The secrecy of Pepys’s diary has, ironically, helped win it millions of readers. Since the diary was first published, Pepys’s use of shorthand has been taken as a powerful voucher for his accuracy and credibility. As Pepys’s first editor put it, shorthand allowed him to record ‘his most secret thoughts’ with ‘exactness’ and without fear of discovery. (For an example of what this shorthand looks like, see Figure 2.3 on p. 43). Publishers portrayed Pepys’s efforts at disguise as part of the diary’s allure: early editions were advertised as ‘deciphered’ from the ‘original short-hand MS.’ or from Pepys’s ‘MS. cypher’.¹ Readers’ interest naturally focuses on the secrets hidden, rather than the ‘cypher’ that hides them. Yet Pepys’s shorthand itself conveyed meaning and it was integral to how he conceived of his diary. He signalled this in his final entry. Continuing the diary in its current form, he wrote, would be ‘to undo my eyes’, but the alternative could only be inferior. He imagined he would have it

Here he was clear that the chief virtue of shorthand was masking information not fit for ‘all the world to know’. By 1669 he had come to see private information (especially his ‘pleasures’) as the chief reason for his diary’s existence.

While Pepys regarded shorthand as vital to his purposes, it has generally been seen by commentators as interesting in principle, but not necessary to engage with in practice. Nineteenth-century editors had almost nothing to say about Pepys’s ‘cypher’ – it was the enticing idea of a code cracked that mattered. Their silence stemmed chiefly from ignorance. In the first hundred and forty years of the diary’s publication, only one of the men who oversaw a major edition could read shorthand: Mynors Bright, who produced the 1870s text. The others – Lord Braybrooke (in the 1820s to the 1850s) and Henry Wheatley (in the 1890s) – relied on transcripts that were the work of others. In the 1960s this changed: William Matthews was employed to work on the diary because of his shorthand expertise, while his fellow editor, Robert Latham, learned to read it on the job.³ Matthews’s description of Pepys’s manuscript in the introduction to the complete edition is the sole authority for most contemporary discussion. Today only a handful of people in the world can read Pepys’s shorthand. It remains extremely unusual for anyone writing on Pepys to have spent time with the six volumes of his manuscript, let alone read any of it. This has led to misconceptions about just what is possible using shorthand and how easy Pepys’s text is to understand.⁴ A detailed investigation of Pepys’s use of shorthand in the diary, his secrecy, and what that secrecy reveals is long overdue.

Considering the diary as a shorthand text means upending some of the assumptions that underlie how it is usually understood. As readers, if we think about shorthand at all, it tends to be as a kind of cover that Pepys added to his text, one which has to be removed to expose the original meaning in English. Instead, the reverse is true. The shorthand is the original text, and the English we read in printed editions is constructed from it: it is the printed English longhand that has to be “seen through” if we want to better appreciate the information Pepys’s diary conveys. Pepys’s diary volumes have other properties that are lost or mediated in printed editions; for example, the layout, longhand, and his varying use of shorthand all carry meaning. Most notoriously, part way through his diary, Pepys began to use a mixture of English, French, Spanish and other languages to write up some of his sexual encounters. A reader of the manuscript therefore must contend not only with Pepys’s shorthand, but with his idiosyncratic polyglot shorthand. It means we need to ask not just ‘what does this passage mean?’ but ‘what might it mean that it takes this form?’ Getting to grips with Pepys’s methods can be tricky, but it rewards the effort – not least because it contains clues about his thoughts on whether his diary might, one day, find readers.

