Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
There’s been a parody Samuel Pepys twitter account running for a while at @Pepys_Diaries. It’s a modern-day take on Pepys, imagining him writing in the modern world. Unfortunately one of the account’s recent tweets, drawing parallels between the Plague and 2020’s coronavirus, has been quoted out of context and spread around as if it’s a real excerpt from the diary. The tweet:
The Samuel Pepys Club has a newsletter and the March 2020 issue contains an interview with me about this site, aimed at people who don’t know much about it. The interview is a little out of date — it’s from nearly two years ago — but, er, if you’re one of the club’s 140 members then you can read it.
It’s possible that many regular readers of this site aren’t aware that there’s a related email discussion group. It’s been running for some years on Yahoo Groups but isn’t very prominently advertised here, which I’ll try to fix. However, because Yahoo is deleting all its groups’ archives the Pepys’ Diary group has now moved over to Groups.io.
The Museum of London recently acquired a very rare silver plate that once belonged to Samuel Pepys. From their website:
Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-run project to create free ebooks with high standards of typography, formatting and accessibility, readable on a number of devices. They recently released an edition of The Diary, by Samuel Pepys so if you have an ebook reader of some kind you might want to download it so you always have a copy with you.
I’ve just changed this site’s search page to a new version that is hopefully more useful than the previous Google-powered one.
I’ve noticed a few articles about Pepys appearing recently:
If you’re in or near London you may be interested in a new Pepys walking tour hosted by Alice Ford-Smith, The Walking Librarian on Twitter:
The Royal Mint, who often produce special coins for special occasions, have produced a £2 coin to honour Samuel Pepys, 350 years after his last diary entry:
Last year saw the publication of a new abridged edition of the diary, which (we mentioned here) and a couple of years ago we had a review of the fascinating book Samuel Pepys and His Books. Both are by Dr Kate Loveman who has kindly agreed to answer any questions you might have for her.