This is a classic, once you've read it you never forget it, even if you didn't really like it.

FROM AMAZON: The Diary of Samuel Pepys is one of the most entertaining documents in English history. Written between 1660 and 1669, as Pepys was establishing himself as a key administrator in the naval office, it is an intimate portrait of life in 17th-century England covering his professional and personal activities, including, famously, his love of music, theatre, food, wine and his peccadilloes. ( )

Awarded as a fifth-form prize to Jeanne Mary Fisher (1931) by Hull High School for Girls ( )

"[Pepys Diary] is, in truth, the greatest autobiography in our language, and yet it was not deliberately written as such. When Mr. Pepys jotted down from day to day every quaint or mean thought which came into his head he would have been very much surprised had any one told him that he was doing a work quite unique
in our literature. Yet his involuntary auto- biography, compiled for some obscure reason or for private reference, but certainly never meant for publication, is as much the first in that line of literature as Boswell's book among biographies or Gibbon's among histories." -- Through the Magic Door, p. 87

A great book which takes you back more than three centuries back, in the turbulent London of the Civil War & Restoration. There are a number of obscure—and sometimes uninteresting—passages where Pepys details his problems at work. But they are intermixed with everyday-life details which show that life in the 17c. wasn't so different from that in the present time (e.g. ordering and delivery of a new coach, supervision of the work done by carpenters at home, problems with the cesspool, where to stop over in town when you needed to pass a motion, &c.) The reading of this 3-volume selection of the Diary incites me to seriously consider the reading of the full 11-vol version... ( )

plague, fire nell gwyn London of the 17th c ( )