The Naval Administrator Whose Daily Diary Recorded the Course of the Great Plague of London in 1665 With a Bureaucrat's Specificity

Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) was 32 in 1665. He worked as the senior administrator of the Royal Navy’s Victualling Office in Seething Lane in the City of London. He had been keeping a private shorthand diary since 1 January 1660.

The 1665 plague entries are the closest day-by-day record of the Great Plague of London — a bubonic plague outbreak that killed about 100,000 of the city’s 400,000 residents between spring and autumn 1665.

What he recorded

Pepys’s first plague reference is dated 30 April 1665: “Great fears of the sickness here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.”

His next month of entries records the formal civic measures: red crosses painted on the doors of infected houses, the words Lord have mercy upon us added below the crosses, parish watchmen posted to prevent the inhabitants from leaving. By July the entries record the standard 1665 plague response: the wealthy fled the city. The Court left for Hampton Court in late June, then Salisbury and Oxford. Charles II did not return until February 1666.

Pepys himself sent his wife and household servants to the village of Woolwich on 5 July 1665. He stayed in the city, working — the Royal Navy was running the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and the Victualling Office could not be closed. He visited Woolwich on weekends.

The Bills of Mortality

Each Tuesday Pepys recorded the weekly Bills of Mortality — the official parish-by-parish death registers compiled by the city’s parish clerks. The bills divided the deaths by cause; plague deaths were a separate category. Pepys’s diary tracks the bills against the previous week’s count:

— Week ending 19 July 1665: 1,089 plague deaths — Week ending 1 August: 2,010 — Week ending 15 August: 3,880 — Week ending 5 September: 6,544 — Week ending 19 September: 7,165 (the peak)

The actual death toll was higher than the Bills recorded. The parish clerks who compiled the bills were themselves dying. Many deaths in the poorer parishes were not registered at all. Modern epidemiological estimates put the actual 1665 London plague mortality at approximately 100,000 against a recorded Bills total of about 68,000.

What did and didn’t work

Pepys records, on 7 August 1665, his decision to begin carrying a piece of “Plague-water” — a herbal preparation, principally rue and rosemary in vinegar — held to his nose when walking in the streets. The herbal vapour was the standard period belief about plague prevention. It did not work; the actual transmission vector was rat fleas, which the herbal vapour did not affect.

He also records his decision to chew tobacco. Tobacco was widely believed in 1665 to be plague-protective. There is no evidence it worked either.

What did work — partially — was avoiding crowded indoor spaces. Pepys’s diary records behavioural adjustment: avoiding taverns, avoiding the Royal Exchange, avoiding theatres (which had been closed by civic order anyway), keeping his immediate domestic circle small. The behavioural adjustment reduced his exposure to plague-carrying rat fleas indirectly; he did not know why it helped.

Pepys did not get the plague. None of his immediate household did. His luck through the 1665 outbreak was statistical: about 1 in 4 Londoners died; Pepys was in the other 3.

What the diary closed

Pepys stopped keeping the diary on 31 May 1669 because his eyesight was failing. He died on 26 May 1703, aged 70. The shorthand diary — six volumes of approximately 1.25 million words — passed to his estate. The shorthand was Thomas Shelton’s Tachygraphy system, which had been largely forgotten by the 18th century.

The first decoded edition was published in 1825 by John Smith, a young Cambridge clergyman who had spent three years independently re-deriving the Shelton system from a published key. Smith’s edition was 30 percent of the full text; the complete unexpurgated edition was finally published 1970-1983 by Robert Latham and William Matthews.

The 1665 plague entries — and the 1666 entries that include the Great Fire of London on 2-6 September 1666 — are the most-cited portion of the diary. They are an unusual document. Almost no other 17th-century European city’s plague outbreak has a comparable day-by-day educated middle-rank professional witness account. The plague entries are also notable for what they do not contain: they are almost without rhetoric, without religious hand-wringing, without panic. Pepys watches the catastrophe with a bureaucrat’s specificity, records the numbers each Tuesday, and gets on with running the Navy.