4. What are the impressions of life in the seventeenth-century London reflected in the diary of Samuel Pepys?
The Diary of Samuel Pepys is considered to be a unique document in the annals of English literature. Pepys narrates his memoirs in an honest reporting style, recording both common and historic daily events with a reporter’s style of description. For example, on October 13, 1660, Pepys describes the historic event of the execution of Charles I’s enemies as follows: “I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered.” But, in the same entry, Pepys relates the events of his comparatively ordinary afternoon: “setting up shelves in my study.” Pepys’s description gets more detailed when he is suitably inspired. One of the most famous examples from the narrative is Pepys’s description of the Great Fire of London in 1666, in which he offers his assistance. Says Pepys in an unusually descriptive diary entry on September 2, 1666: “The houses, too, so very thick thereabouts, and full of matter of burning, as pitch and tar, in Thames-street; and warehouses of oyle, and wines, and brandy, and other things.” Pepys notes other aspects of the fire with colourful descriptions such as “almost burned with a shower of fire-drops” and “the crackling of houses at their ruine.” As a reader of his Diary, one could be amused by his frank, uncensored portrait of life in London at the time of the Restoration. Pepys not only offers his firsthand perspective on the major events during the Restoration, which includes his own role in helping to bring Charles II back from exile to become king, and his aid in both the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666, but he also proposes the most remarkable image of a human being that one can potentially possess. This coverage gives The Diary of Samuel Pepys a historic distinction as well as a literary one. A good metaphor to suggest Pepys’s way of constructing his Diary would be that his entries,...