Set piece · How it ends
How the diary ends, 31 May 1669
By the spring of 1669 every page he wrote hurt his eyes. On the last night he spent the evening merry at a drinking-house by the Park, came home late, and closed the diary. From now on, he wrote, it would be kept “by my people in long-hand”, so it could hold only what was fit for all the world to know.
And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave: for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!
And that is where the squares stop. He was wrong about his eyes: he did not go blind. But he never kept a journal like it again. Elizabeth died of a fever on 10 November 1669, five months after the last entry. She was twenty-nine.
The diary's last fortnight, one square a day, coloured by his mood:
- Tuesday 18 May 1669: mood +1, content
- Wednesday 19 May 1669: mood +1, content
- Thursday 20 May 1669: mood −1, vexed or anxious
- Friday 21 May 1669: mood 0, even
- Saturday 22 May 1669: mood 0, even
- Sunday 23 May 1669: mood +1, content
- Monday 24 May 1669: mood +1, content
- Tuesday 25 May 1669: mood 0, even
- Wednesday 26 May 1669: mood 0, even
- Thursday 27 May 1669: mood 0, even
- Friday 28 May 1669: mood +1, content
- Saturday 29 May 1669: mood 0, even
- Sunday 30 May 1669: mood +1, content
- Monday 31 May 1669: mood −2, distressed or furious
He lived until 1703.
He rose to be Secretary to the Admiralty, was sent to the Tower in 1679 on a charge Wheatley calls baseless, and in 1684 became President of the Royal Society. He left his books to Magdalene College, Cambridge, to pass there after his nephew and heir, John Jackson, had had the use of them; the six volumes of the diary went with them, and have been on the college's shelves since 1724. Wheatley, Introduction (1893) (opens in a new tab)
The failing light: the story of his eyes, from 1664 to the last page