Samuel Pepys and his World

Samuel Pepys, with his insatiable curiosity, his sociable disposition, and the ample opportunities provided by his office, was ideally equipped to explore the London in which he lived.

It was small by modern standards, and we can see it through his own eyes, as he never intended us to see it.

His diary, written in a shorthand that is almost a secret code, is both a guide to a London that was scarcely more than a big village, and a self-portrait of an outstanding man.

He was a first-class administrator, one of the makers of the Royal Navy

He was a sociable man-about-town, a founder-member of the Royal Society, a bibliophile and amateur musician, and a connoisseur of pretty wenches.

Pepys’s life spanned seven of the most eventful decades of English history.

As a young man of sixteen he saw Charles I beheaded.

Near the end of Pepys life, William of Orange landed in Devon.

In the years between he lived through the Restoration of the monarchy, the Plague and the Great Fire of London.

In the pages of his diary we meet characters as varied as King Charles II (‘he runs in debt every day’), Nell Gwyn (‘even prettier than I thought’), his patron and cousin Mountagu (‘my lord’), and above all his young, attractive, exasperating wife Elizabeth.

With many quotations from the best-known and best-loved diary in English literature, Geoffrey Trease brings Pepys the man, and Restoration London, vividly to life.

Geoffrey Trease (1909-1998) was the author of more than one hundred books, including children’s books. He revolutionised children’s literature and was one of the first authors to deliberately appeal to both boys and girls through strong leading characters of both genders. In 1966 Trease won the New York Herald Tribune Book Award This is Your Century.