Todd Bernhardt

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Annotations and comments

Todd Bernhardt has posted 946 annotations/comments since 8 January 2003.

Comments

First Reading

About Sunday 14 May 1665

Todd Bernhardt  •  Link

"my mother having her new suit brought home, which makes her very fine"

Nice to hear that Mom has gotten a chance to get decked out, and that her son is pleased by it...

About Saturday 13 May 1665

Todd Bernhardt  •  Link

"By which one charitably understands that he has worn the same outfit repeatedly during the cold weather, not that he’s never changed the very items all that time."

Robert's amusing scenario notwithstanding, I think we can safely assume that this means he hasn't yet "shifted" (har har, get me, making a 17th century pun) to his spring wardrobe from his winter one. I don't think he's talking about a single outfit.

About Saturday 13 May 1665

Todd Bernhardt  •  Link

"going home bespoke the King’s works, will cost me 50s., I believe"

Could someone please remind me what this is?

About Saturday 13 May 1665

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Why such a trouble? I think it was because it was a new toy, and he was constantly playing with it while his inner Puritan scolded him about his pride re: his expensive plaything...

It's funny, during the times when I've been without a watch, it's really bothered me for a week or so, then I've found I'm perfectly fine without it. Funny how you can learn to do without things that, when you have them, you think you can't live without...

About Friday 12 May 1665

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I wondered about that, too, Aussie Sue, but it occurred to me that perhaps these clerks were only trying to make sure the fees they were responsible for got paid, rather than trying to skim their bit of cream off the top (if I recall correctly, while a clerk, Sam never spoke of doing this).

That said, then, what are "the King's fees"?

About Monday 8th May 1665

Todd Bernhardt  •  Link

re: "potential conflict of interest?"

You betcha! "and if I can get money by it, which I believe it will, I shall take some of it upon me"...

About Sunday 7 May 1665

Todd Bernhardt  •  Link

In modern-day mores, Phil. But I think Michael is perfectly correct in pointing out that this was not standard practice back in Browne's day. One could even make the argument that he was providing a public service by translating and compiling other authors' work, to make them more generally available to the English population.

We should always be careful when judging people and practices from Sam's time through the morals and conventions of our own. I prefer to simply observe (and be fascinated by what is different, and by how much has remained the same).

Awesome link, Jeannine! Totally on-topic, IMO...

About Shorthand

Todd Bernhardt  •  Link

Another excellent annotation from Michael Robinson related to this subject, found at http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1…
________________

L&M on ‘Punctuation’ etc., (I have removed the discussion of their particular textual choices and solutions to problems) vol i, p lxiv:-

"The normal marks of punctuation are seldom used in the manuscript, probably because some of them are used instead as arbitrary symbols for common words: the colon and full-stop are thus employed to represent ‘owe’/’oh’ and ‘eye’/’I’ respectively. Except for the extremely rare use of a comma (which is used a few times to separate words in series), the only normal punctuation marks found in the manuscript are parentheses (the practice with these is not always the same as ours), new lines for paragraphs (usually flush with the left hand margin, but sometimes indented), hyphens in compound words and compound names (although hyphens are restricted to longhand and even there they are used only seldom), apostrophes for possession (these too are rarely used and only in longhand), colons and full-stops for some abbreviations, dashes and full-stops occasionally in sums of money, full stops and oblique strokes after some title headings, etc., a rarely used square bracket for marking off a quotation. Pepys’s standard stops, however, are two devices for indicating a break in a statement or the completion of it. These are a pyramids of three dots used in the earlier part of the diary, and ticks which Pepys begins to use at 16 March 1667."

L&M continue to discuss: 5.’Abbreviations and Corrections’; 6.’Numerals’ and dating in the diary entries; 7.’Mr. and Mrs.’; 8.’Capitals and hyphens in place names’; 9.’Pepys’s Corrections’ (@ p.lxvi):

"In addition, Pepys has often added words, phrases and sentences. These he inserts over a line or in the margins, though sometimes he crowds them in to the spaces between paragraphs and daily entries ... Other peculiarities of the manuscript ... are the sections that Pepys, for various reasons, writes in extremely small characters or in very large ones...

11. ‘Obscurities.’ Pepys’s shorthand is almost always extraordinarily neat and clear; even the passages written in minute characters are all very distinct. Sections written when his eyes were very painful are large and commonly less precise than elsewhere, but they, too, give little trouble to the editor.
Nevertheless, a few shorthand forms are illegible, or almost so, because of blots or poor writing. His longhand, which is less clear than his shorthand, also contains a few doubtful readings. And there are occasions where the inefficiencies of Shelton’s stenography makes for ambiguity."

About Saturday 6 May 1665

Todd Bernhardt  •  Link

Don't worry, Aussie Sue, she's got the staff to torture during these long, long evenings...

But seriously folks, I am struck by the universality of Sam's feelings here. Who hasn't felt satisfied by "being tired ... but it's a *good* tired" when they've gone to bed after a particularly productive day?

About Sunday 30 April 1665

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re: exclamation points

JWB, if I remember correctly, almost all punctuation in the Diary is from the editors, so in this case I'm pretty sure the exclamation points are Wheatley's...

