Why Did Pepys Stop Writing His Diary in May 1669

2026-09-27 · Yesterself

On the last day of May 1669, Samuel Pepys sat down and wrote the end of his diary. He was thirty-six. He had kept it for nine years and five months, since the first day of 1660, in Thomas Shelton's shorthand, filling six small volumes with the Plague, the Fire, the Dutch in the Medway, his wife, his money, his music, his affairs and his dinners. He did not stop because he was bored, or busy, or ashamed. He stopped because he believed he was going blind.

He was not.

The farewell entry

The last entry is not a sign-off. It is a man arranging his own affairs. He explains that he can no longer keep the journal himself, "having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand." Then he tries to solve the problem rather than accept it. He resolves to have the diary kept by his people in longhand, which means, as he immediately admits, that he must "be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know." For anything else, he will try to keep a margin open and add a note in shorthand in his own hand.

Then the last sentence, which is why people still read this entry three and a half centuries later:

And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave: for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!

Notice what he has worked out on the page. The diary was not merely a record. It was a private record, and privacy was a condition of its contents. The moment a clerk holds the pen, the object changes into something else, and he knows it in the same breath he proposes it. He is not giving up writing. He is giving up the only version of it worth having.

No longhand volume survives. As far as anyone can tell, the substitute diary was never really begun.

What he thought was happening

The eye trouble was real. He had been complaining for years, worse from about 1667: pain after long reading, water in the eyes, an ache that arrived with candlelight and close work. He tried remedies as they came. Green-tinted spectacles. Paper tubes to look through, which narrowed the field and seemed to help. He kept working, and the working kept hurting.

In 1669 there was no way to name what he had. Modern writers have proposed long-sightedness, astigmatism, a problem with the way his eyes worked together, plain overuse under bad light, or some combination. None of it is settled. What can be said is that he reasoned honestly from what he had: symptoms that worsened, no explanation, and a period in which failing sight generally meant sight that kept failing. Blindness was the sensible forecast.

It was still wrong.

Thirty-four more years of seeing

Pepys died on 26 May 1703, four days short of thirty-four years after he closed the book. He did not spend those years in the dark.

He ran the navy. He was Secretary of the Admiralty, was thrown into the Tower in 1679 on charges arising out of the Popish Plot, got free of them, and went back to the Admiralty. He served as President of the Royal Society, and his name sits on the title page of Newton's Principia as the officer who licensed it for printing in July 1686. He sailed to Tangier in 1683 and kept a journal there. He published a book of his own on the state of the navy in 1690. He wrote letters by the thousand. He assembled a library of about three thousand volumes, had it shelved by height in its own presses, and left instructions so exact that the collection still stands intact at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

The six diary volumes stood on those shelves the whole time, unread, in a shorthand that nobody at the college had reason to look at, until a student named John Smith spent three years transcribing them and a first selection was published in 1825.

So the man who quit writing because he expected to lose his eyes spent three more decades reading and corresponding, and preserved his own diary well enough that we have it.

What the wrong reason cost

Five months after the last entry, in November 1669, Elizabeth Pepys died. She was twenty-nine. They had returned not long before from a journey to France and the Low Countries, taken partly for the sake of his eyes, and she took a fever and did not recover.

The largest event of his private life falls just outside the record. We have Pepys on a burnt cat in a chimney and on the exact price of a periwig, and we have nothing from him on the death of his wife. There is no entry. The diary that would tell us how he took it stopped in May for a reason that never came true.

The cost of quitting was not paid in the moment of quitting. It was paid later, by a version of him who no longer had the habit when the habit would have mattered most.

If you keep any kind of daily record, the useful thing here is not the sad ending. It is the mechanism. Pepys did not decide the diary was worthless. He decided it was impossible, on evidence that felt overwhelming and turned out to be false, and then he accepted a substitute he already knew was not the same thing.

Yesterself was built around the thing Pepys worked out in that final entry: the diary was worth keeping because nobody else was going to read it, and it stopped being worth keeping the moment somebody was. So it is end-to-end encrypted, with no account, no email and no password, identity held as twelve words on your side, and export is free forever in open formats, on the free tier too. It is not released yet, so the only thing to do with it today is join the waiting list.

Testing your own reason before you close the book

Most stopped journals stop the way Pepys's did: not by decision, by conclusion. A reason arrives, it sounds final, and the book closes. A few questions are worth putting to that reason first.

• Is it a constraint or a conclusion? "My eyes hurt at night" is a constraint and has a dozen answers. "I am going blind" is a conclusion and has one. Pepys converted the first into the second in a single evening.
• Would a smaller version survive it? He was right that a clerk-written diary was a different object. He was wrong that the only alternative was nothing. Three lines a week in his own hand, in daylight, would have carried November 1669.
• Are you changing the form or ending the practice? Changing the form is normal. Pepys's own instinct, keeping a margin for shorthand notes, was the right size of idea. He simply never did it.
• What happens if the reason turns out to be false? This is the question almost nobody asks, and it is the only one that would have saved the diary.

A missed week is not the same as a closed book, and nothing here argues for an unbroken chain. Pepys left gaps and wrote up several days at once from rough notes.

One plain caution, since eyes are involved: this is history, not medical advice. If reading or writing hurts, or your vision changes, see an optometrist or a doctor rather than reasoning it out yourself in an evening, which is exactly the mistake in the story.

Nine and a half years is not a failure

It is tempting to file this as a tragedy, and partly it is. But Pepys quit early and still left the most alive private record in the language. The unfinished thing was enough.

If you are looking at a journal you stopped, the lesson runs both ways. What you already wrote is not diminished by having ended. And the reason you stopped is worth reading again now, in better light, to see whether it was ever true.

Common questions

Why did Pepys stop writing his diary?

He believed that close work by candlelight was destroying his eyes and that he was going blind. The final entry, dated 31 May 1669, says he cannot go on because he undoes his eyes almost every time he takes a pen in his hand.

Did Samuel Pepys actually go blind?

No. He lived until May 1703, almost thirty-four years after the last entry, and went on reading, writing thousands of letters, running the Admiralty and assembling a library of some three thousand books.

Did he ever keep a diary again?

Not the daily private one. He kept a journal during the Tangier expedition of 1683 and generated official papers for decades, but the nine and a half years of shorthand ending in 1669 are the whole of the famous diary.

What happened to the six volumes after he died?

They went with his library to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where they still are. John Smith deciphered the shorthand between 1819 and 1822, a selection appeared in 1825, and the complete edition by Robert Latham and William Matthews came out between 1970 and 1983.

What did he plan to do instead of writing it himself?

Have his clerks keep it in longhand, with only what was fit for them and all the world to know, and add private notes in shorthand in the margin. No such volume survives, and the plan appears to have died at once.