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Samuel Pepys (London 1633-1703) - pronounced "pieps" - was a British civil servant. He was made famous for his diaries, kept from January 1, 1660 to May 31, 1669. They are a combination of personal revelations and eyewitness accounts of important events such as the Great Plague and Great Fire of London. Born the son of a well-to-do tailor, he attended St Paul's in London and Magdalene College in Oxford, after which he entered the service of the "Exchequer" in 1658 [a kind of 'Ministry of Finance' which, however, also deals with 'foreign affairs'. loved]. In 1655 he was married to 15-year-old Elizabeth St Michel, the daughter of a very poor French refugee. He kept the diaries from the moment of promotion (1660) at his ministry as one of the 6 'under-secretaries of state' until he developed an eye problem in 1669 and thought he was completely blind. That year his wife also died. In 1665 he was elected a member of the Royal Society [British Academy of Sciences] of which he later became president. In 1672 he becomes the highest-ranking Clerk of the Acts of the Admiralty, what we would now call Secretary of State for the Navy. He held this position with a short interruption until he withdrew from official life at the time of the "Glorious Revolution" of 1689 (and the arrival of 'our' William of Orange). He was an important civil servant in his day, as well as a member of parliament, and a cultured man with a keen interest in books, music, theater and science. A courageous but above all excellent observer, who lived in a turbulent time and has a detailed report about it. Pepys died childless in 1703 and kept (through a cousin) his diaries - 3800 pages in a kind of shorthand code, bound in 6 volumes - at Magdalene College where he had studied at the time. They were only deciphered for the first time between 1819-1822 by Reverend John Smith, after which a shortened and edited version (4 volumes) appeared in 1825. Completely complete, the diaries (10 volumes and register volume) did not appear until between 1893-1899 in a new decipherment. from Reverend Mynors Bright. In 1963 it appeared (3 volumes) in a final, new transcription by F. McD. Turner. Based on these 3 sources mentioned, Dr. A. Alberts a selection of fragments in the first Dutch-language adaptation.
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