The Diary of Samuel Pepys is the most celebrated personal journal in the English language. His candid revelations as he forged his career as a civilian naval official in Restoration London have fascinated readers ever since the first selection was published in 1825. The Confessions of Samuel Pepys focuses on Pepys’s controversial private life for a contemporary readership, by charting his varied and complex relationships with women. They included his wife Elizabeth whom he both loved and treated abominably, their domestic servants, the mistresses whom he secretly visited in Westminster and Deptford and other places, a host of other opportunistic encounters, the great ladies of the court whom he ogled, and the actresses and other female friends whose company he delighted in and combined with casual flirting and petting. All these he recounted in shorthand, often disguising the more salacious occasions in his own cryptic Franco-Latino polyglot or with a primitive system of extraneous consonants.
