Introduction

There are years that pass unnoticed, leaving barely a trace in the memory of those who live through them, and there are years that fracture the world so completely that everything afterward is measured against them. For London, and for the man whose private journal you now hold, the year 1665 was unmistakably the latter. It was a year of catastrophe and contradiction, of terror walking openly in the streets and of ordinary life stubbornly insisting on continuing. It was a year in which a great city emptied of its frightened wealthy, in which church bells tolled until the sound itself became unbearable, and in which one ambitious, observant, endlessly curious clerk of the Navy continued — almost incredibly — to record his appetites, his anxieties, his small triumphs, and his secret shames with a candor that has never been equaled in the English language.

What you are about to read is not a history book written long after the fact, polished by hindsight and shaped by the knowledge of how things turned out. It is something far rarer and far more intimate: the day-by-day record of a living, breathing human being who did not know what tomorrow would bring, written in the moment, for no eyes but his own. Samuel Pepys never intended for you to read these words. He wrote them in a private shorthand, locked away in volumes he expected no other person to decipher. That fact alone transforms the experience of reading him. There is no performance here, no carefully managed self-image meant for posterity. There is only a man talking to himself, honestly, in the dark, about the most extraordinary year of his life.

This edition presents the complete diary for the year 1665 in a modern translation, adapted for the contemporary reader. The dating follows the New Style (N.S.) convention, which aligns Pepys’s calendar with the way we reckon time today and spares you the confusion that often surrounds seventeenth-century records, when England still clung to an older system that placed it days and even calendar years out of step with much of Europe. The result is a text that reads cleanly and naturally, while preserving the unmistakable voice of the man himself. What follows in this introduction is meant to prepare you — to set the stage, to explain who this man was and why his ordinary observations have become extraordinary treasures, and to help you read him as he deserves to be read. We will take care not to spoil the journey, for half the pleasure of Pepys lies in discovering, alongside him, what each day holds.

To understand why this diary matters, you must first understand the peculiar accident of its survival and the even more peculiar nature of the mind that produced it. Samuel Pepys was, by any conventional measure, a successful man of his era but not a famous one. He was an administrator, a naval official, a rising figure in the bureaucracy of Restoration England. Had he never kept a diary, he would today be a minor footnote in the dry institutional histories of the English navy — competent, industrious, useful, and entirely forgotten by the general public. Instead, because he chose to write down his life in a private cipher between 1660 and 1669, he has become perhaps the most vividly known human being of the entire seventeenth century. We know more about his thoughts, his feelings, his marriage, his ambitions, his fears, and his vices than we know about kings and queens who commanded armies and shaped the destinies of nations.

The reason is simple: Pepys wrote without filter. Because he believed no one would ever read his words, he had no incentive to flatter himself or to disguise his failings. When he behaved badly — and he often did — he wrote it down. When he was petty, jealous, vain, or grasping, he recorded it with the same matter-of-fact attention he gave to the price of a barrel of oysters or the cut of a new coat. He wrote about money obsessively, tracking his growing wealth with the anxious delight of a man who had known what it was to have little. He wrote about his marriage with a frankness that can be by turns tender, infuriating, and heartbreaking. He wrote about his own body, his illnesses, his pleasures, his entertainments at the theater, his nights of too much wine, his quarrels with servants, and his complicated, often guilt-ridden entanglements with other women.

This unguarded honesty is precisely what makes him so valuable and so endlessly readable. History, as it is usually written, gives us the great events stripped of their texture. We learn that a war was fought, a plague raged, a city burned. But we rarely learn what it actually felt like to be alive inside those events — what people ate on the morning they heard terrible news, what they wore, what they worried about, what gossip they exchanged, what they bought to comfort themselves, how they slept. Pepys gives us all of this. He restores the human dimension that formal history strips away. Reading him, you do not merely learn about the past; you inhabit it. You walk the streets of London beside him, you sit in the taverns and coffeehouses, you attend the plays, you handle the documents, you feel the rising dread as rumors of sickness begin to circulate.

It helps to know a little of where Pepys stood in life by the time this particular year opened. He was a man on the rise, no longer the obscure young clerk he had once been, but not yet the eminent figure he would eventually become. His work for the Navy Board placed him at the intersection of money, power, and the machinery of state. England in these years was a kingdom restless and ambitious, freshly governed by a restored monarchy after the upheavals of civil war and the austere experiment of the Commonwealth. The old certainties had been overthrown and then partially restored, and the country was feeling its way forward, hungry for prosperity, for pleasure, for trade, and for empire. Pepys was perfectly positioned to observe all of it, and temperamentally perfectly suited to record it. He was insatiably curious about everything — music, science, books, architecture, women, food, ships, money, fashion, gossip — and he possessed the rare gift of noticing. Most people pass through their days without truly seeing them. Pepys saw, and he wrote it all down.