Shorthand in England

Many people in seventeenth-century England judged shorthand a skill worth learning. The ability to note down speech quickly using symbols had both personal and professional uses. Visiting London in 1641, Jan Amos Komenský was struck by the ‘large number of men and youths’ who took shorthand notes of sermons, a phenomenon he regarded as peculiarly English.⁵ Besides being a fashionable aspect of devotional practice, shorthand was a desirable skill in administrators, although it was far from essential: in 1668, Sir William Coventry, Pepys’s ally who himself used shorthand, was seeking a new clerk with ‘shorthand if it may be’. In the 1660s and 1670s, Pepys had men working under him in the Navy Office who used various shorthands, including Will Hewer, the man who became his surrogate son.⁶ Men and women wanting to acquire this skill could do so via paying a tutor or purchasing a manual. Rival shorthand teachers vigorously advertised their systems on posts around London and published books describing their methods.⁷ Pepys chose to learn one of the most popular systems, Thomas Shelton’s ‘Tachygraphy’ (‘swift-writing’). Like many shorthands, this had been devised with sermon note-takers in mind and contained special symbols for their convenience. Pepys could have picked up shorthand as a boy in London but, since Shelton and his publishers targeted university students, he probably learned it at Cambridge in the 1650s.⁸ It must have looked like a sound investment of time and money: shorthand was good for recording university lectures and debates; it would be a useful skill in his likely line of work as a clerk; and – since it saved on paper and ink – it was a money-saving measure in the long term.

When Shelton advertised tachygraphy’s benefits, the first he noted was its ‘secrecie’: it allowed a man to write down ‘that which he would not have every one acquainted with […] for his owne private use onely’. Its other advantages were ‘brevitie, celeritie, and perpetuity’ (meaning, he explained, preserving ‘things of good use […] which otherwise had bin lost’).⁹ All of these attributes made shorthand appealing to Pepys as a tool for diary keeping, but secrecy was particularly important. He was not alone in this. As researchers have shown, shorthand was used by other contemporary journal keepers to protect their thoughts. Starting her diary in 1686, Sarah Henry wished she had ‘the advantage of writing characters’ to help ‘keep it private’; while the teenage Isaac Newton at Cambridge, and the alchemist George Starkey were among those who recorded their sins (including sexual sins) in shorthand.¹⁰

Recent writing on Pepys’s diary has been sceptical about how much protection shorthand offered him. Keen to correct the view that shorthand was a mysterious code, writers are now more likely to argue that the contents were barely protected at all, even stating that learning Shelton was ‘standard practice’ in England.¹¹ The truth lies in the middle. Sold on bookstalls for over sixty years across the century, Shelton’s tachygraphy was emphatically not a secret code and to call it a ‘cipher’ is misleading. If Pepys had wanted to use a code, he would have done so: he devised personal ‘Characters’ for his employers George Downing and Edward Mountagu to keep their correspondence secret.¹² Pepys also chose not to take full advantage of the concealing properties of shorthand for, like most shorthand users, he generally wrote place names and proper names in longhand. A page of his diary is very clearly a diary: it has the month in longhand, dates in the margins, and each page has an assortment of longhand words that provide clues to its content. On the other hand, the fact that shorthand offered privacy was, as his closing comments confirm, crucial. Keeping his diary locked in his study was the first line of defence but, if that measure failed, shorthand protected the diary from being easily understood by the people most likely to happen on it: his household servants and Elizabeth.¹³ While it was possible that Elizabeth might go through his papers during his lifetime, the more serious risk was that, if he died unexpectedly, she would inherit the diary. His wariness about her as a potential reader helps explain a much-noted quirk of the diary: Pepys never names his wife. Elizabeth is never ‘Elizabeth’ or an initial, she is always ‘my wife’, and ‘my wife’ is in shorthand.¹⁴ Pepys’s habit of referring only to ‘my wife’ shows the value in which he held her and his sense that her identity was inseparable from his own, yet it also owes something to the principles of shorthand. ‘My wife’ was four strokes of the pen in Shelton’s symbols – an economy that meant there was no real impetus to devise a special symbol for ‘Elizabeth’. Since his habit with names was to default to longhand or longhand initials, getting into the practice of avoiding Elizabeth’s name when writing ensured against a slip into longhand: she would therefore remain invisible to would-be readers – and to herself, should she discover the diary.

