The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Samuel Pepys
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Samuel Pepys
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The Diary of Samuel Pepys
The BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation

Author: Samuel Pepys, Hattie Naylor

Narrator: Full Cast, Katherine Jakeways, Kris Marshall

Unabridged: 12 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/18/2014


Synopsis

Kris Marshall and Katherine Jakeways star as Mr & Mrs Pepys in this BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of the world famous diaries.

Samuel Pepys was 26 when he decided to start keeping a diary, in January 1660. For the next ten years he faithfully recorded the day's events and confessed his innermost thoughts. That diary has since become one of our most important, and fascinating, historical documents.

Pepys gave us eyewitness accounts of some of the great events of the 17th century, including the Great Fire of London and the Second Dutch War. He also told us what people ate and wore, what they did for fun, the tricks they played on each other, what they expected of marriage, and even how they conducted love affairs. He described London - the frozen river Thames, the rising crime rate and the poverty - and recorded the details of his own life: his wife, rivals, lovers and friends, his work for the Navy, his drinking and social life.

Over 350 years may have passed since Pepys first put pen to paper, but the man and his preoccupations feel surprisingly familiar. In this major BBC Radio dramatisation of the journals, the sights and sounds of his world are vividly conjured. This collection comprises all ten radio series plus a special Saturday Drama centring on the Great Fire of London.

Featuring Kris Marshall and Katherine Jakeways, as well as; ewan Baily, Rebecca Newman, Matthew Gravelle, Manon Edwards, Blake Ritson, Dick Bradnam, Lee Mingo, Andrew Wincott, John Biddle, Stephen Marzella and Bendan Charleson.

About Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) achieved fame as a naval administrator and a friend and colleague of the powerful and learned. For nearly ten years he kept a private diary in which he recorded life in Restoration London, commenting on politics, public events, and private matters.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Brad on June 07, 2010

Neither this nor Anne Frank's diary come anywhere near the diary of that round headed buffoon Karl Pilkington. Compare: Samuel Pepys on the Plague:"It struck me very deep this afternoon going with a hackney coach from my Lord Treasurer's down Holborne, the coachman I found to drive easily and easily,......more

Goodreads review by Stuart on August 27, 2012

The best diaries ever. This book is so honest its ridiculous - he is a complete cad, but so lovable. He tells it as he sees it, always from his own viewpoint, with such hypocrisy. This is also a hugely comical set of views - possibly the funniest being the diary entries about the pornographic book,......more

Goodreads review by ddjiii on December 11, 2011

There's a reason why this simple book, just a guys's diary from the late 1600's, is one of the classics of world literature. More than almost any other book I can think of, Pepys really gives you a powerful feeling of what it would be like to live in another time. His accounts of his everyday life a......more

Goodreads review by Paul on October 30, 2023

Unique among primary historical sources (at least that I've found) insofar as it covers an entire decade in fine detail, and then it has the added bonus of being (1) extremely candid, because it was written in cryptographic shorthand, (2) historically interesting, insofar as Pepys was a high governm......more


Quotes

...balancing domesticity, business and history so vividly and unexpectedly it sounds as if 1660 were the day before yesterday. Daily Telegraph.