The Confessions of Samuel Pepys

Private Revelations from Britain's Most Famed Diarist

Guy de la Bédoyère

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2026
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9798897100750
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

A remarkable collection of the most personal aspects of Samuel Pepys’ diaries, in celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of their publication.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys is the most celebrated personal journal in the English language.

Pepys's candid revelations as he forged his career as a civilian naval official in Restoration London have fascinated readers ever since the first selection was published in 1825. This book focuses on Pepys’s controversial private life and is geared for a contemporary readership by charting his varied and complex relationships with women. These included his wife, Elizabeth—whom he both loved and treated abominably—their domestic servants, the mistresses whom he secretly visited in Westminster and Deptford, the great ladies of the court whom he ogled, and the actresses and other female friends whose company he delighted in and combined with casual flirting. All these he recounted in shorthand, often disguising the more salacious occasions in his own cryptic Franco-Latino polyglot or with a primitive system of extraneous consonants.

Most of these controversial entries were excised from nineteenth century editions, but all are featured here in completely new transcriptions—with Pepys’s secret code translated—following fresh forensic examination from the original shorthand diary. The Confessions of Samuel Pepys also reveals how all previous transcribers of the diary, as well as many of his biographers, have deliberately avoided this controversial element of Pepys’s reputation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Introduction: Music and Women I Cannot But Give Way To
• Chapter 1: 1660 – Nulla Puella Negat
• Chapter 2: 1661 – I Did Please Myself By Strength Of Fancy
• Chapter 3: 1662 – I Glutted Myself With Looking On Her
• Chapter 4: 1663 – So Deadly Full Of Jealousy
• Chapter 5: 1664 – I Did Arrive At What I Would, With Great Pleasure
• Chapter 6: 1665 – In The End I Had My Will Of Her
• Chapter 7: 1666 – She Would Now Have Done Anything
• Chapter 8: 1667 – My Mind Running On This Pretty Girl
• Chapter 9: 1668 – Very Great Sorrow With My Wife By My Folly
• Chapter 10: 1669 – Now My Amours To Deb Are Past
• Epilogue
• Principal Dates
• Glossary of Pepys’s Polyglot
• Glossary of People and Places
• Photographs
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index
• List of Illustrations
• Image Descriptions
• Copyright