Reading Pepys’s Shorthand

This brings us to what a reader sees on Pepys’s page and how difficult his shorthand actually is to read. Shelton’s system has a symbol for each letter, which is simple enough. However, it also has symbols for pairs of consonants that commonly appear together and for common prefixes and suffixes (such as ‘pro-’ or ‘-ing’). There are symbols, too, for common words and for words or phrases likely to appear in sermons. Many symbols do double duty, standing for a letter, a cluster of letters, or a word. For instance, the symbol for ‘n’ is –, which is also the symbol for ‘and’. (Shelton beat ‘Fish N Chips’ advertisers to this abbreviation by several hundred years.) Shelton also encouraged users to choose symbols for their own common words, which Pepys duly did for words such as ‘Mr’ and ‘home’.¹⁵

While Shelton allocated a symbol to each letter of the alphabet, he had a separate procedure for handling vowels in the middle of words. These are not normally written with a symbol, but are instead shown by the positioning of the symbol that follows the vowel. In Figure 2.1, Shelton illustrates vowel positions around the symbols for b, c, d, and f, by marking the place with the longhand vowel letter. When a writer takes their pen off the page mid-word and starts a new symbol (rather than joining symbols together), this signals a vowel, and where they position that new symbol tells you which vowel precedes it. For example, the symbol for ‘c’ with a ‘t’ symbol directly above it (at 12 o’clock) means ‘cat’; ‘t’ at 2 o’clock is ‘cet’; at 3 o’clock ‘cit’; 5 o’clock ‘cot’; and at 6 o’clock ‘cut’. When a vowel comes at the end of a word it is shown by a dot in the relevant position. Words ending in ‘y’ are spelt with ‘i’ instead. Finally, to aid speed in writing, Shelton requires users to spell phonetically and remove letters that are ‘superfluous’– meaning letters that are not sounded, not strongly sounded, or which can be easily deduced.¹⁶ This applies to double vowels: for instance, ‘about’ becomes ‘abot’ and ‘book’ becomes ‘bok’. Terminal ‘e’ is also a common casualty: ‘slope’ would be written ‘slop’. In this system punctuation is almost entirely absent: Shelton suggests the writer only needs a sign for a full stop and can make use of question marks and brackets.¹⁷

Figure 2.1 From Thomas Shelton’s Tachy-graphy (1660), p. 4.

This is, overall, a very flexible system: it can handle multisyllabic words, proper nouns, and (if not always smoothly) foreign words. However, Shelton’s method does have certain ingrained difficulties, even when the reader is experienced and the writer, like Pepys, careful. First, a number of the symbols closely resemble other symbols. For instance, ‘him’ and ‘then’ are both variations of < . Meanwhile, the sign for ‘b’ (ǀ) is also the sign for ‘but’ and happens to resemble the sign for ‘them’ (a slightly longer vertical line) … and so on.¹⁸ It is easy for a slight movement of the pen or a random blot to accidentally transform a word, and easy for writers to mix up symbols. Second, as the vowel positions rely on fine discriminations, it is not always easy to determine which vowel a writer intended. Finally, shorthand relies on cutting out letters and this incompleteness leads to ambiguities. How a writer chooses to abbreviate words can throw up a range of possibilities: the shorthand ‘slop’ could, for example, mean ‘slop’, or ‘slope’, or ‘sloop’. If a writer has been precise and the reader is tuned into their idiosyncrasies, has a sound grasp of the context, and has understood the last few words, matters are straightforward, but lose the thread of meaning and it can be difficult to reconstruct what was intended.

To get a sense of how shorthand works in practice, we can take the start of Pepys’s most famous entry, the first day of the Great Fire, 2 September 1666, shown in Figure 2.2. Literally, what Pepys wrote was this (with longhand shown in bold):

With very little experience of reading shorthand, it becomes easy to see ‘2’ as (most often) ‘to’, and to recognize that ‘dai’ is ‘day’ and ‘mi’ is ‘my’. Certain of the highly abbreviated words here, such as ‘fe’ for feast and ‘gr’ for ‘great’, are signs found in Shelton’s manual (i.e. the symbol for ‘gr’ is also the symbol for ‘great’). Pepys also employs some of his own formulations: ‘la’ for last, and ‘se’ for see/saw. With more exposure to Shelton’s recommendations and how Pepys implements them, even seeming gobbledegook like ‘mi nit gon’ becomes legible: ‘my night gown’ is meant. The bizarre-looking ‘fallod’ is made up of the symbol for ‘fall/full’, and the symbol for ‘d’ in the position of an ‘o’. What Pepys meant was ‘fallo’d’ for ‘fallowed’: in modern spelling this would be ‘followed’. When skilled editors, such as Latham and Matthews, render the passage for their readers, it becomes:

