“Supped well, and mighty merry, and our fears over”: Food, Drink and Companionship as Escapism Philosophy in Samuel Pepys’s Diary

Paweł Kaptur

Abstract


The Diary of Samuel Pepys offers not only a firsthand account of the political and social life in the 17th-century England, but also a profound insight into the culinary habits of the diarist and his contemporaries. In circumstances of grief or jeopardy, Pepys appears to be searching for ways to obliterate and shun the peril by turning to his favourite pleasure which is food and drink enjoyed in a good company. The author clearly treats the activity as a form of escapism and a social emollient which mitigates feuds and conquers fears. The paper examines Pepys’s life philosophy focusing on those aspects of the Diary where eating and drinking appear as the main sources of the author’s merriness and a technique which helps to overcome the hardships and adversities of everyday life.


Keywords


Samuel Pepys; diary; food; drink; escapism

Full Text:

PDF

References


Ackroyd, Peter. (2001). London. The Biography. London: Vintage.

Brears, Peter. (1985). Food and Cooking in 17th-Century Britain: History and Recipes. Birmingham: English Heritage. Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England.

Bryant, Arthur. (1952). Samuel Pepys. The Man in the Making. London, Beccles: The Reprint Society Ltd.

Drinkwater, John. (1930). Pepys. His Life and Character. New York: Doubleday Doran & Company.

Driver, Christopher, Michelle, Berriedale-Johnson. (1984). Pepys at Table: Seventeenth Century Recipes for the Modern Cook. London: Bell & Hyman.

Harvey, Jacky Colliss. (2021). Walking Pepys’s London. London: Haus Publishing.

Longeway, John L. (1990). The Rationality of Escapism and Self-Deception. Behaviour and Philosophy, 18(2), pp. 1–20.

Ollard, Richard. (1974). Pepys. A Biography. London, Sydney, Auckland, Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton.

Pearsall, Judy (ed.). (2001). The New Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pepys, Samuel. (1978). Dziennik Samuela Pepysa. Edited and translated by Maria Dąbrowska. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy.

Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Daily entries from the 17th century London diary. Downloaded from: https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary (access: 23.04.2021).

Porter, Stephen. (2012). Pepys’s London: Everyday Life in London 1650–1703. Gloucestershire: Amberley.

Sorbière, Samuel. (1709). A Voyage to England: Containing Many Things Relating to the State of Learning, Religion, and Other Curiosities of that Kingdom. London: Printed by J. Woodword, in St. Christopher’s Alley in Threadneedle-Street. Downloaded from: https://books.google.pl/books?redir_esc=y&hl=pl&id=Y8thAAAAcAAJ&q (access: 23.04.2021).

Tomalin, Claire. (2003). Samuel Pepys. The Unequalled Self. London: Penguin Books.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/ff.2021.39.2.15-28
Date of publication: 2021-12-27 11:14:11
Date of submission: 2021-09-13 13:31:44


Statistics


Total abstract view - 1410
Downloads (from 2020-06-17) - PDF - 629

Indicators



Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2021

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.