The late seventeenth century saw a revolution in man's thought, as Newton and others began the scientific study of the universe around them. At the same time a shrewd young civil servant in London began to observe, with something of the same dispassionate curiosity, the strange object around which, for him, the universe revolved - himself. For ten years, from 1660, Samuel Pepys kept one of the most remarkable records ever made of a human life. With astonishing candour and perceptiveness he described his ambitions and speculations, his professional successes and failures, his pettinesses and meannesses, his tenderness towards his wife and the irritation and jealousies she provoked, his extra-marital longings and fumblings, his coolly critical attitude towards the king he served and his watchful adaptation to the corrupt and treacherous society in which he lived.

Claire Tomalin traces Pepys's youth before the diary began, the poor tailor's son, the schoolboy who rejoiced at the execution of Charles I, the aspiring clerk working for Cromwell's senior officials and his transformation into a royalist who helped escort Charles II back to England and the throne. She illuminates his ability as an administrator and his greatness as a writer, and she follows the extraordinary switchback career of triumphs and disasters that continued for three decades after the diary had ended. Finally she shows how he made sure that the diary would be preserved for posterity, and how it took three centuries for the full text to be printed.

As one of our foremost literary biographers - the author of such acclaimed books as The Invisible Woman, Mrs Jordan's Profession and Jane Austen - Claire Tomalin brings a brilliantly fresh and original eye to a truly remarkable life.

Pepys grew up with death at his elbow.   Against the odds he became a survivor, outliving his brothers and sisters.  In the Diary his responses to death vary from the briskly matter of fact on learning of the passing of his uncle Robert, whom he had known since he was a boy – ‘Sorry in some respect; glad in my expectations in another respect’ – to a mournful mediation on hearing the church bells toll for a dark-eyed girl he knew only from seeing her in church.  He liked to call her ‘my Morena’ – my Moorish girl – to himself, and he learnt that she was suffering from a wasting illness.  When she died he honoured her with a gracefully tuned elegy: ‘This night was buried, as I hear by the bells at Barking church, my poor Morena – whose sickness being desperate did kill her poor father; and he being dead for sorrow, she said she could not recover not desire to live, but from that time doth languish more and more, and so is now dead and buried.’  Another local girl he observed, ‘crooked’ but not ugly, killed herself by taking poison, saying before she died that she did it  ‘because she did not like herself nor anything she did a great while’.  Pepys had a writer’s response to these stories: their subjects lived in his imagination, and in that private place he allowed himself to be melancholy or appalled by their fates.  Yet when his cousin Anthony Joyce was thought to have killed himself, he was chiefly concerned to find out what might happen to the property, which the law assigned to the king if suicide were established.

As a survivor himself, he was generally more interested in the survivors than the dead.  When the earl of Southampton died, Pepys’s first reaction was to describe the porter at the great man’s gate in tears; he felt sorry for him and tipped him on the practical grounds that he as not now likely to pick up many more tips: ‘he hath lost a considerable hope by the death of this Lord, whose house will be no more frequented as before’.  Later he reported on the remarkable self-control shown by the earl, and how he had prepared himself to die by ‘closing his own eyes and setting his mouth, and bidding Adieu with the greatest content and freedom in the world’.  Southampton had died in the agonies of the stone, so Pepys had particular reason to admire this stoicism; he had nothing to say about his spiritual condition.  Another case, in which a colleague who was also a courtier died suddenly in the prime of life, led him to look at the court’s response:  ‘I find the sober men of the Court troubled for him’ and yet not so as to hinder of lessen their mirth, talking, laughing, and eating, drinking and doing everything else, just as if there was no such thing – which is as good an Instance for me hereafter to judge of Death, both as to unavoydablenesse, suddenness, and little effect of it upon the spirits of others, let a man be never so high or rich or good but that all die alike, not more matter being made of the death of one then another and that even to die well, the prise [worth] of it is not considerable in the world.’  What interested him was not the dead man and his possible after-life, but the reactions of the living and his reputation in this world.

‘Immaculately well done. Tomalin has managed to unearth a wealth of material about the uncharted life of Samuel Pepys’
Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

‘Fabulously entertaining’ 
Sunday Times

‘Sex, drink, plague, fire, music, marital conflict, the fall of kings, corruption and courage in public life, wars, navies, public execution, incarceration in the Tower: Samuel Pepys’s life is full of irresistible material, and Claire Tomalin seizes it with both hands. Fast, vivid, accessible’ 
Hermione Lee, Guardian

‘A rich, thoughtful and deeply satisfying account. It takes us behind and beyond the diary – which means that, on finishing it, we can reread the diary with greater pleasure and understanding then ever before’ 
Noel Malcolm, Evening Standard

‘In Claire Tomalin, Pepys has found the biographer he deserves. Her perceptive, level-headed book finally restores to the life of the diarist its weight and dignity’ 
Lisa Jardine, New Statesman

‘A great achievement and a huge pleasure. A vivid chronicle of contemporary history seen through the all too human preoccupations of this ordinary and extraordinary man’ 
Diana Souhami, Independent