Comparing this amended transcription with the more literal one above conveys just how much work editorial teams have performed to make Pepys’s shorthand legible for audiences. This work is far from visible in printed texts and has often been downplayed by editors, due to lack of knowledge (they didn’t do the work themselves), modesty, or a desire to instil faith in their edition. In their public statements Latham and Matthews emphasized the reliability of their text (arguing Shelton’s was a simple system, Pepys’s hand legible, and even his polyglot straightforward) and often made light of the challenges. Their unpublished editorial papers are much clearer about the difficulties they faced, with lists of Pepys’s personal symbols and the editors’ lengthy discussions over how to render the text. Even whether to signal the longhand caused them much trouble – Latham ultimately decided not to do so. They chose to modernize the shorthand spellings, except where they felt the shorthand indicated a seventeenth-century variant spelling with a distinct pronunciation: so ‘fallod’, for them, became ‘fallowed’.²¹ Other editors and transcribers determined differently, without explanation. Mynors Bright in the 1870s generally favoured more antiquated spellings, seeking to create a seventeenth-century flavour: in his version of the Great Fire, Pepys was alerted by his ‘mayds’, slipped on his ‘night-gowne’, and thought the fire was ‘on the back-side of Marke-lane at the farthest’, not expecting what ‘followed’.²² These are small judgement calls but, across thousands of words, cumulatively powerful, contributing to readers’ impressions of Pepys as a peculiarly modern and accessible diarist or as a charmingly quaint writer.

Figure 2.2 Diary of Samuel Pepys, 2 September 1666. PL 1839.

The fact that Pepys wrote in shorthand created great difficulties for editorial teams but it has resulted in versions of a seventeenth-century text that are more than usually easy for readers to understand. Shorthand meant Pepys’s editors could not aim at immediate fidelity to the original and were instead compelled to implement their own decisions on spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Unlike, say, the editor of Evelyn’s diary (quoted in Chapter 1) who sought to preserve a detailed impression of the manuscript by reproducing Evelyn’s spellings and leaving abbreviations unexpanded, editors of Pepys have had to be more radical in their interventions. They create, rather than replicate, an English text and the results are editions extensively tailored to contemporary tastes. As Aaron Kunin observes, Pepys’s diary can therefore seem ‘magically transparent’ in comparison to other early modern diarists’ prose.²³ Transcribers and editors had free rein to determine the best combination of strikingly direct, fluently conversational, or “authentically” antiquated language to please their target audience.

While Pepys’s use of shorthand required editors to reshape his text, it had already fundamentally shaped his prose. William Matthews thought the immediacy of shorthand note-taking propelled Pepys away from the ornamental, Ciceronian style that he deployed in official documents, towards a ‘simple, quasi-conversational manner’.²⁴ This does not mean Pepys wrote as he spoke. The features of a shorthand system encourage certain language choices. Even for a proficient user, Shelton’s method exerts a subtle pressure towards the words ‘frequent in use’ for which Shelton had created simple symbols and towards words which can be easily written.²⁵ It is no coincidence that Pepys’s most characteristic phrases (ones that, down the centuries, imitators and parodists would echo) are extremely quick to write in shorthand. For example, his habitual way of beginning an entry is ‘Up and to … ’: in shorthand this is three simple symbols amounting to three pen strokes. ‘And so to bed’, his famous phrase for ending his day, is five strokes, with the first three words each having their own single symbol: – S 2 ǀ^ↄ. His much repeated (and much mimicked) verbal tic, ‘But Lord … ’ is two strokes. Another favourite ‘But strange to see … ’ is similarly straightforward. His highs and lows of emotion are often introduced by ‘with great’ (with great delight/pleasure/sadness, etc.): ‘with’ and ‘great’ each have their own symbol, and each is one continuous stroke. Overall, Shelton’s system encouraged Pepys towards easy and familiar symbols and less multisyllabic language, thereby shaping his idiosyncratic, accessible style.

