Publishing Pepys
Two hundred years ago this month, Samuel Pepys’s diary was published to great acclaim. Readers of the first edition in 1825 relished Pepys’s ‘honest’ observations and ‘private anecdotes’. While writing his journal in the 1660s, Pepys had worked hard to keep it secret. He knew he was placing his livelihood at risk by recording seditious criticisms of his superiors, along with details of his own bribe-taking and sexually explicit accounts of his ‘amours’. There was much that, when writing, he did