Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
A few weeks ago I met Regan Hutchins near Seething Lane and he recorded us chatting about Pepys for Culture File on the Irish radio station RTE Lyric FM.
The interview was broadcast on 2nd December and you can listen to it as an MP3 here.
As most of you are probably aware, the diary ends next year. (Apologies if this is a spoiler for you, but I fear this particular surprise is unavoidable.) It would be great to see Sam off with a gathering in London for anyone who’s able to make it.
I’ve just added another little piece of period data to the sidebar, which you’ll see on all diary entries from 11 November 1668 onwards: A brief description of the day’s weather, taken from John Gadbury’s London Weather Diary. That particular day, for example, was described as “Great winds and rain at night”.
If anyone likes to keep the latest version of the extended Pepys family tree to hand, you should note that I’ve just updated it. The only addition is some of the Pickerings, distant relatives of Samuel by marriage through the Montagus. Let me know if you ever think of more people who can be added to this ever-growing chart!
The BBC Radio 4 show, Woman’s Hour is soon going to be featuring a drama based on Samuel Pepys’ diary. There will be five 15 minute episodes, broadcast at 10.45am (UK time) from Monday 15th to Friday 19th August. Here’s the press release from this page:
Apologies for the formatting problems on the site at the moment. I won’t be able to fix them for a few days. Thanks for your patience.
Update: I’ve managed to patch things up a bit so most of the broken pages should look OK. Many of the “tooltip” info boxes won’t appear over links, and other things might still be broken, but I’ll be able to fix those in a few days. (10.56pm, UK time)
Update 2: The site should be back to normal now. For some reason Movable Type (the software this site runs on) had truncated the template which is used to generate the start of each page. This meant that lots of the crucial code was missing from any newly-created or updated pages. (Monday 11th July)
Over the last few days there has been an increasing amount of spam annotations appearing. I’ve now added an extra question to the annotations form which will hopefully prevent automated spammers from successfully posting things. It’s a simple enough question that you shouldn’t have any problems with it!
Anyone in London next month might be interested in this “dramatic reading” about Samuel Pepys and the theatre. Here’s the full blurb:
I’ve given a talk about this website three times in recent months, and the most recent event, SkillSwap Seeking Stories, has put up an audio recording of my talk. I’ve also put up the slides I used that evening, so you can try recreating the talk in the comfort of your own chair…
A brief amusement for you… On Twitter, @lili_bird asked @wesingyourtweet to sing one of @samuelpepys’ tweets. Apparently they sing tweets on request. And here’s the video of their brief sung version of one of Sam’s more uneventful tweets. Thanks all!