The Illustrated Pepys

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With his unquenchable joy in life and endless curiosity, Pepys serves as the perfect diarist for general readers. His writings capture the public events of 1660s London—Restoration politics, the Dutch War, the Plague, and the Great Fire—while also providing a richly entertaining account of his colorful private life. Few in English history have conveyed their experiences so vividly. Pepys's diary is widely regarded as the most remarkable in the English language, yet it was previously impossible to publish it as he originally wrote it due to limited scholarly work and legal restrictions on its candid passages, particularly those detailing his active love life. In 1960, two scholars, Professor William Matthews, an expert on the diary's shorthand, and Robert Latham, a historian of the period, undertook a fresh study of the manuscript. They produced a new version published in nine volumes, making the complete text accessible for the first time. This edition, lavishly illustrated with contemporary materials, offers a representative selection, containing about one-twelfth of the original 1,300,000 words while preserving the flavor and variety of Pepys's original writings.