Portrait of Samuel Pepys
Ready for your daily dose of Samuel Pepys? Read Pepys’s diary for this day in 1664. This marvellous website has posted all the entries from the 17th-century diary. Pepys was a bit of a philanderer, and to see just how far he indulged his libido, you can read through the million-and-a-quarter words of his famous diary, which ended soon after his wife Elizabeth caught him in flagrante with her maid. For years these diaries sat undeciphered in Pepys’s own library, bequeathed to his alma mater, Magdalene College at Cambridge, until someone found the key to the shorthand sitting in the same bookshelves.
Pepysdiary.com posted Pepys’s first diary entry of January 1, 1660 on New Year’s Day 2003 and continued posting one a day until the last entry of May 31, 1669 was reached in 2012. The print edition by Robert Latham and William Matthews restores the unprintable passages that Victorian editors omitted. If the twelve Latham & Matthews volumes are too daunting, try The Illustrated Pepys, which has one-fourteenth of the diary accompanied by charming period illustrations.