‘A cast of hundreds, from Nell Gwyn to Titus Oates, from baronets to bawdy-house keepers, from pimps to puritans, and roisterers to royalists, populate Tomalin’s teeming canvas. Her book must be among the best written on the subject’ 
Keith Waterhouse, Daily Mail

‘She writes with beautiful clarity and there is about this biography a wisdom, an unforced feeling that the biographer has a sense of the way life is’ 
Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

‘Gripping, sensitive, insightful … thoroughly researched and extremely readable. Tomalin gives us a full life beyond what is covered by the diary and she especially brings her subject to life. A highly entertaining and informative book which gives us a thorough picture not just of a fascinating man, but of his times’ 
Simon Heffer, Country Life

‘Tomalin’s book should sit beside the peerless ten-volume edition of the Diary’ 
Max Hastings, Sunday Telegraph

‘Marvellously entertaining, The early part of her book … is so well done that you sometimes forget Tomalin is having to write it all and that Pepys’s narrative has not yet begun’ 
John Carey, Sunday Times

‘Fascinating, exemplary, scrupulous research’ 
Joanna Griffiths, Observer

‘Delightfully readable … the perfect preparation for reading the Diary itself. It brings alive all the other characters in the Diary and explains their relationship to Pepys and to each other’ 
Ferdinand Mount, Spectator

Claire Tomalin is the author of six highly acclaimed biographies and her books have won her numerous prizes: including the Whitbread First Book Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. In Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self she turns her attention to one of England's most remarkable diarists. For ten years, from 1660, Samuel Pepys kept one of the most significant records ever made of human life. In Samuel Pepys Tomalin traces Pepy's youth and the extraordinary triumphs and disasters that continued for three decades after the diary ended; finally showing how he made sure that the diary would be preserved for posterity. Here, Claire Tomalin talks to penguin.co.uk about Pepys' womanizing ways, the importance of the Diary and how she nearly lost her eyesight combing through all the material available on Pepys' life.

Until now all your biographical subjects have been women, and they've been late 18th century or 19th century figures - what then attracted you to Pepys?
I know I've been called a feminist biographer - and I am a feminist - but in fact I have written about many men: Shelley, Dickens, William IV, Sheridan, D.H. Lawrence, to name a few. It's true that apart from Shelley these were not the title figures in my books. I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures, health, work, marriage, politics, and so on.

What are the principal biographies of Pepys published before yours, and how would you characterize them?
The first great Pepys scholar was John Tanner, born in 1860, who devoted much of his life to studying material about Pepys and editing Pepys' letters as they became available. He wrote a useful short biography, and on his death in 1931 all his papers were handed to Arthur Bryant, who used them as the basis of his famous three-volume biography of Pepys published in the 1930s. Bryant was a master of narrative, but his pace is leisurely and the third volume ends fourteen years before Pepys' death. Richard Ollard's one-volume life of 1974 is another fine book. My feeling was that, since both Bryant and Ollard concentrate on Pepys' public life as a naval administrator, there was room for a book that put more emphasis on his personal life and above all on his achievement as a writer.

The popular image of Pepys is that of a womanizing civil servant whose main achievement was the reforming of the Navy? How fair is that?
Pepys did pursue a lot of women. He is amazingly frank about this in the Diary, and also allows us to see that his success with women was pretty limited. He was a civil servant (before they were so named) and he gave more energy to naval administration than to womanising. He became a dedicated professional, working very long hours and organising a team of assistants to assist him in his work. He spoke effectively in the House of Commons for more shipbuilding. He persuaded Charles II to set up examinations for lieutenants. He effectively set up the Navy List, and he instructed captains to keep journals of their voyages. He did not take on the worst abuse, the system of pressing. In the history of the Royal Navy, Pepys is an important figure. But his greatness lies in the writing of the Diary - a unique and extraordinary achievement.

In many ways he's obviously an attractive character, but the way he changed political sides and the way he appeared to get rich from his public duties are likely to be problematic for us today. Is this just a case of applying contemporary values and expectations?
Changing political sides was as hard to avoid in England in the 17th century as in (say) Czechoslovakia in the 20th. A hard core of heroic figures stuck to their allegiances through thick and thin, but most people trimmed to fit the times. Pepys began as a republican and continued to have severe misgivings about Charles II throughout the period of the diary, but his career depended on serving the King and his brother and heir, James, Duke of York, also Lord High Admiral. James appreciated Pepys' talents and promoted his career - with the result that Pepys gave him personal loyalty. Hence the curious spectacle of Pepys as a Jacobite from 1689, on refusing to take the oath to William III.

How would you describe his attitude to and behaviour with women? Do you think he had a happy and fulfilling marriage?
Pepys' account of marriage is one of the great themes of his Diary because it shows how fluid his feelings were - something I believe to be true of most of us, although not often acknowledged. He was both very happy with Elizabeth and very unhappy - proud of her beauty, her wit and artistic skill, tormented by jealousy, irritated by her careless housekeeping, frightened of her reaction should she discover his pursuit of other women. They shared a taste for reading, for shopping, for ordering new clothes and doing up the house. Their sexual relations were never good: she had a medical condition that affected things badly from the start. Children would have changed things between them, but there were none, a sadness to Pepys and probably to her, although he does not say so. None of her letters have survived, but now and then he lets us hear her voice, naming her favourite dressing gown which she liked to lounge about in 'my Kingdom', and calling him a 'prick-louse' (because he was the son of a tailor) or a 'false, rotten-hearted rogue' when she was angry. He hit her occasionally, but she fought her corner very successfully.

