Diary

Samuel Pepys (1633 to 1703) worked as an administrator for the English navy and sat in parliament, and the journal he kept for almost ten years is the work he is remembered for. It covers the years from 1660 to 1669 and was first printed long afterwards.

Pepys wrote daily, and he wrote about everything: what time he got up, what the weather was doing, what he ate, how his money was going, and how he was getting on at the office. He also set down what he saw of the great events of the decade, among them the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War and the Great Fire of London.

What has kept readers with him for three centuries is his frankness. He is candid about his own weaknesses and about his household, the court and the theatre, and he can spend as much space on a new watch he was proud of, complete with an alarm, or on a country visitor who disliked London for being too crowded, as on affairs of state; historians treat the diary as one of the best sources there is for ordinary life in seventeenth-century London.