By Samuel’s account, the marriage was an affectionate one, but complicated by his jealousy of her friendships with other men and, even moreso, by his own philandering. Most of what we know about what Elisabeth was like comes filtered through Samuel’s diary, which is unfortunate it would be thrilling to discover her own perspective on the period and on their marriage.

Pepys’ diary provides an extraordinary window into both high politics and ordinary experience in a key decade in English history.ĭuring the period of the diary, Pepys was married his wife Elisabeth was the daughter of French immigrants, and she was not quite fifteen years old when they married in 1655 (Samuel was 22). Pepys was a man of tremendous energy–he sometimes got up at 4 or 5 in the morning to get started on the day’s work in the office–and reveled openly in the sensual pleasures of good food, entertainment, sex, and his growing wealth and the material goods it enabled him to acquire.

He made daily records of everything–the money he spent, the people he visited, the plays he saw, the songs he sang (he was a good amateur musician). Pepys was trained as an accountant, and he brings the thorough documentary habits of a bookkeeper to the task of recording his experience. The diary is also rich with the stuff of daily life. Pepys is holding a piece of music that he had composed. Samuel Pepys, painted by John Hayls in 1666 (National Portrait Gallery, London). And as an important figure in the administration of the Royal Navy, he became a participant as well in the machinery of the state. Pepys began writing his diary just weeks before the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and he was even on the ship that was sent to bring Charles II back to England. He was an eyewitness to Charles’s coronation, to the Great Fire of London in 1666, to a terrible occurrence of the plague, and to the wars that England fought with the Dutch in that decade, wars that turned out to be crucially important to establishing England as the dominant naval power in the north Atlantic. In part this is because Pepys was writing at a fascinating moment, and, living in London and working for the government, he was in a good position to see important historical events take place in real time. The diary that Samuel Pepys (pronounced “peeps,” 1633-1703) kept from 1660 to 1669 is the most famous diary written in the English language.

In from the diary of samuel pepys