Shorthand, intended to obscure sense, therefore ultimately contributed to the clarity of Pepys’s diary for readers in two respects: it steered Pepys towards short, common words and it compelled editors to adapt his language and grammar to their own period, offering their readerships prose that (however archaic it might seem) was modernized. There is a third sense in which Pepys’s language is clear: in his manuscript, he laid out his text with precision. His lines are carefully spaced and his characters usually well formed. Matthews observes that Pepys also preferred to end entries at the end of a page.²⁶ Pepys’s care with shorthand characters and his manuscript’s layout was a reflection of his own character. In 1663 he noted in himself a growing refusal to ‘be pleased with anything unless it be very neat’.²⁷ As Latham remarks, the neatness of the diary seems to have had emotional importance for Pepys.²⁸ An aesthetically pleasing text presented an orderly life over which he could exert a firm hand, even – or especially – if events felt beyond his control. His orderly approach distinguishes him from the many writers who used shorthand in ways that indicated their purpose was “notes to self”: where the legibility mattered less because familiarity with your own scrappy hand and your memory of the substance would be enough to make things clear.²⁹ Pepys’s neatness signalled the value of the content and that the ‘self’ reading it might be many years in the future. It also, ultimately, held out the possibility of the diary’s being legible to other readers.

Deeper Secrets

Shorthand was not the only protective measure that Pepys employed in his pages, nor was it the only indication of his sense of who might read them. The diary covers a wide range of sexual activity from solitary fantasies and masturbation to anatomically specific descriptions of who did what to whom. Midway through his journal, Pepys began to change the way he recorded some of these episodes. Early in the diary all such passages were in English shorthand, as when, in September 1663, he took Betty Lane on a pleasure trip to Lambeth: ‘and there did what I would with her but only the main thing, which she would not consent to, for which God be praised; and yet I came so near, that I was provoked to spend’ (i.e. ejaculate). In later entries, there was less concern with God’s providential oversight of his sexual encounters, and more concern for the diary being overseen. In January 1664, he began to write some of these shorthand passages in French, starting with another encounter with Betty Lane at ‘the cabaret at the Cloche in the street du roy […] je l’ay foutée sous de la chaise deux times’ (at ‘the tavern at the Bell in King Street […] I fucked her under the chair two times’). In June 1666, he began switching languages, producing a polyglot of French, Spanish, English, and Latin, with occasional words from other tongues. Meeting the now-married Betty Martin at her home, he ‘did what je voudrais avec her, both devante and backward, which is also muy bon plazer’ (‘did what I would with her, both front and backward, which is also very good pleasure’).³⁰ Next, around May 1667, he decreased his use of longhand overall. At the same time, he began to add extra letters into English shorthand about sex, and a few days later combined this technique of garbling words with his polyglot shorthand.³¹ The effects can be seen in his account of how he had ceased to worry about Elizabeth Knepp resenting what he had done ‘quand yo was con heler in ponendo her mano upolon mini cosa’. This is a mix of English, French, and Spanish. Into three English words he has added extra letter symbols (‘l’ twice and ‘n’ once, shown in bold). Because of the way Shelton’s shorthand uses a symbol’s position to indicate a preceding vowel, this in fact adds additional syllables (el, ol, in). With Pepys’s extraneous letters removed what we get in Latham and Matthews’s text is: ‘quand yo was con her in ponendo her mano upon mi cosa’.³² Finally, when translated it becomes, ‘when I was with her in putting her hand upon my thing’.

Clearly Pepys went to great lengths to cover up this phrase, and others too. However, he was not at all consistent in his concealment. Some of the polyglot passages, although they allude to illicit relationships, do not contain sexually explicit material; in other sexual passages he used only shorthand. He also sometimes used longhand for names and words that should have been in shorthand if concealing the nature of the passages was the sole concern. This has led Matthews and others to argue that the polyglot was less about disguise and more about playfulness, or adding an air of continental, titillating sophistication to Pepys’s sex life.³³ While this is a persuasive explanation for the foreign language use, it remains crucial not to underestimate Pepys’s efforts at disguise. The manuscripts of early transcribers, who found the shorthand suddenly descending into gibberish, demonstrate that Pepys’s tactics caused serious issues. Mynors Bright’s transcript shows that, on encountering passages in French, he first assumed Pepys was using a ‘different cipher’ (another shorthand). After transcribing more entries, he deduced it was French, but was again stumped when Pepys shifted to a polyglot. As he explained to readers in a preface, the introduction of ‘dummy letters’ then saw him ‘nearly giving up in despair’, and he was only able to solve it by systematically removing alternate letters (and not always then).³⁴ Pepys’s shifting languages may have heightened his pleasure, but they also heightened his defences.

