Pepys Swore Off Plays and Wine, Then Wrote Down the Lapse
Samuel Pepys swore off plays and wine around the end of 1661, then recorded his own lapse in shorthand. A short note on a diary that records and asks for nothing.
“Up betimes” is how many of Samuel Pepys’s mornings begin: up early, in good time, the day already owing him something. Then the pen goes on, in Thomas Shelton’s shorthand.
Around the end of 1661 he took a solemn oath against plays and wine. By 17 February he was writing that he had drunk wine, out of necessity, while ill. He recorded the lapse with the excuse attached and made no attempt to bury it.
That separates his diary from the one Samuel Johnson kept a century later. Johnson’s early-rising entries repeat the same resolution for decades. Pepys’s entry reports a vow in the past tense of failure: this is what I swore, this is what I did. One book is a promise renewed, the other a ledger of how the promise went.
A ledger like that is accurate and weightless in equal measure. It cannot stop the second glass. A modern sleep diary asks a patient for the same flat honesty, and for the same reason: the entry is useful because nobody has yet decided what it ought to say.
The diary stops on 31 May 1669. He feared that writing by dim light was ruining his eyes.