In many ways, the Diary that Pepys kept is more a book of ironies than a document about the City of London during his years there. Although the major events impacting the City are all included in the Diary, and in some cases, only known to historians precisely because they are included in his eyewitness history, they are seen predominantly of a man who was narcissistic enough to see every life-changing City-wide experience only as it affected him personally. There are many entries in the Diary that are reminiscent of Marie Antoinette's famous "let them eat cake" comment; Pepys just cannot empathize with the ordinary man in the street.
Take the Great Plague, for example. Pepys journals that he actually enjoyed one of the best years of his life during this time. Although he wrote about the way in which the City had changed - boarded up homes, floral wreaths on almost every door, deserted streets - he was also preoccupied by the source of the hair that was used in his many wigs. What if it came from someone who had died of plague? Could this still be communicable? Many of the entries in his Diary, if made today, would come with the hashtag #richmanproblems.
The Great Fire provokes a similar narcissistic reaction; nervous as he is about the fire getting ever closer to Seething Lane, and saddened as he is to see many of the landmarks in the City destroyed and razed to the ground, he is equally concerned about the effect the mass exodus from the burning City is having on his culinary arrangements. A combination of lack of available food and lack of available help has resulted in a rather boring and characterless evening meal, devoid of condiments, or dressings of any kind, and the table it was served on looked less inviting than usual. Again, Pepys is able to compartmentalize what is happening to others and what is happening in his own life. The Grear Fire is a concern, but not an immediate one, and so he moves on to concern regarding his eating habits. Even after the fire has been extinguished, and it has exhausted the supply of buildings to burn through, his main thought is for his alma mater, and for St.Paul's Cathedral, because they are both buildings that are important to him. There is not a great deal mentioned about buildings that are important to others.
Despite his rather tone-deaf and tactless way of looking at the world as reported in his Diary, Pepys is nonetheless a hard worker, an honest, upstanding man, and a success at his job. He enjoys working and he enjoys getting paid for it, amassing money and gold and enjoying the increase in both. He does, however, have a habit of throwing others under the bus, for example, when asked by the parliamentary commission to produce a sort of post mortem about the war with the Netherlands in an effort to see who was to blame for the loss, he is happy to comply, partly because he was not responsible for any of the things that caused the loss, and partly because it gave him the opportunity to lay more blame at the feet of others and so compound their culpability, and his own lack thereof.
Although we now view the Diary as an historical document, and a documentary of life in the City of London during his time, when he wrote the Diary it was as a record for himself. He wrote about the things that concerned him, the places that meant something to him, the experiences that he went through that were pivotal in his life. He also wrote about the women he was attracted to and the affairs and assignations that he had, something he might not have done had he known that we would still be reading about his infidelities hundreds of years later. The Diary is an exciting window into the City of London during the seventeenth century, but it is a window that we look through specifically from Pepys' own perspective, and so it is eyewitness testimony, rather than actual, evidentiary fact.
