The Awakening • 257seen [in] many a day, and the young people so merry with another.” At
Christmastime, turkeys given to Samuel provided a feast for Elizabeth and
her friends at Seething Lane, while he dined at the country house of the navy
commissioner and engineer, Lord Brouncker, as they talked about reform of
the navy administration and Samuel’s musical compositions.
Celebrating New Year’s at home with his wife, Samuel Pepys broke into
self-congratulatory reflections. “Thus ends this year, to my great joy, in this
manner,” he recounted in his diary. “I have raised my estate from £ 1300 to
£ 4400 .” More soberly he continued, “It is true we have gone through great
melancholy because of the plague, and I put to great charges by it, by keep-
ing my family long at Woolwich, and myself and another part of my family,
my clerks, at my charge at Greenwich, and a maid in London.”
How predictable was this navy entrepreneur and bon vivant! Though he
could still be jarred by what he saw and felt, he continued to screen out un-
pleasantries from his mind and pen. He had lost track of a few of his finan-
cial successes and missed appointments, but not his dalliances, even for a
week. Bathed in self-satisfaction, he wrote, “I have never lived so merrily
(besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague-time.” The
naval war had been good beyond measure to Samuel Pepys, while the sailors
were desperately short of pay and services. He had been compelled to put
down near-riots at the ports, he admitted. He ended with a lament: “Many
of such as I know very well [are] dead... yet to our great joy, the town fills
up apace and shops begin to open again.”^36
Pepys’ diary entries left unrecorded a very different balance sheet of this
Great Plague. The labor of London’s working poor had made it possible for
their city and its better-off citizens to keep functioning, even as these work-
ers suffered enormous losses of life. The surviving workers, in turn, were kept
afloat by the web of support from wealthier Londoners, which had main-
tained the semblance of a safety net when institutional structures weakened
and the economy collapsed. The interdependency of the two “Londons”—
one of the rich and the other of the poor—had cushioned the blow of the
Great Plague.
Perhaps it had accomplished more. By keeping their city and its suburbs
functioning at a minimal level through the entire period of this visitation, the
poor and the rich, workers and entrepreneurs, the governed and their gov-
ernors may have laid the foundations of the remarkable revival of the me-
tropolis that Samuel Pepys and Nathaniel Hodges saw in the bustle of activ-
ity as Londoners returned and country people moved in to fill the jobs of
those who had fallen.