The Glorious Life of Mingo – William Battenby – In Service to Life

Author Elizabeth Uter reads her short story about Mingo, a young Black man whom Samuel Pepys encountered in the 1660s. In 1667 Sir William Batten died and left Mingo the rights to staff the navigation lights at Harwich port. This story imagines what happened next... You can read this work, along with other poetry and prose inspired by Pepys's journal, in the collection Other Lives in Samuel Pepys's Diary, edited by Kate Loveman (https://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data.20449623) The collection was produced as part of the ‘Reimagining the Restoration’ project, which is funded by the AHRC.