even when read later in an entirely different context.Footnote ¹⁵³

Those texts which Pepys did approve tend to open with an indirect and meandering approach to their subject, just as a polite public speaker wins his audience's attention rather than demanding it (a rhetorical method known as captatio benevolentiae).Footnote ¹⁵⁴ An example of the indirect opening is seen in Fuller's Church-history of Britain: ‘I have sometimes solitarily pleased my self, with the perusing and comparing of two places of Scripture.’Footnote ¹⁵⁵ John Davies's The history of Algiers and its slavery (1666), also praised by Pepys,Footnote ¹⁵⁶ opens in this way, and explicitly states the importance of propriety in written address: ‘I flatter my self with a presumption of your pardon, for the roughness of this Address, especially when I reflect on the many favours I have receiv'd from your Honour since the happiness of my first being known to you.’Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Another text praised by Pepys was also explicit on the author's duty to ‘woo’ the reader rather than plunge straight into the topic: ‘Kind Reader, I should have much to say to thee, and not a few Ceremonies to Complement thee withal, if two Considerations did not make me resolve to hold my peace, and abstain from that courtship, which would become a Preface.’Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Davila's History of the civill warres of France was highly praised by Pepys, and also featured a decorous indirectness in approaching the subject, both in the dedication and throughout the work.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Further examples can be seen in the openings of Dugdale's Origines juridiciales, Glanville's Some philosophical considerations, and Greville's life of Sidney.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Pepys himself records the closeness of text to author, and the relationship between written address and an address to an assembled group of varying ranks, when he notes that the members of the House of Commons kept their heads uncovered, as though the king himself were present, while a declaration was read aloud by his gentleman of the bedchamber.Footnote ¹⁶¹ And public settings like parliament or Whitehall, common subjects for paintings and engravings, provide useful models for the sequences of epistles and dedications that open many seventeenth-century works.

Pepys's interpretation of texts, therefore, cannot be separated from his reading practices. The importance of oral or aural reading, a literary culture where authors and readers are lodged at different points in the same social network, social ambition as a motive for reading, the degree to which even ownership of texts is a public affair which reflects on reputation – these create a reading culture where it is easy to see a text as a script, which can be assessed not by its formal qualities in relation to a neutral ‘assumed reader’, but by its propriety in a concrete context of actual writer and specific audience.

This article has attempted to locate Pepys on a tentative chronology of reading which has emerged from earlier studies. Further research is needed to establish how far he represents his period. In the introduction I contrasted Pepys with two other possible types of reader: the villager sharing ballads or chapbooks with friends and the courtier, confident of his or her social position, reading for pleasure not advancement. Pepys is an exceptionally well-documented source, but it may be possible in future to establish how common his kind of reader was, and whether other kinds of reader were numerous enough to influence the way texts were written and interpreted. As it is, the case of Pepys should give us a greater sensitivity when interpreting all kinds of seventeenth-century texts, from brief notes to dramatic poems. We should be more alert than we usually are to the personal quality of the relationship between the reader and the text, where the text is understood as a performable script enacted by the reader ideally impersonating the author.