23rd February: Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist, was born on this date in 1633.

1. Samuel Pepys is best known for his diary - but he had a day job. He was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament. Although he had no maritime experience, he was a talented administrator and studied hard to become the Chief Secretary to the Admiralty under both King Charles II and King James II.
2. He was born in Fleet Street in London, the fifth of eleven children, and the oldest to survive. At 22, he married Elisabeth de St Michel, who was just 14.
3. He was plagued with ill health and pain for much of his early life, due to bladder stones in his urinary tract, probably inherited since his mother and brother also suffered from it. By his mid 20s, it had got so bad that he decided to have surgery - not an easy option in those times as the procedure was risky and painful. The surgery was a success initially and for many years, Pepys celebrated the anniversary of his operation. However, the incision on his bladder broke open again late in his life, and there is speculation that the operation, or the condition, was the reason he never had any children.
4. He started his diary on 1 January 1660 and the opening paragraphs are certainly evidence that he wasn't childfree by choice. He wrote: "Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain but upon taking of cold. I lived in Axe yard, having my wife and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three. My wife, after the absence of her terms for seven weeks, gave me hopes of her being with child, but on the last day of the year she hath them again."
5. He carried on writing his diary until 1669, when he stopped because his eyesight was failing. He considered dictating it to someone else, but never did, because the diary would no longer be private. The only journals he did dictate after this were work related ones - a record of his dealings with the Commissioners of Accounts and a trip to Tangier, Morocco during its evacuation by the English.
6. That the diary remain private was important to Pepys. He wrote a lot of it in code and shorthand, writing in detail about his extra-marital affairs, including one with Deborah Willet, a young woman engaged as a companion for his wife. Pepys described one encounter when his wife caught him groping her companion. Even so, he took great pains to preserve and bind his diary and keep it in his extensive library as if he knew it would be of interest in the future.
7. Some things we know about Pepys from his diary: he was interested in books, music, the theatre, and science; he also loved music - he composed, and played the lute, viol, Violin, flageolet, recorder, and spinet - he even arranged music lessons for his servants; he was a keen singer, performing at home, in coffee houses, and even in Westminster Abbey; he taught his wife to sing and paid for dancing lessons (which stopped when he became jealous of her teacher); he was curious and acted on impulse; like people today, he made New Year resolutions to give up Wine (on New Year's Eve 1661, for example he wrote that he had "taken a solemn oath about abstaining from plays and wine", but on 17 February 1662, he wrote that he'd lapsed: "I drank wine upon necessity, being ill for the want of it.") he he was very proud of a new watch with an alarm; he had a Cat which would wake him at one in the morning; he thought London too crowded. He consistently recorded things like what time he got up, the weather and what he had to eat (he would have loved Facebook!) and his diary is over a million words long.
8. He also wrote about the historical and political events of the day such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War, and the Great fire of London. It was Pepys who recommended to the king that homes in the path of the fire be pulled down in order to stem its progress, and that the Navy Office should evacuate to Greenwich to escape the plague.
9. Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica contains a probability problem, called the "Newton–Pepys problem", that arose out of correspondence between Newton and Pepys about whether one is more likely to roll at least one six with six Dice or at least two sixes with twelve dice.
10. The diaries have been adapted for film TV and radio. Pepys has been portrayed in modern times by Steve Coogan, Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey) and Bill Nighy.