His prose, even in modern translation, carries an irresistible momentum. He moves from the trivial to the momentous and back again without pause, capturing the genuine rhythm of a human mind. In a single entry he might discuss a matter of grave national importance, complain about a dinner that disagreed with him, record a quarrel with his wife, note a new piece of music he had learned, and end with a private confession of guilt — all rendered with the same vivid immediacy. This is not the careful narrative of an author crafting a story. It is the living pulse of an actual life, captured before it could be smoothed into anything tidier. That rawness is the source of its power. You will find yourself growing genuinely fond of him, then exasperated with him, then moved by him, often within the same page — exactly as one might feel about a real and complicated friend.

It is worth saying a word here about the moral texture of the diary, because a reader coming to Pepys for the first time deserves to know what to expect. He was a man of his time, and he held many of the assumptions of his time. He could be self-serving, acquisitive, and, in his private dealings, far from saintly. His treatment of his wife in particular reveals a man capable of real affection and real cruelty, sometimes within hours of each other. None of this is hidden in the pages ahead, because Pepys hid nothing from himself. The modern reader may at times wince, at times disapprove, at times feel a flash of recognition uncomfortably close to home. This is not a flaw of the diary; it is its triumph. We are reading a genuine human being, not a hero, and the experience is the richer for it. To meet Pepys is to be reminded that the people of the past were neither nobler nor baser than we are — only differently situated, wrestling with the same eternal mixture of nobility and weakness that defines us all.

The reason this single year has been drawn out from the larger diary and presented on its own is that 1665 brought to London a calamity of almost unimaginable scale, and Pepys lived through the heart of it. This was the year of the Great Plague, the last and most devastating outbreak of bubonic plague to strike the city. Before it had run its course, it would kill a staggering proportion of London’s population — tens of thousands of people in a matter of months, in a city far smaller than the one we know today. Whole neighborhoods were depopulated. The streets, normally choked with commerce and noise, fell silent except for the carts that came at night to collect the dead. Houses where the sickness appeared were sealed up, sometimes with the living trapped inside alongside the dying, marked with a painted cross and the desperate prayer, “Lord, have mercy upon us.”

What makes Pepys’s account of this catastrophe so uniquely valuable is that he did not flee — at least not entirely, and not at first. While much of the wealthy and powerful population of London abandoned the city for the relative safety of the countryside, Pepys, bound by duty and ambition and a stubborn streak of his own, remained largely at his post through the worst of it. This means that you are about to read one of the only firsthand, intimate, daily accounts of what it was actually like to live in a great city during one of the deadliest epidemics in recorded history. You will not be reading a historian’s reconstruction. You will be reading the words of a man who watched it happen around him, who counted the rising numbers in the weekly bills of mortality with growing horror, who decided whether or not to risk a walk down a particular street, who weighed his fear against his obligations and his appetites, and who recorded all of it as it unfolded, never knowing whether he himself would survive to write the next entry.

This perspective gives the year a tension that no novelist could improve upon. There is a terrible, mounting dread that builds across these pages. The plague does not arrive all at once. It comes gradually, first as distant rumor, then as something happening in other parts of town, then as a creeping presence drawing nearer and nearer to Pepys’s own door. We watch him calculate and recalculate his risks. We watch him make arrangements for his wife and his household. We watch the ordinary rhythms of his life — the business, the pleasures, the social calls — become steadily more strained and more difficult as the city around him hollows out. And yet, remarkably, life does go on. People still conduct business. They still fall in love and quarrel. They still attend to their ambitions and their amusements where they can. The juxtaposition of catastrophe and ordinary human persistence is one of the most haunting and instructive aspects of the entire year.

A modern reader cannot help but bring fresh eyes to all of this. We have, in recent years, learned something we had perhaps forgotten — what it feels like to live through a time when a contagion empties the streets, when daily life is reorganized around fear of infection, when we count the numbers each day and feel them rise, when we must decide how much risk to accept in order to continue living. Pepys’s account, written more than three and a half centuries ago, speaks to that experience with an uncanny directness. The medicine is different, the science is absent, the explanations are superstitious or wrong, but the human heart is exactly the same. The fear, the rationalizations, the gallows humor, the grief, the strange guilty relief at one’s own survival, the determination to find joy where one can — all of it is here, recognizable across the centuries. To read this year of Pepys’s life now is to feel a profound and slightly eerie kinship with a man who has been dead for three hundred years, and to understand that the human responses to catastrophe are remarkably constant.