Pepys' Diary

Thanks to Hannah at mony wylsum way, I've found a wonderful website based on The Diary of Samuel Pepys. It's updated daily to correspond to what Pepys was doing on that day — they are now up to 1665/66. I haven't explored the site comprehensively, but its annotations and resources look excellent.

What a clever idea! I know there are a thousand differences between an online blog and a diary, but there is something about the daily updating of this old diary that captures the immediacy, and what I will call the provisionality, of a blog. Provisionality? the sense that the blog is never the last word on anything. This is what makes it such an attractive medium for academics, perhaps. And do we think Pepys might have had a sense of a reading public? Or anticipated future publication?

Anyway, I'm going to be checking it daily, I can tell. I'm going to see if the experience of readingthis diary is at all similar to the experience of reading other familiar blogs.