Other Readers?

With knowledge of Pepys’s polyglot and shorthand tactics, we can look again at how his diary was meant to be used and whether he anticipated a readership. Most simply, the words Pepys chose to write in longhand can be telling. Here, again, is his account of Charles’s coronation that we saw in Chapter 1, this time with the longhand in bold:

Figure 2.3 shows this diary page, beginning ‘But so great … ’. There is an unusual amount of longhand in this passage. Several words are placenames, which are normally written in longhand, but that explanation does not work for most examples here. Sometimes Pepys opted for longhand as it was easier than recalling the relevant symbols, but again that is no adequate explanation: words such as ‘rayles’ and ‘blue cloth’ are simple to do in shorthand, as indeed is ‘pisse’. Since Pepys wrote ‘pisse’ in longhand, he evidently had no qualms about announcing that need – and indeed apparently wanted to stress it. Collectively, what the longhand seems to be doing in this excerpt is acting as a navigation aid and offering a precis of the text for a reader (Pepys himself). The words in longhand encapsulate Pepys’s experience and his trajectory: the noise drowns the music; the pressing need to piss sets off a sight-seeing expedition through the Hall.

Figure 2.3 Diary of Samuel Pepys, 23 April 1661. PL 1836.

There are other examples in the diary of longhand functioning in this way. Indeed, its role as a finding aid seems to be active even during some of the diary’s most private episodes. In late October 1668, Pepys sat down after several chaotic days to record how Elizabeth had caught him with Deb Willet. When he described the event, he put the fact he wanted to conceal most from his wife into a mix of garbled and polyglot shorthand. In the Introduction, I quoted this passage in Latham and Matthews’s version with some additional translation, but what Pepys put on the page was far more of a challenge to readers (Figure 2.4). He wrote that, after he had gone to have his hair combed by Deb, Elizabeth found him ‘imbrasing the girl con my haland sub su kimots and ended I was with mili min in heler kiloni’. Ungarbled, translated, and with the phonetic spelling adjusted, this reads ‘imbracing the girl with my hand under her coats [i.e. skirts] and endeed I was with my hand in her cony’ – ‘cony’ is a variant spelling of ‘cunny’ (vagina).³⁶ Over the next fortnight he insisted to Elizabeth that he had only been kissing Deb, before Deb told Elizabeth the full extent of their sexual contact. Although Pepys disguised that act in the diary, he wrote Deb’s name clearly in longhand at the start of this episode (See Figure 2.4, mid-page). He continued to put ‘Deb’ and ‘Willet’ into longhand in the coming weeks, while he pursued her despite his wife’s surveillance. This was even though he had previously grown more cautious about writing names in longhand. Had Elizabeth at any point laid her hands on the diary, the manifest references to ‘Deb’ on 25 October 1668 and after would have caused further pain. At this time, however, Pepys’s need to clearly reference Deb overwhelmed any consideration of the risks. The repeated use of her name in longhand emphasized her central role in this episode and signals that he wanted to be able to locate these passages. It also shows that (despite his recognition that Deb had suffered at his hands and been made ‘my sacrifice’), his concern for her did not extend to masking her name within the text – he left her exposed.³⁷ His mention of Deb Willet on the final page of the diary, ‘my amours to Deb are past’, aptly captures the contradictions of his encoding approach and the appeal it had for him. ‘Amours’ is in longhand, but ‘Deb’ is now in garbled shorthand (‘Deleb’).³⁸ This was his last gesture at disguise before he ended his shorthand record, and the last thrill of writing a (barely) hidden name.³⁹

Figure 2.4 Diary of Samuel Pepys, 25 October 1668. PL 1841. The phrase beginning ‘and endeed’ is three lines from the bottom, at the start of the line.

