Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume 23: July/august 1663
July and August 1663: the rain keeps Samuel Pepys indoors, and in that confinement we find him at his most revealing. He quarrels with Sir G. Carteret over money, fumes through parliamentary speeches, and frets about his wife Elizabeth's absence from London. Yet between the Admiralty ledgers and political machinations, Pepys cannot stop watching the world. He notes who sits where at the theater, trades gossip with fellow clerks, and records, sometimes with shame, sometimes with pride, his own romantic impulses and moral failures. This is the diary's extraordinary power: it captures a man trying to advance in Restoration England while simultaneously chronicling the chaos of his own heart. Latham's abridged edition preserves Pepys' irreplaceable voice: curious, vain, often ridiculous, occasionally sublime. Here is 1663 unfiltered, the year King Charles II consolidates his power, the navy expands, and one clerk writes himself into immortality because he simply could not stop watching.
