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.
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