Claire Tomalin:
Samuel Pepys: Das unvergleichliche Selbst von Claire Tomalin (englisch) Taschenbuch Buch - Taschenbuch
ISBN: 9780375725531
He is us.". -Chicago Tribune "Exemplary.. The perfect bookend to [Pepys's] own rollicking self-portrait.". -Whitbread Award Judges' Citation. This was the western edge of the City, and Pe… Mehr…
He is us.". -Chicago Tribune "Exemplary.. The perfect bookend to [Pepys's] own rollicking self-portrait.". -Whitbread Award Judges' Citation. This was the western edge of the City, and Pepys"s first playground. The Nile on eBay FREE SHIPPING UK WIDE Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin For a decade, beginning in 1660, an ambitious young London civil servant kept an astonishingly candid account of his life during one of the most defining periods in British history. In Samuel Pepys," Claire Tomalin offers us a fully realized and richly nuanced portrait of this man, whose inadvertent masterpiece would establish him as the greatest diarist in the English language.Against the backdrop of plague, civil war, and regicide, with John Milton composing diplomatic correspondence for Oliver Cromwell, Christopher Wren drawing up plans to rebuild London, and Isaac Newton advancing the empirical study of the world around us, Tomalin weaves a breathtaking account of a figure who has passed on to us much of what we know about seventeenth-century London. We witness Pepys's early life and education, see him advising King Charles II before running to watch the great fire consume London, learn about the great events of the day as well as the most intimate personal details that Pepys encrypted in the Diary, follow him through his later years as a powerful naval administrator, and come to appreciate how Pepys's singular literary enterprise would in many ways prefigure our modern selves. With exquisite insight and compassion, Samuel Pepys captures the uniquely fascinating figure whose legacy lives on more than three hundred years after his death. FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description For a decade, beginning in 1660, an ambitious young London civil servant kept an astonishingly candid account of his life during one of the most defining periods in British history. In Samuel Pepys," " Claire Tomalin offers us a fully realized and richly nuanced portrait of this man, whose inadvertent masterpiece would establish him as the greatest diarist in the English language.Against the backdrop of plague, civil war, and regicide, with John Milton composing diplomatic correspondence for Oliver Cromwell, Christopher Wren drawing up plans to rebuild London, and Isaac Newton advancing the empirical study of the world around us, Tomalin weaves a breathtaking account of a figure who has passed on to us much of what we know about seventeenth-century London. We witness Pepys's early life and education, see him advising King Charles II before running to watch the great fire consume London, learn about the great events of the day as well as the most intimate personal details that Pepys encrypted in the Diary, follow him through his later years as a powerful naval administrator, and come to appreciate how Pepys's singular literary enterprise would in many ways prefigure our modern selves. With exquisite insight and compassion, Samuel Pepys captures the uniquely fascinating figure whose legacy lives on more than three hundred years after his death. Author Biography Claire Tomalin's books include Thomas Hardy: The Time Torn Man and The Poems of Thomas Hardy. She lives in London. Review Quote "A magnificent triumph. . . . Absolutely stunning." -The Atlantic Monthly "Invaluable. . . . [Tomalin] not only brings [Pepys] back to vibrant life, but makes a powerful case that he's more central, more 'relevant,' than we ever imagined." -The New York Times Book Review "A magisterial book [written] with an elegance and concision that few historians could match. . . . You have to love Samuel Pepys. He is us." -San Francisco Chronicle "Exceptional. . . . Nuanced, moving. . . . A book teeming, like the diary, with clarity, momentum and great pleasure." -Chicago Tribune "Exemplary. . . . The perfect bookend to [Pepys's] own rollicking self-portrait." -The New York Times "Fine and engrossing. . . . Tomalin possesses a particularly graceful and pleasing diction, a proper sense of measure, and a piquant willingness to express her own views." -The Washington Post Book World "Excellent. . . . Remarkable and sympathetic. . . . One is not likely to think of Pepys in the same way again." -St. Louis Post-Dispatch "A superb biography by a writer at the height of her powers." -Whitbread Award Judges' Citation Excerpt from Book Part One 1633-1668 The Elected Son He was born in London, above the shop, just off Fleet Street, in Salisbury Court, where his father John Pepys ran a tailoring business, one of many serving the lawyers living in the area. The house backed on to the parish church of St. Bride''s, where all the babies of the