Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
27 November 2011
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.
12 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”.
14 October 2011
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!
4 August 2011
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:
7 July 2011
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)
26 June 2011
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!
21 May 2011
Anyone in London next month might be interested in this “dramatic reading” about Samuel Pepys and the theatre. Here’s the full blurb:
13 April 2011
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…
13 April 2011
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!
29 March 2011
The Telegraph has an article about the house in Brampton, Cambridgeshire, to which Sam hoped to retire, as it is up for sale. The article probably doesn’t contain much new to those of you who have been reading the diary, but it’s interesting to see a couple of pictures of the place.
29 March 2011
You’ve no doubt noticed that many of the little pop-up descriptions of people, places, etc. in diary entries are lacking descriptive text. Which is a shame, especially for those who aren’t too familiar with the diary and Sam’s world. So I’ve put together a list of the most frequently-appearing topics that are currently lacking brief summaries.
5 March 2011
Last weekend this site was mentioned briefly on the Click programme on the BBC News channel. It’s been repeated during the week and I recorded one of the broadcasts. Here’s the brief segment that tries its best to make a website full of text look as televisual as possible:
25 February 2011
A week ago I put up a quick survey that asked three questions. I’ve since thought of more things I could have asked, but maybe we’ll do another sometime. Until then, here are the results based on the 400 people who completed the survey…
16 February 2011
The survey is now closed.
You may have seen this linked to from the front page already, so apologies for the duplication, but I’d appreciate it if you could answer this quick, anonymous, three question survey.
It’s rather hasty, and maybe I’ll do a more substantial one another time. Either way, I’ll share the results with you in a few days. Thanks!
3 February 2011
In 2008 I put together a family tree for the extended Pepys ancestry. A few weeks ago Alan Lawrence pointed out an error in the family tree (thanks Alan!), so I’ve taken this opportunity to extend the tree as well as correcting the error.
2 February 2011
The 20th January 2011 issue of the London Review of Books features two mentions of Samuel Pepys. Unfortunately, both are only available online to subscribers, but here are a couple of interesting quotes.
22 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.
19 January 2011
Andrew Hamilton writes about a meeting in March…
19 January 2011
Last weekend, at Culture Hack Day in London, Matthew Somerville and Clare Lovell made Pepys’ Shows. It’s a very simple fun thing: it shows a quote from Pepys’ diary about a random play, with a link to the relevant play at Matthew’s site Theatricalia. Click “freshen anew” to see another one of Sam’s mini reviews. Very nice.
13 January 2011
I was on a TV programme on BBC One in the UK today, The One Show talking about Samuel Pepys and diaries. I was only on briefly, but here’s the video if you want to see (I start around 40 seconds in):