Wednesday 19 June 1661

Annotations

• N david cooper on Sat 19 Jun 2004, 11:42pm

  “it being term” — what does this mean?

• N A. De Araujo on Sat 19 Jun 2004, 11:53pm

  “that I am now become the most negligent man in the world as to matters of news” I sympathize with you SP,particularly nowadays!No news is good news

• N dirk on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 01:37am

  “the most negligent man in the world as to matters of news”

  Cfr. remarks on the entry for 8 May 1661.
  http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1661/05/08/index.php#c14245
  http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1661/05/08/index.php#c14246

  Apparently annotators became aware of what was happening before Sam did. As “outsiders” we saw this coming.
  

• N Ruben on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 02:19am

  “the most negligent man in the world as to matters of news”
  For someone surviving by knowledge of what was going on, no news were BAD news, as he was desattached from the milking cow.

• N Pauline on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 02:43am

  “One thing I must observe here while I think of it…”
  This is new, isn’t it? ‘Talking to himself’ as he writes the day’s entry. Can anyone remember him doing this before? Does it indicate remembering to make a note of something he wants to remedy—getting back to keeping abreast of the news? Is he using the diary to make a note to himself?

• N vicente on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 03:42am

  His Leader feels safe.He [Sam]has his pocket full, can buy the little woman a bit of lace now and again and ‘imself the theatre seats and books, and treating the lads to Simpson’s of the Day.[no complaints there, has Will arunning] The Catholics,The Friends, and other dissident groups are seeking satisfaction via appeals thru proper channels i.e Parliament, the Anglicans are trying standard channels attempting to get judicial control and can use the Pulpit for the routine of encouraging the pew to donate and support CII in his efforts to enjoy the good life.
  Every one is fed up with armed men that were running around. So now The dissatisfied ones either have no power or they have reach their level of incompetence and are not going to upset the apple dray yet. They will soon forget [naturally]and feel ill done by. So mean while, the pubs, and business meeting places are quiet just the buzz of normal deals and the unemployed have found ways of keeping the ale flowing, as all business interests, are for all appearances, booming, money is circulating which prevents upsetting the hoi polloi.

• N vicente on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 04:04am

  Sam missed another important meeting ” ‘at our society about poysons againe. We gave Nux Vom : to birds that killed them out-right, afterwa[r]ds, because some writers affirmed Sublimate was its conterpoyson, we tried it on other birds, but it succeded not:” J Evelyn 19 june, 1661 [De Beers ed.}

• N Australian Susan on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 06:06am

  “it being term”
  The Law Term, when Courts sat.

• N Mary on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 08:26am

  “my late pain”

  Sam has not specifically mentioned his ‘old pain’ recently. Perhaps he regards the ‘cold’ that he took after bathing his feet in the Thames (and after a day of rash diet) as a chill ‘on the kidneys’ ……… reputed to be a very treacherous ailment by people of my grandparents’ generation

• N Australian Susan on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 09:46am

  “my late pain”
  My grandmother thought in the 60s that the wearing of mini-shirts and not wearing a vest would give one a chill on the kidneys. I used to wear a liberty bodice as a child in the 50s to guard against getting chilled. Anyone else remember liberty bodices? Sam would probably have thought them an excellent garment. To those of a pre-antibiotic generation (as my grandmother was: 1876-1967)any suggestion of something which could lead to infection was frightening. Bacterial infections so often led to death.

• N Bob T on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 01:02pm

  My late pain.
  I remember liberty bodices, but because I am male, I was not told what they actually were, other than “something girls wore”. Wet feet caused colds, as did going out without drying your hair properly after visiting the swimming baths, or, just having washed it. A cold in the kidneys was a serious thing, although I doubt if it has a medical definition. In the 50’s and earlier, many things were quite different. If anything was uncomfortable, or even painful, then it had to be character building; anyone remember woollen vests? Our Sam lived in a rough and tumble world, and it persisted for a long time. One of my school masters used to say, “Don’t snivel boy, I haven’t hit you yet.” Thank God those days are over.
  

• N Andrew Hamilton on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 01:25pm

  my intention of purchasing at Brampton.

  Sam thinking of an establishment? Have I been inatentive, or is this the first mention?

  This is the way the gentleman rides: ‘propity,propity,propity’

• N BradW on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 01:33pm

  To those of a pre-antibiotic generation any suggestion of something which could lead to infection was frightening. Bacterial infections so often led to death.

  You’re right, Sue, we tend to forget just how much infection and death weighed on folks for the thousands of years prior to current living memory. When Elizabeth was ill, and Sam was critical of her for staying in their home during renovations, I suspected he was expressing a vague fear that a dirty house might lead to a life-threatening infection for her.

  It’s a bit off-topic, but I always thought “Pinocchio” and “Cinderella” were tinged with this fear of infection and death, because the untimely deaths of beloved family members in the back-story left the main characters (Giapetto, Cinderella) with deep emotional scars. I’ve never read the original Pinocchio, but Disney has Giapetto say that he wanted a wooden boy because he would be indestructable, compared to a human boy—a phrase that spoke volumes coming from the gentle old man.

• N Bob T on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 02:35pm

  To those of a pre-antibiotic generation any suggestion of something which could lead to infection was frightening

  I remember reading some advise given in a “Dr Spock” book written when medicine was still an inexact science. The author advised parents not to become too attached to their children, because they would probably die while still young.

• N Mary on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 02:44pm

  The Brampton purchase.

  A few weeks ago (sorry - I haven’t been able to pin down the date) it was proposed to Pepys that he should buy a parcel of land in Brampton that would march with the land that he expected to inherit from his uncle. He’s clearly been muliing the suggestion over and has decided to go ahead with the deal.

