Six Days in Pepys's Diary of the Great Fire of London

2026-09-18 · Yesterself

"Jane called us up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City." Samuel Pepys got out of bed, slipped on his nightgown, went to the maid's window, decided the fire was somewhere behind Mark Lane and far enough off, and went back to sleep.

That is how the most famous eyewitness account in English begins: with a man getting it wrong and returning to bed. He was thirty-three, a senior naval administrator, up late because the household was preparing a Sunday feast. Nothing in the first paragraph announces itself. The hour is given, the window is given, the misjudgment is given and left standing.

Six days, written as one thing

Read separately, as they appear in schoolbooks, the Great Fire entries are a handful of vivid quotations. Read in order from 2 to 7 September 1666 they are something better: a single sustained piece of reporting by a man who did not know how it ended and had a job to do inside the emergency.

The shape of the week is simple. Sunday he watches and carries the news to Whitehall. Monday he moves his household goods. Tuesday he buries things in the garden. Wednesday, at two in the morning, his wife wakes him because the flames have reached Barking Church at the bottom of the lane, and he takes his gold down the river to Woolwich. Thursday he chases a new outbreak at Bishopsgate. Friday he walks the burnt city.

He was not writing for us. The diary was in shorthand, private, and by then six years old, and he had no reason to perform. That is why it survives the reading.

Nouns instead of adjectives

The most quoted sentence of the week is not about fire at all. It is about birds:

the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down

No word in that sentence tells you how to feel. There is a bird, a windowsill, a wing, and a fall. He noticed the one detail that carries the scale of the thing, set it down, and moved on. He does this all week.

• The river is "full of lighters and boats taking in goods, and good goods swimming in the water."
• On Monday, at four in the morning, Lady Batten sends a cart, and he rides in it himself through the crowded streets in his nightgown.
• On Tuesday night he and Mrs. Turner's family eat a shoulder of mutton fetched from the cook's, "without any napkin or any thing, in a sad manner, but were merry."
• On Wednesday he picks up a piece of glass from Mercers' Chapel, melted and buckled by the heat like parchment, and keeps it.
• On the same walk he sees a cat pulled out of a hole in a chimney by the Exchange, the hair burned off its body, and still alive.

A napkin. A cart. A piece of glass. Anyone can write "the scene was devastating." Only someone actually looking writes down that there was no napkin.

The one place he reaches for adjectives

He is not a machine about it. Standing on the water on Sunday evening, watching the fire climb, he writes of "a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire." Three adjectives in a row, and they work for one reason: he anchors them to something the reader already knows. Not like an ordinary fire. The comparison does the load-bearing, not the adjectives.

The same instinct gives us the Thames with your face to the wind, "almost burned with a shower of firedrops": a sensation, but a measurable one.

He also writes down what he did

The entries are not only observation. Sunday afternoon Pepys goes by boat to Whitehall, is called into the King's closet, and tells the King and the Duke of York that unless houses are pulled down ahead of the flames, nothing will stop it. The King sends him to the Lord Mayor with the order. He finds Sir Thomas Bludworth in Cannon Street, a handkerchief round his neck, spent, and records the reply without improving his own part in it:

Lord! what can I do? I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses; but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it.

That is a man's career ending in one sentence, and Pepys just writes it down.

The wine, the papers, and the parmesan

Tuesday brings the detail everyone remembers. Sir William Batten, not knowing how to move his wine, digs a pit in the garden and lays it in, and Pepys uses it for the office papers he cannot otherwise dispose of. That evening he and Sir William Penn dig a second pit, put their wine in it, and Pepys adds his Parmazan cheese.

It has been quoted as comedy for three hundred years, but look at what it does in the record: a complete inventory of one man's priorities under pressure, in order. The wine, the state papers, the cheese. He never says he was frightened. He tells you what he carried into the garden at night with a spade, and you can work out the rest.

That is the transferable lesson. When something goes badly wrong, the instinct is to write the feeling, because the feeling is the loudest thing in the room. But feelings compress. In six months, "I was overwhelmed" tells you almost nothing. The cart at four in the morning, the missing napkin, the hole you dug for a cheese: those keep.

The method fits in five lines.

1. Write the hour. Pepys dates almost everything to the clock, and a time stamp does more work than a paragraph of atmosphere.
2. Name three objects that were physically in front of you.
3. Write one thing you did, including the part that does not flatter you. He went back to bed.
4. Quote one sentence somebody actually said, in their words.
5. Stop. No summary, no meaning, no lesson. The meaning is already in the objects.

This is a way of keeping a record, not a way of treating anything. If a hard week is more than a hard week, talk to a doctor or a qualified therapist; a notebook is not a substitute for one.

We built Yesterself around the half of this that Pepys could only get by rereading his own bound volumes. It is a journaling app that mails your own past writing back to you: yesterday's page in the morning, the entry from this date a year ago, or a line you postmarked forward to a chosen day. A page written in objects during a bad week reads very differently when it comes back long after it ended. Yesterself is not released yet, so there is nothing to download; there is a waiting list on the site.

He wrote it later, and that helps

Pepys almost certainly did not compose these entries on the nights themselves. He worked from rough notes and wrote the diary up afterward, sometimes days later, which is why the week has the momentum of a single narrative instead of the exhaustion of six separate midnights.

If you are inside a crisis, that is permission worth taking. You do not have to write it well while it is happening. Note the hour, the object, the sentence somebody said, and finish the writing when you can stand up straight again. A missed night is not a broken record.

What the entries never do

Pepys does not tell you what the fire meant. He does not conclude. On the Friday he walks the ruined city, sees St. Paul's with its roofs fallen and the choir collapsed into St. Faith's underneath, and reports it. The interpretation was left to the sermons, and the sermons are unread.

Three and a half centuries later, what we have is a man who woke at three, looked out of a window, misjudged it, went back to sleep, and then paid attention for six days. It is enough. It is very nearly all any record can be.

Common questions

What dates do the Great Fire entries cover?

The sustained account runs from Sunday 2 September to Friday 7 September 1666, with the longest writing on the 2nd and the 5th. Pepys keeps returning to the ruins for weeks afterward, but that week is the eyewitness core.

Did Pepys really bury a parmesan cheese?

Yes. On 4 September he records that Sir William Penn and he dug a pit in the garden and put their wine in it, and that he added his Parmazan cheese and some other things. Sir William Batten had dug an earlier pit for his own wine, and Pepys used that one for office papers.

Did he write the entries on the nights of the fire?

Almost certainly not in their finished form. Pepys worked from rough notes and wrote the diary up afterward, sometimes several days later, which is part of why the week reads as one continuous piece rather than six separate nights.

Where can I read the entries in full?

The diary is long out of copyright and the whole of September 1666 is freely available online, including at Wikisource and at pepysdiary.com. Read the six days in order rather than the anthologized highlights.

What is the writing lesson in these entries?

Record objects, hours and actions instead of feelings. Pepys tells you the time the maid woke him and what went into the pit in his garden, and the feeling arrives on its own.