Diary
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys · 1825
Opening lines
Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
A minor clerk of the Exchequer, twenty-six years old, opens a notebook on the first day of 1660 and gets into the habit of putting his whole day in it. Having joined the Navy administration the same year, he records the business of the office and court intrigues, but also what he has eaten, what he has paid, the books he buys, his quarrels with his wife, the maidservants he pursues. He records the plague of 1665, then the fire of the following year, which he follows by boat on the Thames.
Context
The diary was kept from 1 January 1660 to 31 May 1669 in a shorthand devised in the 1620s by Thomas Shelton and widespread among students and note-takers; the most intimate passages are moreover disguised in a jargon of French, Spanish, Latin or Italian words. The six volumes, bequeathed to a Cambridge college with their author's library, remained there unread until 1819. The poor student hired to decipher them spent three years on it, for two hundred pounds and his name on the title page; the manual for this shorthand was in the same library, which he perhaps did not know or chose to keep quiet. The first edition, in 1825, gave only about a quarter of it.
Who it is for
More than a million words in the complete edition, published in French in 1994; each day can be read separately.
Prizes and reception
A picture of the official and social life of London under the Restoration, plague and Great Fire included, whose full text appeared only between 1970 and 1983.
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