Every year in the UK, Samuel Pepys’s diary is used to introduce thousands of primary school children to the study of history, starting with the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the parmesan cheese that he buried in his garden to protect it from the flames. Pepys is considered so integral to our culture that migrants sitting the government’s “Life in the UK Test” are required to know that he kept “a diary which was later published and is still read today”. Strictly speaking, this is not true: his diary was written in a combination of shorthand and polyglot code, and almost no one has read the original manuscript.

Two of the few scholars who can directly read the six volumes of the diary preserved under the terms of Pepys’s detailed will in Magdalene College, Cambridge, have new books out this year, marking the bicentenary of the first publication of transcriptions from the diary in 1825. Kate Loveman’s The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary is a riveting account of how the diary was written, preserved, published and read through the centuries. Guy de la Bédoyère’s The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His private revelations is a painstaking transcription and translation of all the “naughty bits” that previous editors were reluctant to print or keen to gloss over. Separately, these books are significantly different in tone and intention, but together they establish 2025 as the most important year for Pepys scholarship in living memory.

Pepys died in 1703 and his Bibliotheca Pepysiana, comprising almost 3,000 volumes and 12 custom-made book presses (or cases), has been at Magdalene College since 1724. In 1818, the then master of Magdalene, George Neville, lent the first volume of Pepys’s “Diary in Short-hand” to his uncle Thomas Grenville, who went off on holiday and left the manuscript in Buckinghamshire with his brother William, a lawyer, who managed partially to transcribe the first ten entries, and concluded that it should be published as “an excellent companion to [John] Evelyn’s delightful diary”. Pepys’s will specifies that should any of his books be moved further afield than the Magdalene master’s lodge, the whole library will be forfeited to Trinity College, Cambridge. Somewhat sheepishly, the Grenville brothers returned the illicitly borrowed volume to Neville and recommended that he find another transcriber. John Smith, an undergraduate from St John’s College, was hired and, Loveman notes, “became the first…