The Illustrated Pepys

Pepyss diary has long been recognized as the most remarkable diary in the English language, but it has been impossible until our own day to print it as he wrote it. Very little scholarly work had been done on it, and legal restrictions prevented the publication of its frankest passages, in which Pepys describes his vigorous love life. In 1960, however, two scholars set to work afresh on a study of the manuscript - the late Professor William Matthews, of the University of California, the leading expert on the shorthand in which the diary was written, and Robert Latham, an authority on the history of the period. Together they worked out a new version of the text, and with the publication of the ninth volume of their edition in 1976 Pepys was available to the public in full for the first time. Their work has been acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the most important literary achievements of the century.

The present edition - lavishly illustrated from a wealth of contemporary material (some of it from Pepys's own collection of engravings at Cambridge) - is meant for the reader who will welcome the chance of having a representative selection. It contains about one'twelfth of the original 1,300,000 words, and is so designed that the flavour and variety of the original is retained.

With his unquenchable joy in life and his endless curiosity, Pepys is the perfect diarist for the general reader. In his pages the public events of the 1660s - the politics of the Restoration, the Dutch War, the Plague, the Fire of London - are interwoven with a richly diverting account of his colourful private life. Perhaps no one else in the whole of English history has transmitted his experience so vividly to posterity.