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by dcminter·1y ago·view on hn ↗
A few years ago I downloaded some of the Gutenberg version [0] of Pepys' diary which is a transcription of the Wheatley edition which contains this rather odd paragraph in the introduction:

"It has now been decided that the whole of the Diary shall be made public, with the exception of a few passages which cannot possibly be printed. It may be thought by some that these omissions are due to an unnecessary squeamishness, but it is not really so, and readers are therefore asked to have faith in the judgment of the editor. Where any passages have been omitted marks of omission are added, so that in all cases readers will know where anything has been left out."

When I read that I looked it up in Wikipedia [1] and it turns out that it's hilariously disingenuous and it absolutely was an "unnecessary squeamishness" (i.e. censorship of the "dirty" bits) that motivated the omissions.

I therefore picked up a cheap copy of the Latham & Matthews complete paperback edition and am rather slowly making my way through that. It's in eleven volumes - one for each year plus a supplementary overview. I'm still on 1662 but it's very entertaining in short doses. This edition, as well as including the bits that Wheatley sought to obscure, has rather nice illustration of London landmarks on the covers.

There are some other good bits in that Wikipedia page by the way - one of my favourites is the stuff about Lord Granville painstakingly deciphering a few pages of the "encoded" content while the instructions for decoding them were in the same library a few shelves away!

Some or all of this may be in the linked article, but alas it's paywalled (and archive.today didn't work) so my apologies if I'm just repeating its contents!

Pepys' writings nicely precede the stuff about Hooke [2], to whom someone linked yesterday, because Hooke collaborated closely with Christopher Wren (famously the architect of St Pauls Cathedral in London) in the rebuilding of many of the churches destroyed by the conflagarion of the city that Pepys observes and writes about in 1666.

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4200

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pepys

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44232699

1 comments
I mean, at the time that version was published, obscenity laws would likely have made publishing the full version illegal, so, yes, it was necessary.
Possibly, but an honest man would have said as much.
I mean I think his audience at the time would have, particularly given what was left in, understood it to mean that it wasn't "unnecessary squeamishness"; under the law of the time it was literally unprintable and he'd have faced serious criminal consequences if he'd tried.

Like, look how much trouble they had with publishing Ulysses, decades later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)#Publication_hi... . And Ulysses had the benefit of being far less obscene than the diaries, and was Great Literature (TM), rather than, frankly, some pervert's private diaries which had never been intended for publication in the first place. I doubt the diaries could have been safely published in full until after the whole Lady Chatterley's Lover thing, at least not in the UK or US (France was more laid back about this sort of thing).

I still think you're doing some special pleading here. Yes, he might have meant people to infer that, but compare with Bowdler at the earlier end of the same century quite simply saying that he'd omitted passages for "propriety."
In Bowdler's case, though, he was doing _unnecessary_ censorship; you could get basically uncensored versions of Shakespeare's work at the time.

Wheatley _could_ maybe have been more explicit and said "I've omitted the illegally obscene bits", but honestly given the legal environment of the time this would have been asking for trouble.

He could have said that he had omitted some passages for impropriety. If Bowdler could say then then so could he - by the standards of his day or of ours. Saying nothing would have been an option too. His actual statement still seems at worst a lie and at best intentionally obfuscated.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree (although it would be very interesting if there was contemporary evidence of his actual thoughts and motivations).