What Would Samuel Pepys Do [in the 21st century]? Keep a weblog, of course. Phil Gyford, who I know slightly, will be publishing Samuel Pepys’ diary online as a weblog a day at a time, complete with links to more in-depth historical information.
Pepys, probably the world’s best-known diarist, wrote about his life in 17th Century London – Phil provides more detail here.
If you prefer the text in an easy-to-carry-around form or want to “cheat” and read ahead, Project Gutenberg has the whole text for you to download thanks to Dr David Widger, who has also added a lot of other etexts to the public realm.
Later Phil has been interviewed by the BBC and a passing reader of the story pointed out that Pepys would not have kept a public weblog – his diary was in a very hard-to-decipher shorthand.
Thanks for the comments. Actually the diary wasn’t in a “code” but was in shorthand, which was more common in those days than it is now. When it came to publishing the diary it did take some people a while to work it which version of shorthand Pepys had used.
The lede in the BBC article, saying “If the great diarist Samuel Pepys was alive today, he would no doubt use the web to share his thoughts,” is the work of some BBC sub – I don’t agree.
Comment by Phil — 2 January 2003 @ 6:53 pm