Point of View. Point of view is the vantage point from which a story is told. This diary is written from Pepys’ perspective.
Journal. A journal, like a diary, is a day-to-day record of a person’s activities, experiences, thoughts, and feelings. In contrast to the word diary, the word journal connotes an outward rather than an inward focus.
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The Diary of Samuel Pepys is a clear and interesting account of the daily life of a successful, middle-class Englishman. The journal begins in the year of the Restoration—January 1, 1660—and ends on May 31, 1669. In it, Pepys writes about a variety of important and earth-shattering events, including the plague and the Great London Fire of 1666. Oddly, Pepys wrote his journal in an obscure shorthand that had to be deciphered before the book was published for the first time in 1825. In this selection, the spellings of some words differ from those now in use, and some spellings are inconsistent. However, these irregularities have been left in the text to provide something of the flavor of Pepys’s work. It is a diary, written hastily, in the midst of a busy life.
Make a chart and track some of the outward and inward observations Pepys makes.
Think back over your life. During which times would it have been most interesting to have kept a journal? Why?
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