SOURCE: Introduction to Samuel Pepys' Penny Merriments, Being a Collection of Chapbooks, full of Histories, Jests, Magic, Amorous Tales of Courtship, Marriage and Infidelity, Accounts of Rogues and Fools, together with Comments on the Times, edited by Roger Thompson, Columbia University Press, 1977, pp. 11-23.

In the following excerpt, Thompson argues that Samuel Pepys's collection of seventeenth-century ballads and chapbooks are invaluable aids to understanding the lives and tastes of ordinary English people of the period.

Two months before he died in 1703, Samuel Pepys made his will. Being childless, he left his treasured library of three thousand volumes to his nephew John Jackson, with the stipulation that on Jackson's death the books should go either to his old college, Magdalene, or to Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1724, therefore, the Bibliotheca Pepysiana came to Magdalene, to be housed in their glass-fronted cases in the finely proportioned first-floor room of the recent...