Sunday 11 June 1665

(Lord’s day). Up, and expected long a new suit; but, coming not, dressed myself in my late new black silke camelott suit; and, when fully ready, comes my new one of coloured ferrandin, which my wife puts me out of love with, which vexes me, but I think it is only my not being used to wear colours which makes it look a little unusual upon me. To my chamber and there spent the morning reading. At noon, by invitation, comes my two cozen Joyces and their wives, my aunt James and he-cozen Harman, his wife being ill. I had a good dinner for them, and as merry as I could be in such company. They being gone, I out of doors a little, to shew, forsooth, my new suit, and back again, and in going I saw poor Dr. Burnett’s door shut; but he hath, I hear, gained great goodwill among his neighbours; for he discovered it himself first, and caused himself to be shut up of his own accord: which was very handsome.

In the evening comes Mr. Andrews and his wife and Mr. Hill, and staid and played, and sung and supped, most excellent pretty company, so pleasant, ingenious, and harmless, I cannot desire better. They gone we to bed, my mind in great present ease.

38 Annotations

First Reading

Terry Foreman  •  Link

No mention of chapel -- great place to show off a new suit -- nor prayers.

JWB  •  Link

From "The general bill of mortallity", printed by Francis coles:

The week starting June 11, 1665 the number buried in London & Liberties: 558 total, of the plague 112.

http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL…

dirk  •  Link

Ralph Josselin's diary:

"God good in our health and peace, the plague increases to 43. this week, the lord good in our wonderful success against the Dutch, good in the word, the season dry, profaneness common, piety very rare."

dirk  •  Link

Evelyn's diary:

"I came away: having staied there [= at Deale] the 11: where the Mini[s]ter preached on 37 Psal: 21. 5, Pomerid: 15 Jam: 17. 18."

dirk  •  Link

"ingenious, and harmless"

I'm not sure I would like to be described that way...

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"the Mini[s]ter [at Deale] preached on 37 Psal: 21. 5 [21 The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again: but the righteous sheweth mercy, and giveth. 5 Commit thy way unto the LORD; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass.],
Pomerid [p.m.]: 5 [sic] Jam[es]: 17. 18 [ 17 Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months. 18 And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit.]

***

CGS  •  Link

Very clever but would not use their brains to hurt anyone, they did not have a mean streak or ill bone.

"...most excellent pretty company, so pleasant, ingenious, and harmless, I cannot desire better...."
harmless OED:

3. Free from guilt; innocent. arch.
4. Doing or causing no harm; not injurious or hurtful; inoffensive, innocuous.

1653 WALTON Angler i. 16 The most honest, ingenious, harmless Art of Angling.

Kenth  •  Link

True to his personality, Sam is more concerned that his wife doesn't like his suit than he is for his friend's coming down with the plague. It brings to mind some of the characters from Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire Chronicles who followed Sam a couple of centuries later. Life goes on.

andy  •  Link

"Ingenuous" I think, not "ingenious" :

a quick google shows me

http://dictionary.reference.com/b…

1. free from reserve, restraint, or dissimulation; candid; sincere.
2. artless; innocent; naive.
3. Obsolete. honorable or noble.

[Origin: 1590–1600; < L ingenuus native, free-born, honorable, frank, equiv. to in- in-2 + gen- (base of gignere; see ingenious) + -uus deverbal adj. suffix; see -ous]

pity Dr Burnett, unsung local hero suffering alone.

andy  •  Link

I out of doors a little, to shew, forsooth, my new suit, and back again,

Nice Whistle n'flute, Sam!!

Michael Robinson  •  Link

Josselin’s diary: "profaneness common, piety very rare.”

Now, music with "excellent pretty company, so pleasant, ingenious, and harmless, I cannot desire better. They gone we to bed, my mind in great present ease." But yesterday "in case it should please God to call me away, which God dispose of to his glory!" Dr. Burnetts' act of courage and ultimate human decency ... "ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias." (Juvenal X 166)

Tony Eldridge  •  Link

No Andy, I'm sure he means "ingenious", ie clever, talented, quick witted. Apart from the conversation, they were playing together and maybe singing four-part harmonies. And a pleasant contrast to the duller relatives at lunchtime.

Robert Gertz  •  Link

"...I out of doors a little, to shew, forsooth, my new suit..."

Oh, Lord...Bess sighs, watching her strutting peacock head off.

"Nice suit, Mr. P!..." faint call from Burnet house, slightly opened shutter.

"Very nice gesture of yours, Doctor..." polite nod.

"Ah, nephew..." Uncle Wight, pausing in mid-step... "I was just on my way to your home." (At least I am now after seeing you.) "Permit me to shield my eyes from such brilliance."

"Uncle...Like the color?"

"Ravishing..." fond smile. Dear Lord, looks like something I saw Ned Kynaston once wearing on the stage.

Oh, I do believe tis time to storm Castle d'Elisabeth once again...

C.J.Darby  •  Link

What? no church and the plague raging in the parish. Obviously not just a "thunderstorm" christian.Perhaps the singing in the afternoon consisted of a selection of psalms.

Bradford  •  Link

"They gone we to bed, my mind in great present ease."

The sort of remark one looks back on later and gives thanks that one did not know what was coming.

Sjoerd  •  Link

Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year:

"Till this week the city continued free, there having never any died, except that one Frenchman whom I mentioned before, within the whole ninety-seven parishes. Now there died four within the city, one in Wood Street, one in Fenchurch Street, and two in Crooked Lane. Southwark was entirely free, having not one yet died on that side of the water."

http://www.mastertexts.com/Defoe_…

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"no church and the plague raging in the parish"

When even influenza rages seasonally, church is actually a bad place to be.

