The Diary of Samuel Pepys. - Brossura

On 1 January 1660 ("1 January 1659/1660" in contemporary terms) Pepys began to keep a diary. He recorded his daily life for almost ten years. This record of a decade of Pepys’s life is over a million words long and is often regarded as Britain’s most celebrated diary. In fact, Pepys has been called the greatest diarist of all time. This is due to his frankness in writing concerning his own weaknesses and the accuracy with which he records events of daily British life and major events in the 17th century. Pepys writes about the contemporary court and theater (including his amorous affairs with the actresses), his household and major political and social occurrences. To this day, historians still use his diary to gain greater insight and understanding of life in London in the 17th century. Pepys wrote consistently on subjects such as personal finances, the time he got up in the morning, the weather and what he ate. He talked at length about his new watch (that had an alarm—a new thing at the time), which he was very proud of, a country visitor who did not enjoy his time in London because he felt it was too crowded, and his cat waking him up at one in the morning. Because Pepys recorded even minor details, we have a much more thorough understanding of what everyday life would have been like for the British upper middle classes in the 1660s.