Motivated by the publication of John Evelyn's Diary in 1818, Lord Granville deciphered a few pages.[57] John Smith (later the Rector of St Mary the Virgin in Baldock) was then engaged to transcribe the diaries into plain English. He laboured at this task for three years, from 1819 to 1822, unaware until nearly finished that a key to the shorthand system was stored in Pepys' library a few shelves above the diary volumes. Others had apparently succeeded in reading the diary earlier, perhaps knowing about the key, because a work of 1812 quotes from a passage of it.[58] Smith's transcription, which is also kept in the Pepys Library, was the basis for the first published edition of the diary, edited by Lord Braybrooke, released in two volumes in 1825.
A second transcription, done with the benefit of the key, but often less accurately, was completed in 1875 by Mynors Bright and published in 1875–1879.[59] This added about a third to the previously published text, but still left only about 80% of the diary in print.[60] Henry B. Wheatley, drawing on both his predecessors, produced a new edition in 1893–1899,[61] revised in 1926, with extensive notes and an index.
All of these editions omitted passages (chiefly about Pepys' sexual adventures) that the editors thought were too obscene ever to be printed. Wheatley, in the preface to his edition, noted, "a few passages which cannot possibly be printed. It may be thought by some that these omissions are due to an unnecessary squeamishness, but it is not really so, and readers are therefore asked to have faith in the judgement of the editor." Wheatley claims to have indicated all such omissions with an ellipsis, but comparison with the modern text indicates that he did not always do this, and that he silently bowdlerised a number of words.[62]
The complete, unexpurgated, and definitive edition, edited and transcribed by Robert Latham and William Matthews, was published by Bell & Hyman, London, and the University of California Press, Berkeley, in nine volumes, along with separate Companion and Index volumes, over the years 1970–1983. Various single-volume abridgements of this text are also available.
The Introduction in Volume I provides a scholarly but readable account of "The Diarist", "The Diary" ("The Manuscript", "The Shorthand", and "The Text"), "History of Previous Editions", "The Diary as Literature", and "The Diary as History". The Companion provides a long series of detailed essays about Pepys and his world.
The first unabridged recording of the diary as an audiobook was published in 2015 by Naxos AudioBooks.[63]
On 1 January 2003 Phil Gyford started a weblog, pepysdiary.com, that serialised the diary one day each evening together with annotations from the public and experts alike. In December 2003 the blog won the best specialist blog award in The Guardian's Best of British Blogs.[64] In 2021, Gyford noted the existence of the Samuel Pepys Twitter account; set up in 2008, the account similarly serialises Pepys' diary each day.[65][66]
