Pepys’ Diary

Pepys almost certainly learned shorthand when he was an undergraduate at Magdalene College. He used a type of shorthand which had been invented around 1626 by Thomas Shelton. Entitled “Zeiglographia, or a new art of shorthand writing” it ran to many editions over the next 80 years.

Shelton’s was a popular and widely used shorthand, which makes it unlikely that Pepys was trying to keep his diary, or as he called it himself, his journal, safe from prying eyes. Many of his contemporaries could have read it. When he wished to keep his philandering secret he used a mixture of foreign languages, which would not have been difficult for any educated person of his day to decipher.

The diary contains over one million words & many of the occurrences mentioned in it, for example the dates on which he saw certain plays, are the only existing records of such plays’ first nights. His very personal account of the fire of London is unsurpassed by any other writer.

Why he kept a diary at all no one really knows, it may have been because he sensed that the Commonwealth was coming to an end and that he wished to record public events. But right from the start he mixes affairs of state with personal entries about himself, his household, their health, the weather and other day to day subjects. He started it on January 1st 1660 and continued for 9½ years. He wrote his journal in ordinary soft backed notebooks which he bought as required and he ruled a margin on each page. The notebooks were then bound together in 6 volumes, each of which was given a leather cover. They vary in size as there was no standard size for notebooks and the paper was cut to different sizes

as required. The effect of the eyestrain which caused him to stop writing in 1669 is apparent when comparing the first page of the diary with the last, the shorthand symbols are larger and more widely spaced in 1669. He had tried many types of visual aids to attempt to improve his vision but none was really successful . He almost certainly suffered from astigmatism which needs cylindrical shaped lenses to                                               correct it. These were not available in his lifetime and the spherical lenses which were prescribed would have only slightly helped to correct his eyesight problems. Working late at night in his office by candlelight  caused him to strain to try to focus which aggravated the problem.

The diary was first published in 1825 by Lord Braybrooke who had employed a poor clergyman, John Smith, to translate the diaries. He struggled for seven years to achieve his task, having to work out what

the shorthand symbols meant and sadly never knowing that along the shelf on which the diary volumes were kept, was a copy of Shelton’s Tachygraphy, with which his task would have been vastly easier.Only part of the diary was produced as Braybrooke considered parts of it to obscene to publish. Various other editions were published over the years until finally the complete diary, blots, crossings out and every word of text was edited by Professors Matthews and Latham and published mostly by Bell & Sons & the last two volumes by Bell & Hyman.