I made such a pretty, pretty newsletter 12/8/23

Then I hit back before it was saved. This is the less pretty version. I am very sad.

News: Same as where I was last week, mostly. I have put out a bid for a cover commission for Project Innsmouth, and am sorting through replies. I am on track to finish Vol. 3 about on schedule, with ample time for revisions before it goes to the publisher.

Behind The Scenes: Why Samuel Pepys Is Such A Goddamn Menace To My Sleep

Pictured: Pepys, Early Modern Gigachad

You ever fall in a wiki hole? You go look something up on Wikipedia, and then you click a link in the article, then another, then another, then it’s four days later and work is beyond pissed that you vanished?

This is my problem with Samuel Pepys.

Samuel Pepys… hell, I’ll just link to his wikipedia page. (Insert evil sniggering here.) VERY short version- he was an English civil servant who worked for the Navy during the 1600s. Later in life he was President of the Royal Society, (the elite club for philosophers and scientists in the early modern era) and was twice voted to parliament. He was not, himself, a philosopher or a scientist or a theologian.

Alright, so what? Why is he relevant to Slumrat Rising?

So this fucker (and OH BOY did he fuck,) kept a diary. Almost daily from January 1660- May 1669, he made notes about who he met, what he did, what he ate, what he drank, what he read, what he talked about, the music he played, the plays he watched, the clothes he bought, the many, many people he had sex with (only one of whom he was married to,) the executions he watched, the Fire of London, the Great Plague…

Pepys kept busy. Alarmingly busy. He lived from 1633-1703, seventy highly active years, of which the diary records only ten. And when you start teasing apart the threads, when you start looking at who was active in England (and particularly London and Cambridge) during that period, he starts turning up as a common link to almost all of them.

For example, the famed alchemist Sir Issac Newton wrote the occasional bit of work on things like the study of orbits, gravity, calculus, optics, color theory and the like. Notwithstanding that, the overwhelming majority of his work was on alchemy. Who could forget his famed translation of The Emerald Tablet into English? Nevertheless, the first edition of his side project, the Principia Mathematica, quite literally went out with Pepys imprimatur on it.

Or our old “friend” Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was tutor to the future Charles II, the restored Stuart king who brought the Monarchy back to Britain after the civil war. A king who came over on a boat commanded by Pepys patron, the future Earl of Sandwich. Sandwich was attended by his very loyal secretary- Pepys.

Did Hobbes and Pepys know each other? Probably not. Pepys was very sensitive politically, and Hobbes was not popular in Britain after the restoration. But Pepys records the following entry in his diary:

Thursday 3 September 1668

… and so to the Exchequer and several places, calling on several businesses, and particularly my bookseller’s, among others, for “Hobbs’s Leviathan,” which is now mightily called for; and what was heretofore sold for 8s. I now give 24s. for, at the second hand, and is sold for 30s., it being a book the Bishops will not let be printed again, and so home to dinner, and then to the office all the afternoon, and towards evening by water to the Commissioners of the Treasury, and presently back again, and there met a little with W. Pen and the rest about our Prize accounts, and so W. Pen and Lord Brouncker and I at the lodging of the latter to read over our new draft of the victualler’s contract, and so broke up and home to supper and to bed.

Emphasis added.

W. Penn, by the way, being Sir William Penn, the admiral that conquered Jamaica for Britain and the father of the man who gave Pennsylvania its name.

Who else? Well, you know John Locke? Social Contract John Locke? They drank at the same pub- the Pillars of Hercules, on the Strand. They also both worked, in various roles, for the Royal African Company. A company that traded in a great many things, including slaves. John Locke, Mr. Social Contract, helped draft the constitution of the Carolinas (explicitly establishing the right to own slaves) and worked for the Royal African Company that exported slaves from Africa to Europe and the Americas.

Pepys’ whole life is like this. London, particularly elite London, is not that big a place in the 17th century, and Pepys was in constant motion socially. He was involved in or observed one of the most incredible periods of intellectual, political, and economic revolution in the world. In a way, he was at the exact point where the medieval transitioned into the modern. (Scholars would strongly dispute that characterization, but nerts to them, it’s my newsletter.) And he recorded a solid decade of it, in incredibly frank detail.

From that point, let’s loop back to an earlier newsletter. Remember how, in the first letter, I said I write by scrapbooking, and that the scrapbooking concept would come up again? Well here it is. Like it never left. Because it didn’t.

You see, everything I just wrote isn’t just random trivia. They are story hooks.

Pepys’ diary is made up of these little glimpses of the 1660’s. He interacted with every level of society, from the destitute, to the King. (Fun fact, he was the first person to tell Charles II about the Great Fire that was leveling London.) All those connections to people and events. Little bits and pieces of them make their way into Slumrat. As you shall see very explicitly…

And it’s an addictive read. Completely screws up my sleep as I just keep hitting next entry, when I need to be hitting my bed.

Speaking of next, next week I will be taking a break from philosophers and sources of inspiration, and looking at the mechanics of character design. AKA How Did I Invent Truth Medici?