Pepys’s diary has always been regarded as a very strange text. From its first publication, the reasons why Pepys wrote about his life in such detail – and in such embarrassing detail – have puzzled readers, as has why he then preserved his diary for posterity. This introduction outlines Pepys’s life, the episodes from his diary that are the most famous, and the changing estimations of its importance as history and literature. It argues that one of the strangest things about this text is that, despite its fame, very few people have read the original, for Pepys wrote in shorthand with all printed texts being transcriptions into longhand. Answering some of the puzzles of Pepys’s diary means getting to grips with the shorthand, the censored versions in which the diary has circulated, and the strange things that readers have done with it.

This chapter looks at the evidence of Pepys’s diary manuscript and at the implications of Pepys’s decision to write in shorthand. These are dimensions usually missing from discussion of this key source, for the nature of Pepys’s shorthand is generally not well understood by commentators. Pepys used Thomas Shelton’s shorthand system, known as ‘tachygraphy’. The chapter begins by explaining how this system worked and how it shaped Pepys’s prose style. With illustrations from Pepys’s manuscript, it uses his description of the Great Fire and Charles II’s coronation to show how his pages differ from what is in print. It then explores the escalating methods of disguise that he developed for sexual passages and the implications of this. Finally, it considers what his manuscript tells us about his intentions in writing, especially about his sense of who might read his diary.