The most valuable eyewitness account of London in the 1660s was written by a naval clerk in a code his own wife could not read, and he stopped keeping it because he was convinced he was going blind.
Samuel Pepys kept his diary for just over nine years, from 1 January 1660 to 31 May 1669. He was twenty six when he began, an ambitious and slightly anxious civil servant living in a rented house at Axe Yard in Westminster. By the time he stopped he was one of the most capable administrators in England. In between he happened to be standing in London during the Great Plague and the Great Fire, and he wrote both down as they happened to him personally, not as history.
What interests me about Pepys is not that he was present at large events. Plenty of people were. It is that he was writing entirely for himself, with no publication, no readership and no reputation at stake. The result is the least performed document I have read in this whole series on the journals of successful people. Nine sections follow, each one a thing the manuscript actually shows.
1. He Wrote It in a Script Most People Could Not Read
Pepys wrote the bulk of the diary in the shorthand system devised by Thomas Shelton, usually called tachygraphy, with names of people and places left in ordinary longhand. Magdalene College, Cambridge, which holds the manuscript, notes in its virtual exhibition on the diary that Shelton’s system was used in several Cambridge colleges and student clubs, and that Pepys may well have picked it up as an undergraduate there. Isaac Newton used the same system.
The College is careful about why he used it. Speed, they say, was his primary reason. Shorthand let him get a great deal onto the page quickly. But they add the obvious secondary benefit: his wife Elizabeth had no knowledge of the shorthand, so the diary was private in plain sight, sitting on a shelf in a house full of people.
That combination is worth sitting with, because it is available to you in cruder forms. A notebook nobody else opens does something to your sentences. It removes the small internal editor who softens a phrase in case someone reads it later. If your journal lives in a shared cloud folder or on a phone your family picks up, you are probably writing a slightly public document without having decided to. The question of handwritten versus digital journalling is partly a question of who could open it.
Try this: for one week, write in a place with no possibility of an audience. Not a private-ish app. A physical notebook that lives somewhere only you go. Then read the week back and mark the sentences you would not have written otherwise.
2. He Opened With a Stock-Take, Not a Scene
The first entry is not literary. It is an audit. Pepys begins by summarising his health, his household, his wife’s body, the political situation and his money, in that order, before he gets to the events of the day.
Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold.
I lived in Axe Yard having my wife, and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three.
Source: entry for 1 January 1659/60, Henry B. Wheatley’s 1893 edition, as published entry by entry at pepysdiary.com. The “old pain” is the bladder stone cut out of him in 1658.
A few lines later comes one of the most quietly honest sentences in the whole diary:
My own private condition very handsome, and esteemed rich, but indeed very poor; besides my goods of my house, and my office, which at present is somewhat uncertain.
Source: entry for 1 January 1659/60, Wheatley edition.
Esteemed rich, but indeed very poor. He is twenty six, writing down the gap between how he is seen and what his accounts say, and he kept doing it. Roughly every month, and every year end, the diary stops narrating and starts totalling.
Most journalling advice pushes you towards feeling and away from arithmetic. Pepys does both in the same book, and the arithmetic is where his self-knowledge lives. If you are working out how to structure your journal, a periodic stock-take that names one number you have been avoiding is a more useful page than another paragraph about your mood.
3. The Plague Arrives as a Detail on a Street He Was Walking Down
The Great Plague of 1665 does not enter the diary as an announcement. It enters as a thing Pepys saw on his way somewhere else, on the hottest day he had ever felt.
This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “Lord have mercy upon us” writ there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that, to my remembrance, I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell to and chaw, which took away the apprehension.
Source: entry for 7 June 1665, Wheatley edition.
Read the shape of that entry. The plague sighting is not at the top. It comes after a long paragraph about accounts, a dinner at the Dolphin Tavern, a failed meeting with goldsmiths, and a pleasant walk in the Spring Garden at Vauxhall where he spent sixpence. History is a postscript to a normal Wednesday.
Then look at what he admits in the last clause. Faced with the first plague houses he has ever seen, his reaction is not compassion. It is a sudden anxiety about his own body and his own smell, followed by buying tobacco to chew because it made him feel better. He did not tidy that up.
That is the argument for keeping a diary through a bad period. You will not know at the time which detail matters. Pepys did not know the red crosses would outlast the goldsmiths. He wrote both at the same weight, and one of them turned out to be the record.
Try this: on any day when something large is happening in the world, write your ordinary day in full first, then add the large thing where it actually fell in the sequence. Do not promote it to the top of the page.