family were christened and two were already buried in the churchyard; when he was a man, Pepys still kept the thought in his mind of "my young brothers and sisters" laid in the ground outside the house of his youth. Salisbury Court was an open space surrounded by a mixture of small houses like John Pepys''s and large ones, once the abodes of bishops and ambassadors, with gardens; it was entered through narrow lanes, one from Fleet Street opposite Shoe Lane, another in the south-west corner leading into Water Lane and so down to the Thames and river steps fifty yards below. The south-facing slope above the river was a good place to live; people had been settled here since Roman times, and when Pepys was born in 1633 a Christian church had stood on the spot for at least five hundred years. A block to the east was the Fleet River, with the pink brick crenellated walls of Bridewell rising beside it; it had been built as a palace by King Henry VIII and deteriorated into a prison for vagrants, homeless children and street women, known to the locals as "Bridewell Birds." A footbridge spanned the Fleet between Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill, and from St. Bride''s you could look across its deep valley-much deeper then than it is today-with houses crammed up both sides in a maze of courts and alleys, to old St. Paul''s rising on its hill above the City. This was the western edge of the City, and Pepys''s first playground. The City was proud of being the most populous in the world; it had something like 130,000 inhabitants, and in the whole country there were only about five million. If you went west from Salisbury Court along Fleet Street, you came to the gardens of the Temple lawyers, with their groves of trees, formal beds and walks, and further west along the Strand you were out of the City, on the way to Whitehall and Westminster. To the east was the only bridge-London Bridge, almost as old as St. Bride''s Church, with its nineteen arches and its spikes on which traitors'' heads were stuck-and then the Tower. The river, without embankments, was very wide, with a sloping shore at low tide, a place for children to explore; and the great houses of the aristocracy were strung along the riverside, each with its own watergate. The best way to get about fast in London was by boat. The Pepys house centred round the shop and cutting room, with their shelves, stools and drawers, cutting board and looking-glass. At the back the kitchen opened into a yard, and in the cellar were the washing tubs and coal hole, with a lock-up into which troublesome children or maids might be put for punishment. The stairs to the living quarters went up at the back. Timber-framed, tall and narrow, with a jetty sticking out over the street at the front, set tight against its neighbours, with a garret under the steeply pitched roof: this was the pattern of ordinary London houses. On the first floor the parlour doubled as dining room. Above there were two bedrooms, each with a small closet or study opening off it, and high beds with red or purple curtains. In one of these Pepys was born and spent his first weeks. Older children, maids and apprentices slept on the third floor-Pepys mentions "the little chamber, three storeys high"-or in the garret, or in trundle beds, kept in most of the rooms, including the shop and the parlour; sometimes they bedded down in the kitchen for warmth. In one of the bedrooms was a virginals, the neat, box-like harpsichord of the period. John Pepys was musical: he played the bass viol, and his eldest daughter, six-year-old Mary, could have started at the keyboard by the time Sam was born. Singing and musical instruments-viol, violin, lute, virginals, flageolet (a recorder of sorts)-were an essential part of family life, and music became the child''s passion.Music was not only in the family but literally in the air for many months during the first year of Sam''s life. It came from one of the large houses in Salisbury Court, in which a young and ambitious lawyer, Bulstrode Whitelocke, was preparing a masque to be performed before King Charles and his queen. Whitelocke and Edward Hyde, together representing the Middle Temple, had joined with members of the other three Inns of Court in a plan to celebrate Candlemas in a great masque to be produced before the Court at Whitehall, and Whitelocke, who had some skill as a composer, was in charge of the music. He assembled a large group of singers, including some from the Queen''s Chapel, and "caused them all to meet in practise at his house in Salisbury Court where he . . . had sometimes 40 lutes, besides other instruments and voices, in consort together." The noise must have been terrific. On the day of the performance, 2 February 1634, three weeks before Pepys''s first birthday, the masquers, in costumes of silver, crimson and blue, some riding plumed horses draped in cloth of silver, some carrying flaming torches, processed along Holborn and Chancer, [PU: Random House]<
