Pepys’s diary has always been regarded as a very strange text. From its first publication, the reasons why Pepys wrote about his life in such detail – and in such embarrassing detail – have puzzled readers, as has why he then preserved his diary for posterity. This introduction outlines Pepys’s life, the episodes from his diary that are the most famous, and the changing estimations of its importance as history and literature. It argues that one of the strangest things about this text is that, despite its fame, very few people have read the original, for Pepys wrote in shorthand with all printed texts being transcriptions into longhand. Answering some of the puzzles of Pepys’s diary means getting to grips with the shorthand, the censored versions in which the diary has circulated, and the strange things that readers have done with it.

This final chapter investigates what Pepys’s famously frank and comprehensive diary does not say – and how readers have dealt, or failed to deal, with those omissions. The focus is on a selection of the people mentioned in Pepys’s papers whose lives are barely mentioned in official documents or who went otherwise unrecorded: his wife Elizabeth, women and girls in whom he had a sexual interest, and certain of the Black people who worked for him or lived near him. Pepys’s diary and his other surviving records contain valuable information on their lives – information which shows Pepys to have been a sexual predator and an enslaver. For a range of reasons, these are aspects of his life missing from his popular reputation. Getting the most from the diary, and using it to explore the lives of others, requires understanding and countering influential traditions about Pepys and how his diary should be read.

This chapter looks at the evidence of Pepys’s diary manuscript and at the implications of Pepys’s decision to write in shorthand. These are dimensions usually missing from discussion of this key source, for the nature of Pepys’s shorthand is generally not well understood by commentators. Pepys used Thomas Shelton’s shorthand system, known as ‘tachygraphy’. The chapter begins by explaining how this system worked and how it shaped Pepys’s prose style. With illustrations from Pepys’s manuscript, it uses his description of the Great Fire and Charles II’s coronation to show how his pages differ from what is in print. It then explores the escalating methods of disguise that he developed for sexual passages and the implications of this. Finally, it considers what his manuscript tells us about his intentions in writing, especially about his sense of who might read his diary.

Pepys kept his diary for more than nine years, covering a variety of topics that is unrivalled among seventeenth-century diarists. This chapter explores why and how he did so, drawing on recent work which has expanded our sense of early modern life-writing. Pepys turned the methods seen in religious diaries and financial recording to his own ends. His diary’s purposes developed to include assessing his social status and his health; storing useful anecdotes; and relishing illicit pleasures. To illustrate Pepys’s techniques his account of Charles II’s coronation is examined, alongside his friend John Evelyn’s account of the same event. Pepys’s diary was a dynamic text: it evolved in response to Pepys’s changing needs and was intended to act upon him, stimulating favourable change in him and for him.

The later nineteenth century saw expanded editions of Pepys’s diary by Lord Braybrooke (1848-49), Mynors Bright (1875–79), and Henry Wheatley (1893–99). This chapter surveys the publication of these editions and the responses to them as Pepys’s fame grew. Each new edition was accompanied by swirling rumours about what was left out. The diary inspired parodies, paintings, historical fiction, and articles in children’s magazines. A dominant theme in these creative responses was imagining what the censored texts had omitted, especially about the women in Pepys’s life. By the late nineteenth century, Pepys featured in formal education as a representative of the Restoration, but his name was also shorthand for unorthodox and fun history. The popularity of the comical version of Pepys sparked discussions about the purpose of history, notably via stress on Pepys’s role in naval and imperial history.

Pepys’s diary was first published in 1825, in a highly selective version edited by Lord Braybrooke. This was a starkly different journal from the versions read today, cutting most of Pepys’s personal life, his details of everyday London and (with the exception of some court scandal) all the sex. This chapter investigates how the diary came to be published, including the shrewd tactics of the diary’s shorthand transcriber John Smith and its publisher Henry Colburn. On release, the diary drew influential admirers such as the novelist Walter Scott and the historian Thomas Macaulay. Early responses focused on the diary’s value as entertainment, on censorship, and on the questions that it raised about historical value. The chapter considers how the diary changed – or did not change – ideas of the Restoration period, the diary’s influence on the writing of social history, and the extent to which its publication followed Pepys’s plans for his library.