4. The Great Fire Survives Because He Noticed Small Things
The Fire began in the small hours of 2 September 1666. Pepys was woken by a servant, looked out of a window, decided it was far enough away, and went back to sleep.
Jane called us up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose and slipped on my nightgowne, and went to her window, and thought it to be on the backside of Marke-lane at the farthest; but, being unused to such fires as followed, I thought it far enough off; and so went to bed again and to sleep.
Source: entry for 2 September 1666, Wheatley edition.
That is the single most useful sentence in the diary as evidence, and it is useful precisely because it is unheroic. A historian writing later would not have included the going back to sleep. Pepys included it because he was not writing for anybody.
Later the same day, having gone down to the river and watched the fire eat its way along the waterfront, he records this:
And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.
Source: entry for 2 September 1666, Wheatley edition.
Nobody assigned him the pigeons. There is no version of the Great Fire of London in which the birds are the point. But that is the image that survives three and a half centuries, and it survives because a man with no editorial brief wrote down the thing he could not stop looking at. The same instinct runs through Walt Whitman’s notebooks, where the useful material is almost always the specific thing rather than the important one.
5. He Buried the Parmesan
Two days later, with the fire coming up Tower Street, Pepys and his colleagues at the Navy Office started digging holes in the garden.
Sir W. Batten not knowing how to remove his wine, did dig a pit in the garden, and laid it in there; and I took the opportunity of laying all the papers of my office that I could not otherwise dispose of. And in the evening Sir W. Pen and I did dig another, and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things.
Source: entry for 4 September 1666, Wheatley edition. The cheese is spelled “Parmazan” in the manuscript tradition.
This is the most famous domestic detail in English diary literature, and it is famous for a reason worth naming. It is not a symbol. It is a man protecting an expensive imported cheese during a catastrophe because the cheese was expensive and he did not want to lose it. He also buried his office papers and his wine, in that order, which tells you more about his priorities than any self-assessment would have.
The lesson for a journal keeper is unglamorous and I think important. Do not decide, while writing, what will turn out to be significant. You are a bad judge of that in the moment. Write the cheese down. If you are stuck on what to write in a journal, the answer is very often the concrete thing you assume is too trivial to record.
6. He Recorded His Own Bad Behaviour Without Softening It
Pepys wrote down things about himself that most people would not say out loud. His jealousy. His vanity about clothes. His constant tracking of who was ahead of him. And, repeatedly, his sexual behaviour, including coercive and abusive conduct towards women who worked in his household or depended on his goodwill.
The clearest instance is his relationship with Deborah Willet, a young woman employed as a companion to his wife. On 25 October 1668 Elizabeth walked in on him:
after supper, to have my head combed by Deb., which occasioned the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world, for my wife, coming up suddenly, did find me embracing the girl
Source: entry for 25 October 1668, Wheatley edition. Wheatley silently cut what followed; the Latham and Matthews edition restores an explicit description of what Elizabeth actually saw. The exposure is one-sided in the record. Pepys documents his own distress at length and Willet’s almost not at all, and she lost her place in the household.
I am not going to turn that into a journalling technique, and I would be wary of any article that did. What it demonstrates is narrower. An unedited private record does not flatter its author. It exposes him, including in ways he clearly did not intend. Pepys thought he was recording a domestic crisis. What he actually recorded is the ordinary abuse of power inside a seventeenth century household, written down by the person holding the power.
Diaries do this. They catch you. Samuel Johnson’s diaries of failed resolutions catch him in a different way, decades of the same promises to rise early and pray more, broken and renewed and broken again, which he could not have missed on rereading. That is not a comfortable feature of the form. It is the form working.
7. He Wrote Almost Every Day for Nine Years, Which Is the Real Achievement
It is easy to focus on the famous entries and miss the arithmetic underneath them. The manuscript at Magdalene runs to roughly 3,100 unnumbered pages across six bound volumes, the first octavo and the rest quarto, covering 1 January 1659/60 to 31 May 1669. That description comes from the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, which lists the diary as Pepys Library MS 1836-41.
Most of those pages are not about fires or plagues. They are about dinners, wigs, the theatre, arguments with colleagues, boat trips, money, and music. The extraordinary entries exist because the ordinary habit was already running. Pepys was not a man who started a diary when the Fire began. He was a man who happened to be well into one.
That is the least romantic and most useful fact here. Virginia Woolf kept her diary for twenty six years; Thoreau’s journal reached two million words; neither knew in advance which day would matter. If you are still trying to build a journalling habit that sticks, the point is not to write well on the important days. It is to already be writing when one arrives.
