Apostrophe — Bert Collins’s Blog

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

There’s some good news (if a little belated).  Samuel Pepys reports:

Then comes my wife, and I set her to get supper ready against I go to the Duke of Albemarle and back again; and at the Duke’s with great joy I received the good news of the decrease of the plague this week to 70…

Pepys diary for January 3rd 1665/6  (We’d call it 1666, but they didn’t start their new year until March for legal purposes) rejoices in the lowest death rate in twenty years, but notes it may be because of  “the want of people in London.” His daily concerns are eerily contemporary–greed, corruption, war, cronyism and lust. Sometimes his remarks are a little obscure, but they are elucidated by notes and reader annotations.

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