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Suffering
the Benz
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[Previous entry: "So Many Roads ..."] [Main Index] [Next entry: "My war against the Amazon ..."] 01/12/2003 Archived Entry: "A 17th century blogger ..." I've been reading the diaries of Samuel Pepys, as posted online in blog format. Pretty fascinating (and often mundane) stuff. Pepys (pronounced peeps) was the father of the modern British navy, but he also had a habit of writing down everything he did, day in, day out. His writings start on New Year's Day 1660 when he was 26 and run for nine years, filling six 282 page notebooks. The New York Times had a review of a recent Pepys biography, and that's where I first read of him. When I saw this online diary, I started reading it and got hooked. A lot of it is the mundane stuff of everyday life in the 17th century ("From thence to my father’s to dinner, where I found my wife, who was forced to dine there, we not having one coal of fire in the house, and it being very hard frosty weather.") Pepys' entries are posted daily online, so you can read them as they develop. At first it was tough to keep track of the coming and goings of the cast of characters, but the diary is annotated, and in blog style, readers can add their own notations. It gets pretty interesting. So far, I'm amazed at how much time old Samuel spends collecting money due and fretting about money owed. At this point in the diary, he is a clerk to Sir George Downing, one of the Four Tellers of the Receipt of the Exchequer.
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