London’s National Maritime Museum has a new exhibition opening soon, Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution. It runs from 20th November to 28th March 2016. Their blurb:
Immerse yourself in one of the most vibrant and chaotic periods of our history, witnessed and brilliantly brought to life in the candid, witty and irreverent diary of London’s own Samuel Pepys.
With Pepys as your fly-on-the-wall exhibition guide, explore this period of revelry and rebirth, revolution and catastrophe, which saw kings fighting for their crowns and London transformed into a world city following the devastation of the Plague and the Great Fire.
And here’s a trailer:
There are a few events happening related to the exhibition, so worth a look if you’re going to be in London over the next few months.
3 Comments
Second Reading
Stephen Durr • Link
I have secured my ticket for the opening of the exhibition starting November 20th and looking forward to learning more about Mr Pepys and his life. I went to the church of St Olave last week and took various photographs of the church and statues found in and outside of the church grounds. Seething lane and Hart lane are now soulless places with just concrete office blocks and lots of office workers.
Chris Squire UK • Link
I went yesterday and recommend it to anyone who can go and hasn’t been.
It is aimed squarely at the general public and tourists who know next to nothing about this highly eventful period so there is not much for a regular reader of the diary to learn but there is a good range of pictures and artefacts to see which flesh out the entries we read day by day.
Not the diary, which cannot leave Magdalene College library under the terms of his will but other shorthand records made by SP and the complete transcript made in 1811.
There is a fine modern portrait of Elizabeth Pepys based on a print of the now lost contemporary picture that SP was so pleased with - a beautiful young woman!
The credit panels at the end include a twitter feed of daily quotes running since 2008 by PG: @samuelpepys https://twitter.com/samuelpepys but not http://www.pepysdiary.com/, which is a pity as many visitors will leave unaware of this site and of the singular pleasure of receiving a daily email from Our Sam.
John Goldin • Link
I enjoyed the exhibition very much. That's a good thing because I traveled all the way from Connecticut to Greenwich to see it! The last time I was in London was 18 years ago. The exhibition was enough to trigger one last visit. I expected to be mildly disappointed. Generally I get a stronger sense of history by reading than I do by seeing exhibits in a museum. The Pepys exhibition did a nice job of selecting items to display that amplified my appreciation of Pepys and his time. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
One complaint: At the end of the exhibit there's a description of the history of the Diary all the way down to the current Pepys twitter feed. But there's not mention of pepysdiary.com. Big mistake!