Thanks to Gaw's suggestion, I have begun to (very belatedly) delve into the life of Samuel Pepys. I have just begun reading Claire Tomalin's excellent biography, and concurrently I have subscribed to the daily Pepys blog - a most ingenious idea, posting Pepys' unedited daily musings in blog form.(and so much more digestible in daily morsels)

Yesterday was the 'big one' - the Great Fire of London, and I was amazed at the intimacy and immediacy of the description.

"So near the fire as we could for smoke; and all over the Thames, with one's face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops. This is very true; so as houses were burned by these drops and flakes of fire, three or four, nay, five or six houses, one from another. When we could endure no more upon the water; we to a little ale-house on the Bankside, over against the 'Three Cranes, and there staid till it was dark almost, and saw the fire grow; and, as it grew darker, appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire. Barbary and her husband away before us. We staid till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruins."


It's just a shame that I am out of kilter with the descriptions of the book, as I would love to be able to compare Pepys' writing with Tomalin's contextualisation. Hopefully in a week or two, I shall be up to speed and able to luxuriate yet further in time spent learning about a fascinating man