Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys, clerk of the Acts of the Navy Board, held an influential position in the royal bureaucracy of seventeenthcentury England. He was well known to the king and the court of England, but his literary fame rests on his lengthy diary and his ability to take down the minute details of his everyday life in sometimes exhausting detail. By reading Pepys' diary, the modern student of historical London can take a vivid tour of life as it was lived more than three centuries ago and grow closely acquainted with Pepys' opinions, emotions, and outlook on life.

Pepys, who was born in 1633, experienced firsthand the London plague of 1665. In the following diary extracts, he describes what he saw, his own moody cast of mind at the thought of his own mortality, and the general fear and chaos...