About Shorthand

Todd Bernhardt  •  Link

From Michael Robinson's excellent annotation of 29 April 2008, found here:
http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1…
_____________________

This is a quick selection of the major relevant portions of a lengthy discussion, of 20 p. in L&M Vol. I, on various questions about and arising from transcription from shorthand and editing the text for modern printing.

In L&M The shorthand is discussed in Vol. I, pp. xlviii - liv, at p li:-

"Its essence is a brief way of representing the letters of the ordinary alphabet ... the shorthand substitutes a set of brief signs, a few of them cut-down forms of the ordinary letters, but the majority straight lines and simple curves. These symbols serve for constants in all positions and for vowels that occur at the beginning of words. For vowels in the middle or at the end of words two devices employed. A medial vowel is represented by placing the following consonant (disjointed and written small) in five positions above the preceding consonant. These five positions represent a, e, i, o, u, and these serve for both long and short vowels and also for diphthongs..."

and the editorial decisions, liv - lxvii, at p. lvii:

"The problem that presented itself therefore was whether the conventional spelling to be used for the shorthand in this text should be our own or something similar to the spelling used by Pepys and his contemporaries. The possible objection to the first alternative is that it conflicts with our decision to print, so far as the abbreviations allow, Pepys’s longhand as he wrote it. It conflicts moreover with our decision to retain Pepys’s grammar, to keep his ‘you was’, ‘he begun’, ‘ill-written’ and so on, rather than to change them to ‘you were’, ‘he began’, and ‘ill-written.’ Unless Pepys’s grammar and longhand were also modernized, to represent his spelling entirely in modern fashion would obscure a lot of details important to many scholars. To spell in seventeenth-century style (where it can be said to exist) is, however, not only difficult but leads to scholarly tampering. This is what a previous editor, H. B. Wheatley, tried to do, and the result is a free-hand antique, in which nothing can be relied upon. The trouble is that seventeenth century spelling was extremely variable and very inconsistent; the same words could be spelled in present-day fashion and also in one often two or three earlier styles...

From these considerations, it was decided that the basis of the spelling of the shorthand in this text should be present-day British usage. The procedure, although necessary, is not free from defect. Even though Pepys’s own variants include almost every modern spelling, uniform spelling is quite alien to his habit; to adopt it entirely would, moreover, be subject to objections we have already mentioned.

It is fortunate, therefore, that a desirable mixture, a moderate kind of seventeenth-century inconsistency, can be achieved in a systematic fashion and with sufficient accuracy. This is made possible by the phonetic spelling in Pepys’s shorthand ... Thus the general principle adopted for spelling shorthand forms in this edition was that ordinarily the spelling was to be in present-day British style, but when the shorthand indicated a seventeenth-century variation in spelling, and when that spelling indicated a seventeenth-century pronunciation and a spelling that Pepys himself used, it should be spelled in the appropriate non-modern style. This compromise has certain merits. The variant spellings, both of longhand and shorthand words, combine to give the text an appropriate seventeenth-century coloration. And since every one of the variants is authentic, it is to be hoped that the text provides historical linguists with evidence they may need..."

About Wednesday 26 April 1665

Todd Bernhardt  •  Link

As if this horse wasn't already dead enough, please allow me to beat it a bit more...

Pedro, I don't think anyone is saying that the topic should not be discussed. I enjoy your annotations, and welcome all comers. I think it's simply a matter of casting our discussions in clear terms. When we're speculating, we should say so.

We've all been on a five-year journey together, and feel we know Sam and his world pretty well. It's easy to forget sometimes that, despite the wonders of the Internet and the skill of the annotators in adding to our perspective about Sam's time, there is still so much that we don't know that it's just about impossible to draw definite conclusions about people's motivations, states of mind, circumstances, morals, context, etc. All we can do is guess. Hopefully what we do is make an educated guess, backed by what evidence we can gather, but in the end it's still a guess, and we should simply be careful to cast it as such.

About Thursday 27 April 1665

Todd Bernhardt  •  Link

Wow, interesting point, Paul. I didn't realize this was a possibility -- I assumed the shorthand had a one-to-one correlation with letters or groups of letters.

One thing I wonder, though -- given L&M's extensive research and desire to be true to the Diary in all ways, mightn't they have then rendered the Diary in Sam's "intended" spelling? Could someone with access to L&M tell us if they write at all about the translation process and whether spelling was an issue for them?

About Wednesday 26 April 1665

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"Again, of course, it’s necessary to separate what we definitely know from what we believe."

I think this is what LH is (justified in) protesting about. It's fun to speculate. We all do it, and it's all good, as long as it's noted as speculation. However, when people talk about something as a given when there is no hard evidence behind it, that crosses the line and creates controversy.

About Friday 28 April 1665

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"and when they rose, my Lord Chancellor passing by stroked me on the head..."

I know it's the 17th century equivalent of an "attaboy," but I can't help thinking, "good doggie"!

About Thursday 27 April 1665

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"my Lord Treasurer now begins to be scrupulous, and will know what becomes of the 26,000l. saved by my Lord Peterborough, before he parts with any more money"

Could someone please give a quick synopsis of this problem, and why it concerns Sam? Thanks in advance.