A quiz question · hard
What allowed Samuel Pepys to keep his Plague Year diary private for over 150 years after his death?
Pepys wrote in Shelton's Tachygraphy, a shorthand system largely forgotten by the 18th century. The first decoded edition was published in 1825 by John Smith. The complete edition appeared 1970-1983.
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The Naval Administrator Whose Daily Diary Recorded the Course of the Great Plague of London in 1665 With a Bureaucrat's Specificity Samuel Pepys kept his shorthand diary from January 1660 to May 1669. The 1665 entries — running through the worst of the Great Plague that killed approximately 100,000 Londoners — are the closest surviving day-to-day record of how the plague moved through the city, how the parish authorities tried to contain it, and how an educated middle-rank professional Londoner adjusted his daily routines around an active mass-mortality epidemic.