Despite the inconsistencies in Pepys’s secretive measures, his changing combinations of shorthand, longhand, polyglot shorthand, and mixed garbled and polyglot shorthand show that he strengthened his protective measures over the course of the diary. He did so, at least in part, because he was increasingly conscious that his diary might be read. After the death of his brother Tom in 1664, he had experienced what happened when private papers were passed to family members who were unfavourably discussed in them. Among Tom’s papers, Samuel had found ‘base letters’ from their younger brother John. He was enraged at the ‘very foul words’ John had written about him and the ‘plots’ his brothers had been contriving together against him. As a result, he broke off contact with John for over two years.⁴⁰ During the Great Fire in 1666 and again in 1667 after the attack on Chatham, Pepys was impelled to send his diary volumes out of his custody, leaving them with others for safe keeping. By mid 1667 his growing influence, and the failures of the navy, had also made him a target for political enemies: he saw colleagues arrested and sent to the Tower, putting their papers at risk of confiscation.⁴¹ The risks in keeping such a sensitive record had been repeatedly brought home to him.

The danger of hostile readers grew over the 1660s, but so too did the reasons for Pepys to consider that the contents of his diary should not remain entirely private. Through twists he could never have anticipated when he began writing, he had become an eyewitness to major historical events and court machinations. It would have become increasingly apparent to him that the diary contained material that could inform a published history – especially as he was coming to think of himself as a potential historian in relation to his naval work. As early as 1661, he set about writing a ‘little treatise’ on history and law concerning the king’s claims to control of the seas around the British Isles, which he intended to circulate among navy officials. Friends and colleagues encouraged his ambitions as a historian. In 1664, when a new war with the Dutch was fast approaching, William Coventry suggested that Pepys write a history of the previous war during the 1650s. Pepys was delighted, feeling this project would suit ‘mightily with my genius [i.e. character] – and if done well, may recommend me much’. Unlike his planned 1661 treatise, this history would have been destined for print. By 1668 he was considering writing a more ambitious ‘history of the Navy’, a project that would occupy him for the rest of his life.⁴² Neither his treatise on the dominion of the seas, nor the history of the first Anglo-Dutch War, nor the grand history of the navy were ever completed – Pepys enjoyed researching and collecting material for histories far more than he loved actually writing them. However, in the 1660s and after, this kind of activity can only have sharpened his sense of how his personal diary might one day serve him as a source towards a naval history or, perhaps, serve someone else in a similar task. Close family, current enemies, and even distant generations were therefore all potential readers whom Pepys had cause to believe might have a strong interest in his diary. The possibility of these readers was clearly not enough to persuade him to adopt more consistent methods of protection, to avoid supplying damaging details, or to end the diary – its uses were too important to him for that. Yet, while its primary intended reader remained himself, his intimations of other readers developed as he wrote.

Shorthand Matters

Shorthand, though little understood, has been an enduring reason for the popularity of Pepys’s diary. It has lent the diary an exciting air of mystery, while shaping a text which is highly readable. Shorthand influenced Pepys’s direct, informal style and, by demanding unremitting editorial intervention, resulted in texts extensively adapted to their perceived audiences. When manuscripts are printed, some of the information conveyed by the material features of the original is inevitably lost, and this is more true of Pepys’s diary than most other documents. His careful hand and regulated layout indicate, far more than any printed text can, that the diary was no spontaneous effusion and that its capacity to impose a neat order on his experiences was part of its purpose. As his eyesight deteriorated, his characters did too, and the diary had to end.

The use of shorthand and longhand in Pepys’s entries often conveys how he expected to re-read them. This variation nuanced his statements and sometimes even undermines them. Coming amid his statements about his continued efforts to get Deb Willet’s ‘maidenhead’, Pepys’s concern for her during the events of October and November 1668 rings hollow enough in printed editions.⁴³ In his manuscript his repeated writing of her name in longhand at this time makes that resonance even louder. Blazoning his interest in her within the text and catering to his own future convenience in navigating this record took priority over any concerns about guarding her name. Pepys’s efforts at ensuring the privacy of his diary’s contents were erratic and the signs are that his sense of a potential readership beyond himself was similarly inconsistent. Yet his escalating protections, the manifest historical interest of his diary, and his own growing sense of himself as a historian who merited an audience, all strongly imply that his recognition of a potential readership increased as he wrote. Three decades later, he set about to turn that possibility into a certainty.