Reading Pepys’s shorthand

Pepys wrote his diary in shorthand, using a popular seventeenth-century system called ‘Tachygraphy’, invented by Thomas Shelton.

Shorthand uses symbols in place of letters for speed of writing. It also serves to disguise the content of the text from anyone who doesn’t know the system. This was important to Pepys, who was writing much in his diary that he did not want other people to read.

When we read Pepys’s diary today, in a printed text or online edition, we’re reading a transcription of the shorthand into English. To turn shorthand into readable longhand, an editor has made decisions about spelling, grammar, and punctuation. In some respects the result is more like a translation than a direct transcription.

The upshot is that very few people have every actually read Pepys’s diary – meaning the text as he wrote in the manuscript. There are very few images of the diary in circulation, so even seeing what the pages look like can prove difficult.

Below you’ll find an image of Pepys’s shorthand and a transliteration into English.  If you’d like to know more about the system Pepys used, see more images of shorthand, and explore how it works, you can download the PDF guide at the bottom of this page.

The is guide is also designed to be useful if you’re a researcher trying to identify a shorthand you’ve come across in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century document.

The project has also created shorthand activity sheet for primary school children, along with a Teachers’ guide to Pepys’s Diary (which includes a discussion of shorthand). These can both be found at the fireoflondon.org.uk website or at the Museum of London’s Learning Resources site.

6 January 1663: Pepys destroys his wife’s papers during an argument

I pulled them out one by one and tore them all before her face though it went against my heart to do it, she crying and desiring me not to do it. But such was my passion and trouble to see the letters of my to love her and my Will, wherein I had given her all that I had in the world when I went to sea with my Lord Sandwich, to be joyned with a paper of so much disgrace to me and dishonour if it should hath been found by any body.