He's most famous for his Diary, of course, but this wasn't published until over one hundred years after his death, and then not fully for another one hundred and fifty years. Could you give a brief publishing history of the Diary.
The Diary was a secret one, written in shorthand, but the shorthand was a well-known one, and Pepys interspersed it with many words in longhand. He made careful arrangements to preserve it after his death. It has been transcribed three times, the first time by a Cambridge scholar set to the task by Magdalene College, to whom Pepys had bequeathed his library. John Smith was paid £200 and took three years on the task, which he did well, but his work was cut and garbled by Lord Braybrooke, who was given it to edit. The second transcription, by Mynors Bright, was made in the 1870s, and this time four-fifths of the text was published, provoking criticism because of indecent passages. The third, and this time complete, transcription by William Matthews and Robert Latham, was published from 1970, after the Obscene Publications Act had been passed, and the publishers had taken legal opinion. So it took from 1660 until 1970 for the first page of the Diary to be printed as Pepys wrote it.

The Diary only covers one decade, and he lived for another thirty years. Why do you think he stopped writing it?
Pepys himself explains that he is giving up the Diary because he fears he is going blind. He said that giving it up was rather like dying. He did not go blind, but he never took up the Diary in the same way again (there are snatches of diary keeping at later periods of his life, but they are thin stuff). My feeling is that the death of Elizabeth and his professional success and rise in social status removed two of the stimuli that had kept the Diary going. And once having set it aside he may simply have quailed at the thought of the energy and commitment needed to take it up again. Writers, including the greatest, do sometimes just decide to stop writing - Shakespeare, for example.

What precisely is the value of the diary? Is it a historical document chiefly, or do you believe it has literary values beyond that?
I regard the Diary as one of the great works in the English language, taking its place alongside the greatest - Chaucer, Dickens, Shakespeare. It's a million and a quarter words long, it opens a window into London society during an extraordinary decade in which the nation changed its politics and everyone had to adjust; it tells us more about the men and women of the time than anyone else has done; and it explores the inner nature of its writer with unparalleled frankness. You can't ask for much more than that. Pepys was not just jotting down what had happened that day - he selected and shaped his material like any artist.

You write in some detail about his life after the Diary. What sort of evidence/documentation did you have to work with?
For Pepys' later life there are stacks of letters, his own and those of contemporaries, in many libraries and in private possession; parliamentary records; State papers; wills; bank accounts - Hoare's bank in Fleet Street has a lot of Pepys material; Royal Society records; Christ's Hospital records; picture material and maps; medical records - and so on. I sometimes thought I was going to lose my eyesight following Pepys - but it was worth it. What a man he was.

WINNER OF THE 2002 WHITBREAD BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BBC4 SAMUEL JOHNSON AWARD 2003

'Immaculately well done. Tomalin has managed to unearth a wealth of material about the uncharted life of Samuel Pepys' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

'Fabulously entertaining' Sunday Times

'Sex, drink, plague, fire, music, marital conflict, the fall of kings, corruption and courage in public life, wars, navies, public execution, incarceration in the Tower: Samuel Pepys's life is full of irresistible material, and Claire Tomalin seizes it with both hands. Fast, vivid, accessible' Hermione Lee, Guardian

In Samuel Pepys, The Unequalled Self, Claire Tomalin has taken a new approach to Pepys and his diaries. For the first time Tomalin reveals the personal side of Pepys - the married man, the private man, the man who sought out pleasure and meditated in print on his own reactions, the man who cherished secret ambitions, both financial and political. Through this portrait Claire Tomalin has brought to life the 17th Century, one of the most exciting periods in English history in which society was turned upside down not once but twice, the monarchy, the House of Lords and the established church got rid of and then brought back.

Claire Tomalin also looks at both Pepys's early and later years. Few biographies have focused on the importance of the first twenty-seven years of his life living as a poor London tailor's son, before being given his chance as a scholarship boy making his way under Cromwell and the Commonwealth, helped out by cousins who were supporters of Cromwell. Additionally, she reveals fascinating information about the end of his life - his long-term relationship with his mistress, Mary Skinner, and his struggle to change his will to include her.

Tomalin examines Pepys as a writer and argues that his diaries are one of the great texts of the English language. It is the first to be written in demotic speech and come close to Shakespeare in its range of characters. Claire Tomalin also tells the story of the diary itself - how Pepys preserved it and how it had 'sleeping beauty' years before it was discovered and then slowly emerged.

Claire Tomalin has worked in publishing and journalism all her life, becoming literary editor first of the New Statesmanand then of the Sunday Times. She has written five highly acclaimed biographies most recently JANE AUSTEN: A LIFE. Her books have won the Whitbread First Book Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the NCR Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. Claire Tomalin lives in London.