ABSTRACT
Here we were very merry with Sir W. Penn about the loss of his tankard, though all be but a cheate and he doth not yet understand it. But the tankard was stole by Sir W. Batten, and the letters as from the thief wrote by me; which makes very good sport. (II, 169)
The next night ‘the thief’ sent Penn another letter offering to return the tankard for thirty shillings (II, 170). The unsuspecting Penn paid up and Pepys, with a large company of friends, went to the Dolphin tavern to drink away the money. Still unaware of the trick, Penn joined the party, but was too drunk to understand when his colleagues tried to explain to him that the merriment was literally at his expense. Pepys was rather relieved to have avoided Penn’s anger, for ‘he hath so talked of the business himself and the letters, up and down, that he will be ashamed to be found abused in it’ (II, 176). Indeed, Pepys soon heard that ‘Sir W. Penn doth take our jest of the tankard very ill – which I am sorry for’ (II, 178). Penn’s anger was understandable for he had found himself in a position which his society regarded with particular contempt – that of a credulous interpreter, abused by a roguish fiction and laughed at by his fellows. This trick was a small-scale, targeted hoax, but once a sham made its way into print it had the potential to take in thousands; as Daniel Defoe – who had good reason to know – remarked: ‘if a Man tells a Lye in Print, he abuses Mankind, and imposes upon the whole World’.2 The shams of wits were just one of the many abuses to which readers might be subjected, for duplicity was widely regarded as endemic within the book trade. The ‘great rascallity’ of writers and publishers required readers to be alert to a spectrum of deceit, from the specious marketing tactics of booksellers, to the lying newsbooks produced by ‘cheating talemongers’, to – and this was the more worrying threat – the ideological deceptions of the enemies of Protestantism. Such enemies, it was argued, designed to outwit readers, persuading them of ‘Deceits and delusions’ in order to trick them from their religious and political allegiance.3 If successful, these deceits would ultimately
1 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London: Bell, 1970-83), II (1970), 164.
