routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Scottish Enlightenment, diarists and Gibbon
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the foremost nations of the world’. By a remarkable coincidence, the
book was published in the very same year as the American Declaration
of Independence. One of the comments later used by Napoleon Bonaparte
against the British is first found in Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, again
underlining the new mercantile ethos of the time.
To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a
people of customers, may at first sight appear a project fit only
for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether
unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation
that is governed by shopkeepers.
And so to bed
(Samuel Pepys, Diary)
The growth of the writing profession coincided with a rise in writing
which was private and not intended for publication. Diaries and letters
were, for the new literate middle class, forms of expression which
enjoyed increasingly wider currency.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys is probably the best-known example of its
kind in all literature. Running from 1 January 1660 until 31 May 1669,
the diary was written in a form of code, which was not deciphered
until 1825. Essentially private and highly personal, it gives a day-byday
insight into the decade of the Restoration – with visits to the
theatre, graphically described amorous encounters, details of Pepys’s
work as a high-ranking civil servant, and such major events as the
Great Plague (1664–65) and the Great Fire of London (1666).
To Pepys, and to his contemporary John Evelyn, we owe first-hand accounts
of the new society as it was taking shape. Evelyn is less spontaneous, perhaps
more reflective than Pepys; in part, because his Diary (or Memoirs), first
published in 1818, was not written day by day, as Pepys’s was. But their
contribution to our knowledge of the Restoration is outstanding. Here we
can contrast the two commentaries on the Great Fire.
. . . the fire running further, that in a very little time it got as far as the
Steele-yard, while I was there. Everybody endeavouring to remove