My own longest unbroken run is about five years. What ended it was not burnout or a bad stretch. It was a backpacking trip, where I decided to stay in the moment rather than stop and write it down, and the gap ran five or six months. Pepys kept writing through a plague and a fire. I stopped for a good holiday. I do not think that is a moral failing so much as evidence for the same point: the habit breaks in exactly the places you would not predict, and the only thing that matters afterwards is whether you pick it up again.
8. The Private Script Nearly Cost Us the Whole Thing
Here is the part of the story that complicates the case for privacy. Pepys left his library, including the diary, to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where it still sits in the oak bookcases he had built in 1666 and arranged as he left it. And there it stayed, largely unread, for over a century, because Shelton’s shorthand had fallen out of use by the 1770s and nobody could read it.
It was the success of John Evelyn’s diary, published in 1818, that prompted the College to look again at the volumes on their own shelves. The job of deciphering went to John Smith, a nineteen year old undergraduate at St John’s College, who worked on it from 1819 to 1822 and was paid two hundred pounds. Nobody told him Pepys had used a standard published system, and he did not discover it himself until he was well into the work, so he reconstructed most of it from first principles.
In 1858 Smith wrote to the Illustrated London News describing what the work had been like. He had spent twelve to fourteen hours a day on it, and the manuscript, he said, was
much of it was in minute characters, greatly faded, and inscribed on almost transparent paper – very trying and injurious indeed to the visual organs.
Source: John Smith, letter to the Illustrated London News, 1858, quoted by Magdalene College, Cambridge.
I did not expect that symmetry and it stopped me when I found it. Pepys stopped writing because he thought the diary was destroying his eyes. A century and a half later the man who made the diary readable damaged his own eyes doing it. Smith’s transcript ran to fifty four volumes. Lord Braybrooke published an edition in 1825 under his own name, cut it heavily, and gave Smith a passing acknowledgement.
Every complete-ish edition since descends from that decipherment: Mynors Bright’s transcription in the 1870s, Wheatley’s 1893 edition now free on Project Gutenberg, and finally the unexpurgated Latham and Matthews edition in eleven volumes, published between 1970 and 1983, which restored what the Victorians had quietly removed. If you go looking for the racier passages in the Wheatley text you will find rows of full stops where they used to be.
9. The Last Entry Is About Losing the Ability to Write It
By 1669 Pepys was in real distress about his eyesight, and the diary ends because of it. The final entry is a completely normal day: accounts with Will Hewer, a meeting with the Duke of York, a walk in the park with his wife, a drink at a tavern called The World’s End. Then this:
And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand; and, therefore, whatever comes of it, I must forbear.
Source: entry for 31 May 1669, Wheatley edition.
He goes on to say he will have it kept by his staff in longhand instead, and immediately understands what that means: he will be “contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know.” The moment the writing has a reader, the honesty stops. He knew that in 1669.
The entry closes:
And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave: for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!
Source: entry for 31 May 1669, Wheatley edition.
He was wrong about the blindness. His sight improved after a holiday abroad that autumn and he lived another thirty four years, dying in 1703. He never resumed the diary in the same form. The most affecting ending in diary literature turns out to be a false alarm, and that somehow makes it worse rather than better.
Try this: write one entry as though it were the last one you would be able to write. Not a summary of your life. Just today, in full, with the thing you have been leaving out.
What the Diary Actually Argues
Pepys did not set out to produce a historical source. He set out to keep an account of himself, in a script chosen for speed and convenience, in a book nobody else was going to open. Everything that makes the diary valuable follows from that: the going back to sleep during the Fire, the buried cheese, the chewed tobacco in Drury Lane, the self-exposure he did not intend.
The lesson is not that you should write in code. It is that the value of a journal is inversely related to how much you are managing the impression it makes. A performed diary is a worse document and, I suspect, a less useful one to its own author.
Pepys is also proof that this needs no literary talent and no interesting life. He was a competent administrator with a good ear and no particular gift for prose. What he had was the habit, running quietly for nine years, already in motion when the city caught fire. If you want somewhere to start, start with an ordinary Tuesday.
There are entries in my own journals I would not hand to anyone, and I knew that while I was writing them. Not on a later reread, at the time. That is the part I keep coming back to. The discomfort was not a flaw in the record, it was the sign the record was working. Pepys had a shorthand to hide behind. Most of us just have a book nobody happens to open, and the honest entry still has to get written before you know whether you will regret it.
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Featured image: Samuel Pepys painted by John Hayls in 1666, holding a song he had composed. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
