“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,” began Samuel Pepys on the first page of his diary. [1]
On Sunday, 1 January 1660, 26-year-old Samuel Pepys opened a notebook he’d purchased the previous month, picked up his quill pen, dipped it in ink, and began writing about his day. He continued to record his daily life for almost ten years writing using a form of shorthand known as ‘tachygraphy’.
Pepys has been described as the greatest diarist of all time due to his frankness in writing of his own weaknesses and the accuracy with which he records daily British life and major events in the 17th century. He wrote about the contemporary court and theatre (including his affairs with the actresses), political and social occurrences, and his household – personal finances, the time he got up in the morning, the weather, what he ate, and even his cat disturbing him during the night. More than a million words long, Pepys’s record is often regarded as Britain’s most celebrated diary.
The diary of Samuel Pepys has long been considered the greatest diary in the English language. It is one of a very few sources which provides great detail of the everyday life of an upper-middle-class man during the 17th century. Historians have found it invaluable, but it is also a superb work of literature and the record of an extraordinary man.
When Pepys died in 1703, he left his entire collection of books, including the diary which is in six volumes and was not then transcribed or known, to his old university, Magdalene College.
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