Compare the responses of two contemporaries, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, to the same phenomenon : The Great Fire of London.

Compare the responses of two contemporaries, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, to the same phenomenon: The Great Fire of London.

The people of London who had managed to survive the Great Plague in 1665 must have thought that the year 1666 could only be better, and couldn’t possibly be worse! Poor souls… they could not have imagined the new disaster that was to befall them in 1666. A fire started on September 2nd in the King’s bakery in Pudding Lane near London Bridge. Fires were quite a common occurrence in those days and were soon quelled. Indeed, when the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth was woken up to be told about the fire, he replied “Pish! A woman might piss it out!”. However that summer had been very hot and there had been no rain for weeks, so consequently the wooden houses and buildings were tinder dry. The fire soon took hold: 300 houses quickly collapsed and the strong east wind spread the flames further, jumping from house to house. The fire swept through the warren of streets lined with houses, the upper stories of which almost touched across the narrow winding lanes. Efforts to bring the fire under control by using buckets quickly failed. Panic began to spread through the city. As the fire raged on, people tried to leave the city and poured down to the River Thames in an attempt to escape by boat. Absolute chaos reigned, as often happens today, as thousands of ‘sightseers’ from the villages came to view the disaster. Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, the diarists, both gave dramatic, first-hand accounts of the next few days.

Samuel Pepys’ Account of the Great Fire of London

If there is one thing that people know about Samuel Pepys, it’s that he witnessed and chronicled the Great Fire of London which devastated the capital in the late summer of 1666. Together with the epidemic of bubonic plague that hit the city the previous year, the Great Fire had an unimaginable impact on London and its people. The fire, which broke out in the house of the King’s baker, Thomas Farynor, early in the morning of Sunday 2 September, decimated four-fifths of the city: over 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, 52 Livery Company Halls, the Guildhall, the Royal Exchange and St Paul’s Cathedral. In the words of Pepys, ................TO GET COMPLETE STUDY MATERIAL JOIN NSOU ENGLISH COACHING

SHARE

Milan Tomic

Hi. I’m Designer of Blog Magic. I’m CEO/Founder of ThemeXpose. I’m Creative Art Director, Web Designer, UI/UX Designer, Interaction Designer, Industrial Designer, Web Developer, Business Enthusiast, StartUp Enthusiast, Speaker, Writer and Photographer. Inspired to make things looks better.

• 
• 
• 
• 
•