• N Pauline on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 04:39pm

  ” In the 50

• N Mary on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 04:55pm

  The liberty bodice
  was not like a tank-top; more in the line of corsetry. You can see one or two very elegant (!) models still available at www.woods-online.co.uk

  The style worn in my childhood was made of stout cotton and came complete with buttons at the lower edge, to which one’s woollen, winter stockings were supposed to be attached.

• N JWB on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 06:07pm

  No news
  With Montagu at sea, Sam’s out of the loop, no longer a conduit-the boss isn’t asking and others not trying to get to the boss though him. Then he keeps returning to Wardrobe, which raises to my mind the idea of his inhabiting a Potemkin village, and in a Potemkin village there is never any news. To look behind stage props I keep going to Macaulay http://www.strecorsoc.org/macaulay/m02a.html , who, of course,has props of his own, but…well I just like reading Macaulay.

  
  

• N vicente on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 07:47pm

  “An Act for a free and voluntary Present to His Majesty.”
  Yep they were in session see :Hodie 3avice lecta est Billa,

  From: British History Online
  Source: House of Lords Journal Volume 11: 19 June 1661. House of Lords Journal Volume 11, ().
  URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=14127
  Date: 20/06/2004
  

• N vicente on Sun 20 Jun 2004, 07:51pm

  Liberty bodice today means freedom to show of the navel and diamond and surrounding tissue, to all and sundry.

• N Jim on Mon 21 Jun 2004, 02:45am

  Australian Sue and BradW, you are not off topic — it is important that we remember just how different life is today and how close death was to people of Sam’s era — I’m old enough to remember when vacination meant against small pox but the rest (polio, rubella, whooping cough, etc.) were all diseases we either feared or suffered. My kids don’t really understand when I mention nightmares about iron lungs. We always must remember how tenuous and fragile life was in Sam’s day, sans antibiotics, sans antiseptics, sans vacines… and with small pox and bubonic plague, etc.

• N Australian Susan on Mon 21 Jun 2004, 02:48am

  Liberty bodices, “catching cold” etc.
  Thank you, Mary! Have just had a nostaliga trip in the woods website. Yes, there is a liberty bodice on p.30 of the online catalogue.Our grandmothers were obviously soul mates and shared the collective consciousness of their times. We make so many assumptions now: babies will survive, they will be born healthy, people are not likely to die in child birth and so on. Sam would have thought otherwise. Mary, Queen of Scots (not that long before this time) had to make her will as she went into labour as it was assumed by all that she might die and, being an important person, she needed to have her affairs in order before she died.

• N dirk on Tue 22 Jun 2004, 02:56am

  Human fragility

  A philosophical note - slightly off topic. All this makes me realise how fragile our civilization has become. A couple of major (or even minor) catastrophes may take many things away we for granted. (Even a generalized electricity failure may be sufficient to destroy most of our social and medical infrastructure - and break through the varnish layer we call civilized behaviour.) We have become so dependent that it’s really frightening to think how we could survive without all these things

  Sam’s life was of course dependent on outside factors too, but maybe less than ours.
  

• N vicente on Tue 22 Jun 2004, 03:39am

  Off topic yes and no, reading SP gives us the idea of what it has taken to sit down to eat strawberries all year round with Devon clotted cream in Antartica or where ever. Our lives depend on Water,Salt,Oxygen. All technology[and brains] have done, is to make sure that we eat,drink,sleep and have fun and then transpose all the materials in to satisfying our unending requirements. We are indeed lucky not just to survive by picking up random life giving items, the way our feathered and mammal free friends do. Indeed Civilisation could collapse easily as it did near Sodum. The experiments at the society are fun to read.

• N Jenny Doughty on Tue 22 Jun 2004, 04:02am

  I also remember liberty bodices, and wearing them as a small child in the fifties. I remember them as a thick white material, possibly slightly padded, and fastening up the front with white rubber buttons.

  Uncomfortable as they were, they were called ‘liberty’ bodices because unlike the stays of an earlier generation of girls, they did not constrain the body at all.

  I used to have (lost it, alas!) a bound volume of ‘The Girls’ Own Paper’ from 1900 and 1901, which frequently ran articles on the evils of tight lacing to achieve the desirable hourglass figure.

• N vicente on Tue 22 Jun 2004, 07:57pm

  girls! girls! Here is wot was like to be: incase the boys never [k]new:
  girls own 1900 etc: http://www.garfnet.org.uk/new_mill/spring98/sk_girls.htm

  bodice at:
  http://www.thedarkangel.co.uk/cogent/311.html
  risque:
  http://www.woods-online.co.uk/trolleyed/138/253/
  

• N Australian Susan on Wed 23 Jun 2004, 12:35am

  Vincent you are a naughty man! The picture at dark angel is like nothing I ever wore, but the woods picture is *exactly* right!

• N language hat on Wed 23 Jun 2004, 11:56pm

  Liberty bodice:
  Thanks to all for this information; I had never heard of such a thing. Here’s a page on “The fall of the corset and rise of the girdle”:
  http://www.candsconstructions.com/pand3.htm

  It has this to say on the LB:

  “The use of stay bands and other forms of stiffened or corded vests would continue until the 1920

• N Laura K on Sun 27 Jun 2004, 04:50pm

  human fragility, antibiotics, etc.

  This is late, but… It’s worth remembering that there are still places in the world - too many - where death during childbirth, infant mortality and death from the simplest infection are still daily realities. Thousands of children die each year for lack of clean drinking water (dysentery, chronic diarrhea). In some ways, portions of the globe are closer to Sam’s time than the lives we annotators live.