I have added a bit of extra contextual information in the sidebar next to every diary entry. You can now see:
The average temperature for that month (daily data isn’t available until 1772) as recorded by Gordon Manley of the Royal Meteorological Society. You can view the full dataset on the Met Office’s website.
Links to the relevant daily Journals for the House of Commons and House of Lords from British History Online. These will hopefully give some context to Pepys’ more political activities.
My thanks to Terry Foreman for finding both these sources of information that help bring Pepys’ world alive. If anyone can suggest anything else, do let me know.
The most requested feature for the site has been to receive daily diary entries by email. It may have taken me nearly five years for me to manage this but, finally, it’s now possible.
Thanks for all your comments on the new design. I’ve made a few changes based on what you said, as described below. If things look a little odd you may need to visit this file and click the Reload button in your browser.
As you can tell, the site’s had a lick of paint! Everything should be working OK now, so if you come across anything that looks broken, or that doesn’t work as you expect, do let me know (and tell me which web browser and operating system you’re using).
Some time ago I raised the possibility of readers of the diary adopting pages in the Encyclopedia and becoming editors of them. I made a few changes to the site that made this possible, and a couple of press-ganged “volunteers”, Jeannine and Todd, have so far given this a try.
Since the site started, most of the places listed in the Encyclopedia have had links to their location on Streetmap. I’ve now replaced these with a map from Google Maps which shows the location in the page, which is more convenient.
A. Hamilton suggested in an annotation that we could use a section in the Encyclopedia for information about the Pepys household. I’m certainly finding it hard to keep track of which servants are currently working there, for example.
As most readers are aware, I add new entries to the Encyclopedia section as we progress through the diary, as Pepys meets new people, visits new places, etc. Until now I haven’t included pages for all the plays he’s seen, but this was becoming an increasingly obvious omission. So I’ve created pages for all the plays Pepys has seen or mentioned so far and will keep it up to date like everything else.
You might notice a few things around here have been tweaked. This is to make room for a new section of the site: In-depth Articles. This will, hopefully, be a home to occasionally essays about aspects of Pepys’ life or the world in which he lived. If you would like to write something that doesn’t seem to fit elsewhere (perhaps because it’s too long for an annotation or covers too many topics to find a home in the Background Info pages), either drop me a line or raise the idea in the discussion group. The first article will appear this week…