The Diary of Samuel Pepys | Hacker News Reader

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

pepysdiary.com

62 pointsdang17 comments

Hi, that's my site. It's been running for twenty years, through two complete cycles of the diary, and we've just started the third.

You can read it on the site (or via its RSS), or get each diary entry via email https://buttondown.email/pepysdiary , or get excerpts throughout the day in "real time" on Twitter https://twitter.com/samuelpepys , or the same on Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@samuelpepys

Feel free to AMA

Thank you for your service. I follow the Twitter account and I am always amused when I see what a naughty boy Samuel was. Seeing various people join in and comment, with a weird sort of "meta" that was created around it is always a pleasure.

Seeing these longer diary entries I wonder does the Twitter account publish full content of the diary entries or just selected parts?

Only selected parts. There's a lot of stuff that isn't super interesting, or isn't super interesting in fragments, or just doesn't work as short fragments. So there's a lot of editorial decisions about what would make good tweets – often "boring" bits make for good, relatable tweets though.

I often edit the tweets by omitting a few words if it's required to make them fit into 280 characters. Which is easier than the first few years when I had to fit them into 140 characters.

There was a good exhibition a few years ago at the naval museum in Greenwich. They also made use of the diaries. Your website has proven a great follow up, thank you.

Just wanted to say hello, as someone who used to regularly browse haddock.org for interesting links before hackernews existed!

Wow, I never saw that site. I thought of mining https://www.haddock.org/directory/ for obscure links for HN, but https://www.haddock.org/directory/previouslinks/index.html doesn't work.

I've been slowly reading my way through the Diary on the linked website, a few entries at a time, since last year. I haven't tried to "sync" my read through with the other people reading through the diary in "real-time", one entry a day, but the fact that a bunch of the commentators on the website do, and have done so through multiple cycles starting in 2002, make the comments of the diary sort of a weird historical record in and of themselves.

So you have one set of comments of people referencing the invasion of Iraq, the Indian Ocean tsunami, etc. as they were happening. Then another set 10 years later bemoaning the Great Recession, etc. Then a final set comparing events in the Diary to the COVID pandemic. And on top of all that, the actual diary entry discussing what were currently developing events 400 years ago.

Reading through an entire page at once gives a kind of weird, poignant, feeling of the passage of time.

I did a production of the Diary for Standard Ebooks[1], it’s still the longest thing on there (amazingly enough given that we also have The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire). Phil from pepysdiary.com was a big help and pointed out a bunch of OCR errors that he’d previously fixed for the site, which I flowed straight back into the SE production.

[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-pepys/the-diary

Ooh, I've probably got some more since then, because I hadn't finished working my way through the diary (for the second time) when I sent you that lot.

If you’ve got them lying around and want to email them over (same address as last time) then I’ll get them in. Thanks!

They* started a new cycle of this. Yesterday was the opening: https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1660/01/01/.

One colourful Pepys quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20579630.

* where by "they" I mean philgyford - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34230074. Bravo!

I love this site. Tech-wise it's been put together which such attention to detail.

There was a really interesting podcast with it's owner broadcast some time ago: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/32-building-a-site-a...

For those seeking more background about Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin wrote a biography "Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self" that more fully provides a context for his diary entries. [0]

On a tangent I was surprised to learn that I'd been mispronouncing his last name for years. Phonetically it's "peeps" and not "pep is" as I'd believed.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Samuel-Pepys-Unequalled-Claire-Tomali...

> On a tangent I was surprised to learn that I'd been mispronouncing his last name for years. Phonetically it's "peeps" and not "pep is" as I'd believed.

It's a shibboleth for English lit majors, like knowing Euler is "oiler" for math folks.

One Walter C. Pepys, a genealogist, did some research on this. This quote comes from the introduction to the Standard Ebooks edition linked in another comment: “The accepted spelling of the name ‘Pepys’ was adopted generally about the end of the seventeenth century, though it occurs many years before that time. There have been numerous ways of pronouncing the name, as ‘Peps,’ ‘Peeps,’ and ‘Peppis.’ The Diarist undoubtedly pronounced it ‘Peeps,’ and the lineal descendants of his sister Paulina, the family of ‘Pepys Cockerell’ pronounce it so to this day. The other branches of the family all pronounce it as ‘Peppis,’ and I am led to be satisfied that the latter pronunciation is correct by the two facts that in the earliest known writing it is spelt ‘Pepis,’ and that the French form of the name is ‘Pepy.’ ”

The English sure seem to have a fondness for weird pronunciations. Not long ago I was informed that P. G. Wodehouse’s surname is actually pronounced “Woodhouse,” and even more recently I learned that “Ralph Fiennes” rhymes with “safe signs.”

If you are in Cambridge,UK you can visit the library which holds the books he collected (including his diaries): https://www.magd.cam.ac.uk/pepys He designed the bookcases which hold the circa 3000 volumes shelved according to height. His will stipulated that the books are to be held in the library 'without addition or subtraction'

I read through the entire thing over many years when the site first began and a new entry was being posted every day. I found it to be surprisingly interesting and I enjoyed reading about daily life in the 17th century. The comments could also be quite informative. I recommend it to anyone who think they might be interested.

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