Pepys’ blogging is over but what about Twitter?
A Web designer posted daily entries from the diaries of the 17th century writer.
After faithfully writing almost nightly for nine years, noted diarist Samuel Pepys ended his blogging Thursday.
Bloggers come and go, but Pepys is unique in that he died in England more than 300 years ago.
Pepys was a hard-working clerk to the Naval Board who eventually was elected to Parliament and became chief secretary to the Admiralty under two British kings. Starting at age 26, he began keeping a diary.
Pepys was an engaging diarist, taking great joy in describing the good meals he ate, business conundrums, tussles and tangles with his wife, and his extramarital sexual encounters.
He also lived through and chronicled some enormous historic events up close: The Great Plague of London (1664-1666) and the threeday-long Great Fire of London in 1666.
It was for those eyewitness accounts that Pepys’ diary was first published, in two volumes, in 1825. The sexual escapades were left out of this and later editions until the 20th century. In America, that was in a ninevolume edition that was published by U.C. Press from 1970-1983.
The realization that 17th diary entries were in fact a perfect match for blogging as a form struck Phil Gyford, a British Web designer and developer. He set up PepysDiary.com, where Pepys’ diary entries published every day, coinciding with the days Pepys wrote them. They went online at 11 p.m. London time, an approximation of when Pepys might have been writing at the end of the day, or when a modern-day Pepys would sit down to blog. Pepys concluded many of his entries: “...and so to bed.”
Gyford added notes and created a system whereby readers — some of whom surfaced with deep expertise in Pepys and his period — were able to annotate freely.
After nine years, Pepys’ diaries ended, and his online blog version saw its final entry published Thursday.
Although Samuel Pepys will no longer be updating his blog, it will remain online for interested readers.
Gyford’s plan now is to take a break from Pepys, but he might bring him back next year: maybe as @samuelpepys on Twitter, perhaps as a Pepys Pinterest, or in some other Pepys’-ready 21st century technology yet to be born.