The first half of the twentieth century saw a veritable industry spring up around Pepys. Three best-selling biographies by Arthur Bryant were influential in establishing Pepys as an English hero, while novels about Pepys’s wife Elizabeth mocked attitudes towards the diary advocated in mainstream historical works. Spurring much of this interest, however, was the experience of two world wars. To trace the roles the diary performed during wartime this chapter looks at three very different productions: the long-running diary parody by R. M. Freeman (1909–46); the war diaries of one of Pepys’s readers, Constance Miles (1939–43); and the post-war BBC drama The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1958). In wartime, Pepys’s portrayal as an ‘ordinary’ Englishman proved more effective than his representation as a heroic figure. The journal and its adaptations legitimated a range of emotional responses to disturbing times.

On his death in 1703, Pepys left his library to his old college, instructing that it be preserved ‘for the benefit of posterity’. Among this collection was his diary. This chapter demonstrates that Pepys’s choice to save his journal was part of wider plans to shape the historical record. It was a response to the hostile political climate of the 1690s and to the types of histories then being written. Pepys was an expert in creating and controlling archives – his own and others. He intended his diary to be read alongside his naval records and in conditions that would secure it a sympathetic reception. Pepys’s collecting also shows he had an expansive sense of what (and who) might be worthy of future historians’ attention. What he termed his ‘scheme’ for his library’s future was, ultimately, a design on future readers and we need to factor this in when interpreting his records.

The afterword draws together arguments made in previous chapters about the creation, publication, and reception of Pepys’s diary. It briefly surveys the reputation and uses of the diary in the early twenty-first century and considers what the future of the diary might hold.

This chapter tells the story of how the uncensored text of Pepys’s diary was finally published in the late twentieth century, before turning to the diary’s online presence in the twenty-first century. The complete text, edited by Latham and Matthews, appeared between 1970 and 1983. However, the decision to publish the diary in full was made much earlier, at the time of the controversial Lady Chatterley trial (1960). Getting all the diary into print required navigating the new law against obscene publications, with implications for how the diary is read today. International collaboration – and behind-the-scenes controversy – also shaped this edition. Collaboration is likewise a feature of the site pepysdiary.com (2003-present), which attracts an international community of readers. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, this site became a record of how readers worldwide used Pepys’s history to interpret a contemporary plague.

The author’s remembrance of actors speaking in Shakespearean plays is one of loss but also of delight. Memory, as Virgil put it (‘forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit’), may bring pleasure or benefit or help, depending on how iuvabit is translated. For Virgil, memory may be therapeutic and/or affective, as Shakespeare knew as he reworked Virgil’s phrase. But the pleasure of remembering Shakespeare is palpable in the voices of the people interviewed in Cecilia Rubino’s documentary film, Remembering Shakespeare (2016), and in the laughter memory generates in Thomas Tomkis’s play Lingua (1607), the records of what Simon Forman wanted to remember of performances he had seen and in the diary comments on plays seen by Samuel Pepys.

Fortified as a Parliamentarian stronghold under Oliver Cromwell, Cambridge emerged from the English Civil War intact, and flourished under the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. A great age of science and architecture at Cambridge followed, inspired by Trinity fellow Isaac Newton and architect-mathematician Christopher Wren. Stephanie Boyd explains why the building of college courts, chapels and libraries boomed in this period, and classical masterpieces such as the Wren Library at Trinity sprung up. Comparison is drawn between the fine Cambridge colleges and the squalor of the town, and the impact of the Great Plague on townspeople and scholars. The contributions of individuals such as Francis Bacon and Pepys are included, along with local businessman Thomas Hobson, originator of both fresh water to the town from Nine Wells and the expression ‘Hobson’s Choice’.