Website: http://www.pepysdiary.com/
Phil Gyford
Articles
Phil Gyford has written four articles:
- Evelyn to Pepys, 26 March 1666 (26 March 2009)
- John Evelyn’s Fire of London (2 September 2009)
- Q&A with Dr Kate Loveman (14 April 2019)
- A bill of exchange (18 August 2020)
Annotations and comments
Phil Gyford has posted 773 annotations/comments since 27 December 2002.
The most recent first…
Comments
Third Reading
About Saturday 20 July 1661
Phil Gyford • Link
Note that you're looking at the sunrise/sunset for 2024, and those times are British Summer Time, one hour ahead of UTC/GMT.
As the "About these events" links explains, the sunrise and sunset times is generated by this code, adjusted for the Julian calendar that Pepys uses: https://github.com/hugovk/time-to…
7.49pm is also the time given for this date on https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/u…
The footnote on that table says "All times are local mean solar time for London (UTC -0:01:15 hours). They take into account refraction. Dates are based on the Julian calendar. For years before 1700, the calculated times might be off by many minutes."
And "local mean solar time" is explained on https://www.timeanddate.com/time/…
As we can see it's a complicated subject, and there's no unambiguous answer to what a particular time "is" all those centuries ago.
About Bill of exchange
Phil Gyford • Link
See an image of a bill of exchange mentioned by Pepys in the diary here: https://www.pepysdiary.com/indept…
About Shorthand
Phil Gyford • Link
See Kate Loveman's downloadable PDF guide to reading Samuel Pepys's shorthand: https://pepyshistory.le.ac.uk/pep…
About Patches, Black
Phil Gyford • Link
Another article about the history of face patches https://www.collectorsweekly.com/…
About Friday 10 February 1659/60
Phil Gyford • Link
Just a little nudge about annotations… while it is often useful to compare Pepys' life and world to our own, this isn't the place for discussions of the modern world and our opinions of it. Annotations are for discussing and making sense of what Pepys writes, for readers today and in the future. Thanks.
About Supporting this site at Ko-fi
Phil Gyford • Link
Hi Linda. I'm not sure what to do I'm afraid, as there's no way I'm able to change the forms on Ko-fi. I can only suggest double-checking your card number and the three-digit CVC number are correct. Sorry, but thanks for the thought even if you don't succeed!
Second Reading
About Sunday 1 January 1659/60
Phil Gyford • Link
From now on, where the 1893 edition has ellipses (…) marking omitted phrases, I will be gradually adding in the text for them taken from the Latham & Matthews edition, in [brackets] and marked with "L&M". We see the first two of these in this diary entry.
About Monday 31 May 1669
Phil Gyford • Link
I've just created this Site News post which I'll update with some stats etc about the site over the past two decades or so: https://www.pepysdiary.com/news/2…
Feel free to post thoughts, goodbyes, thanks, etc in the comments there!
About 'Samuel Pepys and His Books' out in paperback
Phil Gyford • Link
I've updated the post with a few further links and info about getting hold of the book.
About Sunday 9 August 1668
Phil Gyford • Link
As Kevin Peter says above, Sir Arthur Slingsby (who L&M indicate this is, in their Index) is dead at this point. I'm linking him to Henry Slingsby, given the only other male Slingsby mentioned in the diary is Col. Robert, who is also dead at this point.
About Saturday 2 November 1661
Phil Gyford • Link
On the one hand, please do bear in mind that people are still reading this day-to-day and don't want to know about "future" events - requesting no spoilers is entirely reasonable.
On the other hand, it's debatable how much of a spoiler noting Pepys's opinions changing is - it's interesting to know in advance, and it's not like saying when someone will die, for example.
About Diary entries by email service changing
Phil Gyford • Link
I've added an update noting that I've tweaked the instructions for subscribing to the new group. Hopefully these new instructions work better.
About Diary and Encyclopedia data available
Phil Gyford • Link
Over six years later... I've put the data back online, at URLs that are updated above.
About Ms Nightingale
Phil Gyford • Link
I received an email from Brian Roberts who gave permission to post this memory of his:
"From 1954 to 1969 I worked at Church Farm, Yelling. The small field close to the farmhouse is called 'Nightingales' to this day. The local belief was that the name originated from the fact that Nightingales sang there in the Spring, but I am assuming that the field was in fact owned by Miss Nightingale, with the possibility that her cottage stood there."
About Hinchingbrooke House
Phil Gyford • Link
The full text of 'Biographical Notices of the Portraits at Hinchingbrook' by Mary Louisa Boyle, published in 1876, is available for free on Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6…
About Maps are working again
Phil Gyford • Link
For anyone following along at home... it turns out that Mapbox had updated how they do things and although the maps were now working again, they'd have stopped on November 1st, when the "old way" of defining the style of the map stopped working.
In the end it required downloading a small update to some of the map-generating code and changing the name of the style of map we use. So, it should now continue working.
About Samuel Pepys and the virus
Phil Gyford • Link
I've posted an update because there's been another flurry of those tweets being sent around resulting in an even larger spike in traffic for the site.
About Wednesday 9 July 1662
Phil Gyford • Link
Could I suggest that any general questions that aren't directly related to the current diary entry are directed to the Discussion Group, which is as close as we've got to a place for more general discussion: https://groups.io/g/pepysdiary Thanks.
About Thursday 28 February 1666/67
Phil Gyford • Link
"I realize that all month when Phil highlighted "Victualling" I hadn't bothered to check the link. Today I did, and find that they led to Dennis Gauden, not the Victualling offices."
Having checked, all instances of "victualling" lead to the description of Victualling. Instances of "the Victualler" lead to Gawden, the Navy Victualler. Is this wrong?
About Sunday 3 February 1666/67
Phil Gyford • Link
The walks, created by Glyn Thomas, are all linked to here: https://www.pepysdiary.com/news/2… They should probably be somewhere that's easier to find but I'm not sure where...
(Any suggestions direct to phil@gyford.com or the discussion group - https://groups.io/g/pepysdiary - please, rather than adding any more off-topic annotations here. Thanks.)