Home, and to Bed to Supper

Samuel Pepys witnessed everything: fires, the plague, the executions of monarchs. But in his diaries he recorded not only major politics—there are also family squabbles, flirting with a maid, and noisy feasts with friends.

This selection from an eleven-volume corpus is a vivid, sharp, and astonishingly candid portrait of Restoration-era London.

The English statesman Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) enjoyed an impressive career and left behind diaries of everyday life in Restoration London, where his rare literary talent shines through.

He lived alongside such milestones as the execution of Charles I and the return of the monarchy, the Great Fire of London and the plague epidemic, and he described them with temperament, detail, and a lively tone. With the same effortless ease, Pepys writes about wars with the Netherlands and theatrical premieres, his service at the Admiralty and friendly bouts of heavy drinking, his quarrels with his wife and his courtship of a maid.

His notes formed a cycle of eleven volumes; in this edition, selected excerpts are brought together to give the reader a coherent picture of the everyday life, domestic life, and customs of the most varied strata of English society in the seventeenth century.