Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
The maps in the Encyclopedia aren’t working at the moment – none of the graphical “tiles” that make up the maps are loading. I can’t tell exactly why and don’t have much time right now to look into it. Hopefully Mapbox (who provide the free tiles) will get back to me, or else I’ll find the time to rewrite the map-generating code. I’m not sure how long this will take, sorry!
Readers of this site may be interested in a new book, The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy by Danielle Bobker, which looks at this room as it was written about by various authors, including Samuel Pepys. Given how interested Pepys was in improving and enjoying his closet, it sounds interesting.
If you’re at all interested about the technical aspects behind this site then here’s just the thing for you… I was interviewed for an episode of the Running in Production podcast. I talk about the code that runs the site and how it’s served.
A couple of months ago I mentioned a couple of modern versions of Samuel Pepys recounting their experiences of living through the age of the coronavirus. If you’re looking for more, here’s Samuel Pepys: The Covid Diaries.
I recently mentioned an interview with me about this site in the Samuel Pepys Club newsletter. Although the newsletter is only available to members the interviewer and club secretary, Lucie Skeaping, has kindly offered the full interview to read for anyone interested.
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 The interview is a little out of date — it’s from nearly two years ago — but, er, if you’re one of the club’s 140 members then you can read it.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.