Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys (1633 – 1703) was a Member of Parliament and an administrator of the English Navy but is most famous today for the voluminous diary he kept for a decade as a young man. His detailed private diary, kept from 1660 until 1669, was first published in the 19th century and is considered by many to be an important primary source of the English Restoration period. It provides a personal view with eyewitness accounts of the era’s great events, such as the Second Dutch War, the Great Plague of London in 1665, and the Great Fire of London. By turns mundane, literary, poignant, and even scintillating, Pepys’s diary entries are often marked by a standard beginning, “Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health … ” and an equally standard ending, “ … and so to bed.”