Annotations and comments

Louise Hudson has posted 501 annotations/comments since 9 November 2013.

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Second Reading

About Sunday 24 January 1663/64

Louise Hudson  •  Link

Bradford: "read a lecture to my wife upon the globes": does this suggest to anyone else that he has a book, from which he is reading extracts aloud, which provides information about foreign lands or heavenly bodies, rather than discoursing out of his own knowledge?

Couldn't he have done both? Using his own knowledge and gleaning more information from books, then writing it up in terms he thought Elizabeth would understand? Isn't that what pedagogues have done for millennia and do to this day? "See here, my dear . . ."

About Thursday 21 January 1663/64

Louise Hudson  •  Link

This is odd. The Wikipedia entry on James Turner [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J…] who I assume is the same James Turner Pepys is referring to--unless there was anothet similar James Turner of the same time. But the Wikipedia article says, he "appears to have died soon after 1685, although the exact date of his death is unknown." It says nothing about an execution. 1685 is long after Pepys says he witnessed his hanging in 1664. Can anyone straighten this out? Am I barking up the wrong tree?

About Monday 11 January 1663/64

Louise Hudson  •  Link

Even if laundry was done only once a month or once every six months in the Pepys household, I'll bet underclothes and bed linen were washed every time whether they needed washing or not.

About Sunday 10 January 1663/64

Louise Hudson  •  Link

Sam and Beth turned their noses up at Swan at Uncle Wight's on New Year's day and would have none of it. I thought at the time that they thought Swan was beneath them. I guess not.

About Saturday 9 January 1663/64

Louise Hudson  •  Link

Todd Bernhardt asks "What was he thinking?" We know what he was thinking!

Arby is probably right, it's a cold sore or a chancre. Let's hope it's herpes simplex and not syphillis, which was rampant then--and often fatal.

About Friday 8 January 1663/64

Louise Hudson  •  Link

Bryan M, you took the words right out of my mouth, though I always heard it as "The little dog laughed to see such sport
. . ."

The original Mother Goose Rhymes wasn't published until about 1780, though the individual rhymes were probably widely known before that.

About Wednesday 6 April 1664

Louise Hudson  •  Link

Such a sad story. I suppose Sam and Elizabeth could have taken the child in, but perhaps that was not the done thing. If Tom was the father, Sam and Elizabeth would have been the child's uncle and aunt. Pal would have also been the child's aunt. Instead the child probably died from neglect, as so many illegitimate babies did in those days. It would take nearly another 100 years for London to get its first foundling hospital (Coram's) not that countless babies didn't still die of neglect, but it helped a little. Coram's is now open to the public as a museum. Worth a visit.

About Sunday 3 January 1663/64

Louise Hudson  •  Link

"Lay long in bed, and then rose and with a fire in my chamber . . ."

I thought for a moment he was going to say "with a fire in my loins." As Emily Latella would say, in another century, "That's very different. Never mind."

About Thursday 31 December 1663

Louise Hudson  •  Link

I guess you could call us Pepys' peeps.

Peeps is slang for friends--the people that someone hangs out with all the time.

YourDictionary.

About Thursday 31 December 1663

Louise Hudson  •  Link

Glyn wrote: "Just for the record, 'old Pall' is currently 23 years of age."

Yes, about the same age as "old Liz" and six years younger than Sam.

About Friday 1 January 1663/64

Louise Hudson  •  Link

"She's reckoned worth 80,000l."

Sam might not care much if she has dirty hands.

"There was brought to table a hot pie made of a swan . . ."

I hear it tasts fishy and not very nice, which is probably why it is seldom eaten, especially these days,

About Wednesday 23 December 1663

Louise Hudson  •  Link

Anyone who has experienced the excruciating pain of a bad toothache knows that the sufferer often can't tell which tooth is the culprit or even which side it's on. Every tooth in the mouth hurts. One of the things it's so hard to know is the pain people suffered because modern dentistry had not been developed, along with other medical advances they had no access to in the 17th century. As Thomas Hobbes was to say only a few years later.
". . . the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

And pain, and often not nearly short enough.

About Saturday 19 December 1663

Louise Hudson  •  Link

Bradford on 19 Dec 2006
"God knows, the expectation of profit will have its force and make a man the more earnest."

As Mae West might have put it, "Godliness has nothing to do with it, dearie."

It was "goodness," not "godliness."

"Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie", was her response to the exclamation, "Goodness! What lovely diamonds!" in Night After Night (1932). She later used Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It as the title of her autobiography in 1953.

About Tuesday 15 December 1663

Louise Hudson  •  Link

". . . my cozen, Edward Pepys, was dead, died at Mrs. Turner’s, for which my wife and I are very sorry, and the more for that his wife was the only handsome woman of our name."

Yikes, was that as much sorrow over the death of a cousin that he and his wife could come up with?