Samuel Pepys Begins His Diary

1660

A twenty-six-year-old Exchequer clerk named Samuel Pepys, who would join the Navy Board that July, 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.