Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
Monday 31st December 2012
Welcome to the new website, just in time for 1st January. The diary entries will be appearing each day on the front page from 11pm (London time) on 1st January 2013, starting with 1st January 1660. The RSS feed and daily emails should also start working again.
Thursday 5th July 2012
I’ve give the the family tree a probably final update. I’d been planning to give it a tweak — filling in some of the post-diary dates, and adding a couple of people who appeared late in the diary — but I’ve also now added a lot more Montagus. There’s now a new chunk featuring the eminent family, Pepys’s distant relations, on the right-hand end. It’s quite a confusing family — there are several Edward Montagus for example — so having them displayed like this helps make things clearer!
Tuesday 29th May 2012
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been going through my neglected list of things on the site I’ve been meaning to fix or add. Better (very) late than never! Here’s what I’ve been doing:
Friday 10th February 2012
I’ve just added a new section to the site, for letters to and from Samuel Pepys. It currently lists a selection of letters between Pepys and the era’s other major diarist, John Evelyn.
Saturday 12th November 2011
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”.
Saturday 22nd January 2011
Those of you with a technological bent may be interested to know that I’ve packaged up a lot of the data behind this site into computer readable form that will make it easy for people to make new things.
Saturday 8th August 2009
I thought it would be useful if the little “pop up” pieces of text that appear when you hover over underlined words in the diary could also contain pictures. So I’ve been through all the people in the Encyclopedia who are also linked to Wikipedia pages, and copied any portraits found there.
Sunday 10th May 2009
Ever one to keep up with the latest technologies, Samuel Pepys has now started twittering regularly. He’ll be updating around three times a day, so feel free to follow him if you want to keep up with what he’s doing before he gets round to writing his diary at night.
Wednesday 31st December 2008
Just a quick one… I recently added links next to diary entries when there was a letter written between John Evelyn and Pepys. The links take you to the text of the letter at this site. You can see examples on the entries for 9th or 13th December 1665.
Sunday 21st December 2008
This weekend I’ve added two new types of graph to the site, to help visualise some information. One shows Pepys’ increasing wealth during the diary period and the other shows how often an Encyclopedia topic has been referenced in the diary.
Sunday 19th October 2008
I’ve put together a Pepys family tree as an alternative way of accessing Encyclopedia pages for all the Pepyses. It’s also hopefully useful as a way of getting an overview of how everyone’s related — it’s a big family!
Wednesday 15th October 2008
Keeping the annotations tidy requires occasional tending. Despite all the spam filters a few spam annotations get through occasionally, and these only get deleted when someone notices them and emails me. And occasionally there are accidentally duplicated annotations which need tidying up. Also, an unfortunate number of annotations have been truncated during past database moves.
Thursday 21st August 2008
I’ve just added a new feature to the site: maps showing many places at once. They allow you to, for example, see all the churches in London Pepys has mentioned in one glance. Or London streets, or places outside Britain, and more.
Thursday 7th August 2008
Some time ago I added the average monthly temperature and links to the House of Commons and House of Lords journals to the side of each diary entry. I’ve now added links to information at the Records of Earls Colne.
Thursday 27th March 2008
I’m not really sure what to call this. Tool-tips? Hover help? Anyway, you should now notice something new if you hover your mouse cursor over any of the linked words in Diary entries. Here’s an example:
Sunday 30th December 2007
As I mentioned a couple of months ago I’ve been adding Wikipedia content into the Encyclopedia pages. I’ve now looked through the 2,797 Encyclopedia pages and 535 now feature Wikipedia content.
Sunday 4th November 2007
I’ve now added the ability for some pages in the Encyclopedia to automatically pull in relevant content from Wikipedia.
Sunday 28th October 2007
I have added a bit of extra contextual information in the sidebar next to every diary entry. You can now see:
The average temperature for that month (daily data isn’t available until 1772) as recorded by Gordon Manley of the Royal Meteorological Society. You can view the full dataset on the Met Office’s website.
Links to the relevant daily Journals for the House of Commons and House of Lords from British History Online. These will hopefully give some context to Pepys’ more political activities.
My thanks to Terry Foreman for finding both these sources of information that help bring Pepys’ world alive. If anyone can suggest anything else, do let me know.
Saturday 13th October 2007
The most requested feature for the site has been to receive daily diary entries by email. It may have taken me nearly five years for me to manage this but, finally, it’s now possible.
Monday 5th March 2007
Thanks for all your comments on the new design. I’ve made a few changes based on what you said, as described below. If things look a little odd you may need to visit this file and click the Reload button in your browser.