CGS  •  Link

"...which my wife puts me out of love with, which vexes me, but I think it is only my not being used to wear colours which makes it look a little unusual upon me...."

Ah! "there thee be my little bantam cock, strutting around like some aging rooster, my little peacock" sayeth one Bess.
Florus in De Qualitate Vitae, III warns one that when woman flatters , she has sumet up her sleeve, and Bess be 'onest or be it miffed at not getting her silk outfit.

"Dulce de labris loquuntur, corde vivunt noxio."

speaking sweetly now obnoxious later.

JWB  •  Link

With all the hubbub about Hater being a fanatique on the 5th, we missed this: "The Great Plague of London struck in the summer of 1665, and the Theatre Royal, along with all other public entertainment, was shut down by order of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London on 5 June. It remained closed for 18 months until the autumn of 1666, "

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thea…:

Robert Gertz  •  Link

"Bess! Mother!! Look what a damned cabman did to my ferradin suit. Thread pulled and it's brand new. Silly lout! Oh..."

"Sam'l...Some one just went by with a cart, crying 'Bring out yer dead.' And he wasn't doing a version of Monty Python from the future."

"Oh...? Well, that's bad too."

Australian Susan  •  Link

"...which my wife puts me out of love with, which vexes me, but I think it is only my not being used to wear colours which makes it look a little unusual upon me...."

It is this sort of comment which makes Sam's Diary such a wondrous thing - he puts in these remarks which really show him in not such a good light, but enables us to have a well-rounded picture. And so human. Bess obviously slightly miffed she did not get any new clothes to celebrate the victory over the Dutch (which was more of a drawn match than an away win anyhow) and she seems to have the same reaction to the suit as one of our daughters when her father bought a pink shirt!

Michael Robinson  •  Link

" ... shut down by order of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London"

Both theaters were outside the City boundaries specifically to prevent regulation by the Lord Mayor etc. If such an order had been made it would have to have been by the Crown, both companies were started and functioned under a Royal license.

[Any strangulated sounds emanating from your speakers as you read are those of a middle aged pedant harrumphing and grumping at Wikpedias ability yet again to include statements that are clearly wrong on their face -- this time in an article to which the editors have awarded a star.]

For similar reasons the theaters of Shakespeare's day were sited in Southwalk along the south bank in the so called 'liberty of the clink' neither part of the City's Bridge Ward nor the surrounding county.

Jessica A. Browner, 'Wrong Side of the River: London's disreputable South Bank in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.'
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/jou…

JWB  •  Link

Pedant
I see Wikipedia's article has been corrected. Kudos(one star).

Michael Robinson  •  Link

Wikipedia’s article has been corrected. Kudos(one star).

Thanks - not a pedant for nothing, the real work was in correcting and expanding the footnote!

Brian  •  Link

“…which my wife puts me out of love with, which vexes me, but I think it is only my not being used to wear colours which makes it look a little unusual upon me….”

Perhaps he looked something like this??

http://www.nga.gov/feature/artnat…

(this portrait is a "favorite" of my 12 year old daughter . . .)

Second Reading

Sasha Clarkson  •  Link

"not being used to wear colours "

So, the Commonwealth/Protectorate Puritan fashions seem to have persisted amongst the middle classes until now?

StanB  •  Link

Harman, his wife being ill
Interesting I would have thought any sign of any type of illness close by would have them scampering for the hills or Oxford as Charles did.
I wonder how common ailments were viewed at that time given the heightened tension with Plague being present were they merely dealt with as they would normally be, or at the slightest sniff or a cough did panic ensue.
It reminds me of the Spanish flu pandemic which killed nearly 100 million people in 1918 and 1919 and to a lesser extent the recent Ebola breakouts in Africa and previous to that the Aids epidemic of the early eighties and the amount of scaremongering that went on I would imagine given Sams small world at that time the panic was quite high

Sasha Clarkson  •  Link

Ha ha Sarah - you're right!
I wonder if that suit met with an "accident" after one of Sam and Bess's fights? :D

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

StanB ... cramps were considered an illness, and put women to bed for days ... abscessed teeth were the 4th leading cause of death. While I agree that the plague would have had me heading off to my country estate now, I don't think their assumption would be that every ill person was infected.

StanB  •  Link

Thanks for that Sarah, I only ask because given most of the time Sams world occupied a very small space and within living memory of 1665 just 30 years previous in 1636 there was a large plague outbreak up in Newcastle that wiped out thousands.
Also, of course, London had a plague outbreak in 1603 and obviously The black death that ravaged Europe, Asia, and North Africa 1346–1350 that accounted for 75–200 million
So it occurs to me that while the majority of the common uneducated people were probably unaware historically of previous outbreaks how aware were the people of Sams elevation/status of just how devasting these outbreaks were did they have the numbers at that time were they known facts

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

I get that, StanB, and you and I might think/react that way. But Pepys didn't. And tempting as it is to rewrite the diary, we shouldn't. I suspect Pepys didn't panic because he knew Philip Harmen would have been locked in his house with a large red X on the door if his wife had had the plague.

The Josselin diary entries tell us that the country folk were well informed about the arrival and growth of the plague in London. That to me is the value of these entries, plus the weather report, of course. The news went quite quickly from London to the wilds of Essex.

StanB  •  Link

Thank's for that Sarah,
I suppose sometimes we forget to look at this diary and Sams life through the values and mindset of the 17th-century perspective..............

StanB  •  Link

^^^ woohoo^^^
That was my 100th Annotation since joining this wonderful site

Liz  •  Link

Still living with our own plague: COVID-19. Unlike in SP’s time, we now have vaccines. The older population and front line health/care staff are being inoculated first. Interesting to see self-isolation taking place in SP’s time. De Foe says it was imposed - as we are currently.

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