Pepys’s diary itself – I prefer “diaries”, since he ended up with six leather-bound volumes over the course of ten years – was, as you can see, written in shorthand. Bar the names, that is – spot ‘Axe-yard’, where Pepys lived; ‘Lamb’ (Major-General John Lambert), ‘Lawson’ (Sir John Lawson) and ‘Monke’ (George Monke, Duke of Albermarle).

What you’re seeing there is, from his very first diary entry on 1 January 1660 (I love the hand-drawn margins, btw):

Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold. I lived in Axe Yard having my wife, and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three. My wife, after the absence of her terms for seven weeks, gave me hopes of her being with child, but on the last day of the year the hope was belied. The condition of the State was thus; viz. the Rump, after being disturbed by my Lord Lambert, was lately returned to sit again. The officers of the Army all forced to yield. Lawson lies still in the river, and Monke is with his army in Scotland. Only my Lord Lambert is not yet come into the Parliament, nor is it expected that he will without being forced to it.

Pepys and his wife, Elizabeth, longed for a child, which would never arrive. Previously, he had endured a frankly agonising operation to remove a kidney stone, the pain of which had blighted his young life – it must have been bad, to resort to an op without anaesthetic – and scholars suggest that the procedure may have affected his ability to father a child.

Why shorthand? The man who created this specific ‘Tachygraphy’ system, Thomas Shelton, pointed out that it made writing by hand far speedier. Which is true; however Pepys also likely used it knowing that it made his innermost thoughts, in the unlikely event that they were discovered (he kept the diary under lock and key), indecipherable.

Pepys recorded everything in his diary, down to his multiple ‘indiscretions’ with other women. These, he disguised further, by recording them in an odd mixture of foreign languages (French, Spanish, Greek, Latin).

For instance, here’s an entry from 20 February 1665:

“Thence to the office, and there found Bagwell’s wife, whom I directed to go home, and I would do her business, which was to write a letter to my Lord Sandwich for her husband’s advance into a better ship as there should be occasion. Which I did, and by and by did go down by water to Deptford, and then down further, and so landed at the lower end of the town, and it being dark ‘entrer en la maison de la femme de Bagwell’, and there had ‘sa compagnie’, though with a great deal of difficulty, ‘neanmoins en fin j’avais ma volont d’elle’, and being sated therewith, I walked home to Redriffe, it being now near nine o’clock, and there I did drink some strong waters and eat some bread and cheese, and so home.”

I’ll leave you to translate it. The fact is that Pepys had eyes for other women, and given the slightest encouragement, would act upon his fancies. The 17th century was pretty unreconstructed. (Actually, it’s odd that he chose to ‘disguise’ this entry – and many others – in French, since Elizabeth was half-French and spoke the language fluently. We can assume he was absolutely certain she would never read his words.)

Amazingly, I stumbled upon an online copy of Thomas Shelton’s 1645 manuscript, ‘Tachygraphy or Short Writing – The Most Easy Exact and Speedie’, which is today’s rabbit-hole link.

Incidentally, we shouldn’t laugh, but… The first man to attempt to decipher Pepys’s diary shorthand was a Magdalene College (where Pepys’s library is kept) student named John Smith. Shelton’s system having become obsolete by the early 19th century, Smith essentially had to crack the code to reveal the diary, which no doubt took a while… So we can only imagine his fury when he realised, at the end of his toil, that a copy of Shelton’s manuscript had been in Pepys’s library all along.