The Diary of Samuel Pepys

What a great idea: somebody is taking the diary of Samuel Pepys and turning it into a daily weblog. Apparently it’s being transcribed directly from the diary itself, each day following the dating of the diary itself.

Pepys of course wrote during some of the greatest events in London history, The Great Plague of 1665 and The Great Fire of 1666. Daniel Defoe famously wrote about life in London during the plague in his novel A Journal of the Plague Year, but Pepys writes from the perspective of someone actually living in the city at the time.

He was also writing during a time when London was a much more human–scale city. The street layout of the central core, “The Square Mile,” hasn’t really changed much since it was recorded in Braun and Hogenberg’s famous map of the city, engraved around 1560.