Collection Other Lives in Samuel Pepys’s Diary: A Collection of Creative Writing Inspired by Samuel Pepys’s Journal of the 1660s

On this site you can find the book itself and a recording of one of the authors, Elizabeth Uter, performing her story. Pepys’s diary is famous for detailing major events such as the Great Fire of London.

In it, there are also glimpses of the lives of female servants, enslaved Black people, and other Londoners whose lives barely appear in more conventional historical records. The three people from the diary who feature in the collection are Pepys’s maidservant Jane Birch; an unnamed Deaf boy whose signed conversation Pepys observed at a party; and Mingo, a young Black man who had been enslaved as a child. There is a historical introduction to each figure.