Website: http://www.pepysdiary.com/
Phil Gyford
Articles
Phil Gyford has written four articles:
- Evelyn to Pepys, 26 March 1666 (26 March 2009)
- John Evelyn’s Fire of London (2 September 2009)
- Q&A with Dr Kate Loveman (14 April 2019)
- A bill of exchange (18 August 2020)
Annotations and comments
Phil Gyford has posted 771 annotations/comments since 27 December 2002.
Comments
First Reading
About Will's ale house (Old Palace Yard)
Phil • Link
The map location above is very approximate.
About Tuesday 17 January 1659/60
Phil • Link
Thanks for the clarification about Mrs Jane and Mrs Jem, Glyn! That makes much more sense. I should have noticed that, but I don't always get the chance to read Latham & Matthews prior to posting entries.
About Tuesday 17 January 1659/60
Phil • Link
If a person doesn't have a page for annotations, this doesn't necessarily mean they're not important or they don't appear very often. A person gets a page to themselves if the 1893 edition of the text had footnotes about them and these tended to be erratic. If anyone wants to annotate a person I'm happy to create new pages as desired!
About Should entries display the weekday?
Phil • Link
I know what you mean Jason. One alternative would be to shift the entries so we get a Monday entry on our Monday. But this would have other problems, like not getting his Christmas on our Dec 25th. In a way, while it was easier to believe the events were happening right now, it was just a cover-up, an illusion, and rather misleading; you'd get Pepys going to Church on what seemed like a Thursday for example.
About Listen to Claire Tomalin's Pepys biography
Phil • Link
It doesn't appear Radio 4 archive Book of the Week, so it doesn't look like you can hear it now.
About Thursday 12 January 1659/60
Phil • Link
We have days of the week. No more votes needed! :)
About Saturday 14 January 1659/60
Phil • Link
Location of Pepys' office and Will's
Pepys' office at this time was in Westminster, as he said on Jan 3rd "so went to Westminster, where I found soldiers in my office."
I got confused a few posts back -- Will's isn't a coffee house in Covent Garden, but a "place of entertainment" in Westminster. Sorry! All very convenient for getting to and from home though!
About Saturday 14 January 1659/60
Phil • Link
"Why does our diary introduction say 'unabridged' if it is censored?"
Tim, that's a good question! I guess the Victorian compilers considered this version unabridged compared to previous versions which were much more condensed. Even so, they obviously couldn't bring themselves to print *quite* everything! No doubt myself or others will attempt to fill in any such gaps.
About Charing Cross
Phil • Link
But the fact it isn't one of the original Eleanor Crosses, is a couple of hundred years newer, and is in a different location means it's correct to say that one of the 12 crosses is not at Charing Cross.
About Saturday 14 January 1659/60
Phil • Link
I agree that he wasn't really walking far, except for people who are used to travelling everywhere by car. In fact his walk to Westminster from his home is only about 5 minutes (not 30). Walking to Will's coffee shop in Covent Garden would be perhaps 15 minutes, little more. And walking to the Guildhall or Tower of London (30 mins or more from Covent Garden) would no doubt be perfectly normal and reasonable in those days.
About Want more people/place footnotes?
Phil • Link
Maybe it's just a case of marking the Place pages as to whether something still exists or not. Or this might be obvious by reading the annotations. I'm planning on taking some photos of the locations before too long.
About Saturday 14 January 1659/60
Phil • Link
I think we'd be making a mistake to apply our 21st century standards of what makes a day's work to the 17th century. It was only relatively recently that it became the norm to work 9-5 (or whatever). Before that it was far more irregular, probably in part due to the fact that clocks were rarer and less accurate items.
About Friday 13 January 1659/60
Phil • Link
Re: old maps.
I'm going to see if I can find any old reproduction maps to buy this week and scan in. If not I'll try and mark up that 1642/43 map at the weekend. I think pre-Great Fire maps would be best given how much was destroyed then, and such maps don't seem to have much detail unfortunately.
About Want more people/place footnotes?
Phil • Link
As I say, if anyone has something to say about a location, they just have to ask me for a place to post annotations! I fear the problem with some of the locations, such as pubs, might be that no one knows anything about them these days.
About Friday 13 January 1659/60
Phil • Link
You should be able to get some idea from looking at the Streetmap links on the Place pages, but I realise this could be tricky without an existing knowledge of London! I haven't had much luck finding a decent online period map with streetnames; one problem is that it's a lot of information to display on screen. However, there are quite a few maps here http://makeashorterlink.com/?E339… and I'll mark up a suitable map (perhaps the 1642/43 one) with some of the most important locations. Stay tuned...
About Friday 13 January 1659/60
Phil • Link
Yes, you can probably still catch some of Claire Tomalin's biography of Pepys here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/… (until each day's is overwritten with this week's book of the week). Pepys and his wife did separate in the late 1650s for unknown reasons as this page says: http://www.pepysdiary.com/about/h…
About Should entries display the weekday?
Phil • Link
Thanks for all the thoughts everyone! As you may already have noticed, I've decided to add the day of the week above each entry, so as to make things clearer. On the few occasions where Pepys wrote this in himself, I've also included this in the diary entry itself, for completeness sake. I hope this makes the diary clearer!
About Should entries display the weekday?
Phil • Link
"If it ain
About Should entries display the weekday?
Phil • Link
I don't feel the need to reproduce the Project Gutenberg text precisely because I see it as some object of perfection, or whatever. It's more about trying not to confuse sources. I like to make it clear that all text in the diary entry is from an external source with none of it amended by me or anyone but PG. Given there are already plenty of versions of Pepys' Diary, I don't really want to create another, apart from by adding annotations to an existing text.
Some entries already have extra words in square brackets to make things clearer, and I'm not sure whether this is from PG or the 1893 edition. Either way, I don't want to confuse this further by adding my own corrections or amendments to the text. Altering the dates for each entry is a different matter as these are already a slightly different format to Pepys' original, but it's still not something I wanted to rush into without asking for the opinion of others.
About Thursday 12 January 1659/60
Phil • Link
The best place to discuss the issue of putting weekdays in diary entries is now here: http://www.pepysdiary.com/about/a…