In 1660 Samuel Pepys, an increasingly-important 26 year-old civil servant in London, began writing his diary. He stopped a decade later.

This site contains the full text of his diary, along with several letters sent or received by Pepys, plus thousands of pages of further information about the people, places and things in his world.

Each day's diary entry appears on the front page of the site towards the end of the day (UK time), starting with 1st January 1660 on 1st January 2023.

This is the third reading of the diary. The project began with the first reading in January 2002, ending in May 2012. The second reading ran from 2013 to 2022.

This site is run by Phil Gyford. If you have questions about the site you can email me at phil@gyford.com. If you have questions about Samuel Pepys, the diary, or 17th century London you may be better off joining the discussion group at Groups.io and asking people there.

Supporting this site

If you'd like to support the site financially, that is always welcome. You can make a one-off donation, or a monthly recurring one on Ko-fi.

If you would like to donate to a cause that this site relies on, the diary text we use comes from Project Gutenberg, an effort to make a vast number of copyright-free texts available online. Its work is conducted largely by volunteers, and you can donate to them. We also rely on Wikipedia who also accept donations.

Donors

Many thanks to the following for their kind contributions of gifts in the past: Roger Arbor, Alan Bedford, Todd Bernhardt, James B Collins and his 'European Civilization to 1789' class, Diarist.com, Peter Easton, David Gurliacci, Louise Hayes, Gerry Healy, Laura K, Jeannine Kerwin, Mary Knight, William Loughner, Sari Magaziner, Peter Mehlin, David Nix, R Rawlins, Carole Sargent, Evelyn Senior, Sharon, John Grahame Simmons, Glyn Thomas, Keith Wright and others.

(If you do not wish to be listed as a donor then let me know.)

Thanks

Extra special thanks to those who have contributed to the content and running of the site over the years. These include: Jeannine Kerwin (several In-Depth Articles, most of the Diary Summaries, and some Encyclopedia texts); Terry Foreman (many corrections and suggestions to diary texts); Max Wainer (flagging more than 1600 broken annotations); Alan Anderson (many Encyclopedia summaries); Dirk Van de Putte (some Story so Far summaries); Sue Nicholson (many book reviews and other articles); and all of the many annotators. Thank you.