Hot on the heels of his video review of The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary, Guy de la Bédoyère published another video, this time about transcribing Samuel Pepys’s shorthand.
Guy has his own book coming out this summer, The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations, which has involved a lot of re-examining Pepys’s diary manuscripts. In this video he shows parts of two diary entries – 23 August 1665 and 20 March 1667 – and explains both the tachygraphy shorthand and his deciphering of those passages that Pepys obfuscated in a mixture of non-English languages.
It’s easy to forget, when reading the diary entries on this site or in books, how different “the real thing” is, and how much work has gone into making it understandable to us all. Well worth a watch.
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