Samuel Pepys Begins His Diary

1660

A twenty-six-year-old clerk in the Navy Office named Samuel Pepys began writing a private diary in shorthand: fires, plagues, dinner parties, lovers, tailoring bills, the Restoration court. For nine years he recorded everything. The manuscript would eventually become the most vivid personal chronicle of the seventeenth century, preserving daily life in Restoration London with an intimacy no other source can match.