Did you start the year by determining to keep a diary of the
year’s events? Did you keep it going for long? In the year 1660 a young civil
servant named Samuel Pepys not only started a diary but he kept making entries
for nine years and created a remarkable document by so doing.
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys, a 26-year-old graduate of Magdalene College
Cambridge, was at the start of his career as a government servant – he
eventually became Chief Secretary to the Admiralty and a Member of Parliament.
Although he lived until 1703, the diary only covers nine years, but the period
in question included such events as the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660,
the plague of 1665, the Great Fire of London in 1666 and the naval war against
the Dutch in 1665-7, in which Pepys played an important role.
A private diary
However, the diary is as much a personal document as a
record of great events. Pepys wrote it for no eyes other than his own – he used
a private form of shorthand that needed to be deciphered when the diary was
eventually discovered – and he included many intimate details of his private
life that were certainly not intended to be read by anyone else.
Indeed, it will surprise many to learn that the full text of
Pepys’s diary was not published until 1970, more than 300 years after the
author made his first entry. The diary was originally discovered among Pepys’s
papers when he died, but was not published until 1825 in a version that was
severely censored to leave out many of the “naughty bits” in which Pepys
detailed his extramarital sexual conquests and other entries that were thought
to be indecent.
As it is, the diary contains many personal details of
ordinary life, such as on the first day when he tells of how his wife Elizabeth
had burned her hand when she cooked the Christmas turkey that he was now
finishing off, plus a riveting day-by-day eyewitness account of the progress of
the Great Fire of London in September 1666. Even here, among the details of
houses destroyed and streets threatened, there is the personal touch as Pepys
tells of burying a precious parmesan cheese in his garden just in case he
should be forced to evacuate his house – which didn’t happen.
Pepys’s diary turned out to be one of the most remarkable
works in the whole of English literature, as well as being a primary source for
some of the most dramatic events in the history of Britain and London in
particular.
It is also an entertaining document that has inspired many
people in subsequent years to mark 1st January in a similar way by
starting “Day 1” – some succeed in carrying on but most do not!
© John
Welford
Boo-Yah! Great blog, John! I ove this diary...I feel like I'm snooping when I read it!
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