How Londoners used data to survive the Great Plague

From bbc.co.uk/news

When plague swept through London in 1665, killing tens of thousands, people did not simply pray or flee. They checked the numbers.

New research by Karen McBride, external, an accounting professor at the University of Portsmouth, argues that the weekly Bills of Mortality acted as an early public health information system, shaping how some Londoners navigated life, work and survival during the Great Plague.

Drawing on the diary of Samuel Pepys, the study suggests the published death figures were used as "quite practical decision guiding accounts or data of what was going on".

The Bills were issued weekly, listing deaths by parish across the capital. They were posted publicly and sold on street corners, allowing readers to compare week-on-week rises and falls.

"They recorded the summaries of death by parish within London. So people could see where figures were rising if they compared week on week, they could see where figures were rising, where figures were falling, what was happening," McBride said.

                                                        The Bills of Mortality were weekly death figures published by London parishes

Pepys, a naval administrator and writer living within the city walls, bought the Bills and frequently copied the totals directly into his diary.

"What was interesting to me was the fact that Samuel Pepys kept a very extensive diary. And that very extensive diary noted how he was using this data to go about his daily life at this time," McBride said.

As the numbers rose, he changed his behaviour. He planned routes through the city to avoid heavily affected parishes, reconsidered visiting friends, and relocated his wife out of London. When the totals peaked, he wrote his will.

"They enabled Londoners to use the increases and decreases to judge personal risk, where to travel, when to travel, when to leave the city, and to assess when it will be safe for them to return as well," McBride said.

                                                           Samuel Pepys altered his own family's behaviour based on local death figures

The figures were discussed in coffee houses and compared socially.

The Bills, McBride argues, "almost supported that idea of self-surveillance and self-governance aligning individual behaviour with the broader public health objectives without actually telling people what to do necessarily".

Accuracy was sometimes questioned. Parish officers were responsible for collecting and compiling the data, and as deaths surged, recording capacity was stretched and figures went underreported.

But doubt did not mean rejection, McBride said.

"They were nonetheless trusted enough for them to use them to guide their behaviour."

Even when people suspected understatement, rising totals heightened fear and caution. Falling numbers encouraged the reopening of shops and the resumption of social life.

                                                 Mass graves were used as deaths surged and burial capacity was overwhelmed

The study challenges the idea that 17th Century society was simply helpless in the face of disease.

"I think they had an understanding or what they thought was an understanding of what was going on. That was wrong, but they thought they had an understanding," McBride said.

Although many believed plague was caused by "miasma" or bad air, practical measures such as isolation and distancing were adopted.

"Although the ideas behind why they did these things might have been very different to what the reality was, actually it was quite helpful."

The research also highlights stark inequality. While the Bills were publicly available, literacy was limited and the ability to act on the information was "highly unequal", McBride said.

Pepys, as an upwardly mobile and wealthy Londoner, could interpret the trends, reduce contact and move his household. Poorer residents, including servants and casual labourers, often had no such flexibility.

McBride found that "for them, continued exposure was unavoidable".

There was inequality within the data itself.

"Plague deaths amongst the poor were much more likely to be misclassified, underreported, or even concealed," McBride said, whether because of parish capacity, misdiagnosis or attempts to avoid the economic consequences of shutting up a house.

Although the study does not centre on modern pandemics, McBride delved into the issue as the UK was going through its own pandemic response.

"We were all looking at numbers every day. The television was on, the numbers were there, he had numbers, he was acting on those numbers, we had numbers, we were acting on those numbers," she said.

The academic stresses that the research does not claim direct equivalence with modern outbreaks, but points to structural parallels in how societies respond to published statistics.

"Whilst people truly believe that they're giving information and they're letting people know the situation and they're informing people and they're enabling people to act, that doesn't always get received equally," she said.

If information is issued without the means to respond, she suggested, it can deepen inequality rather than reduce risk.

"Whilst I completely agree with providing information, we just need to think a little bit about how that information is received."

The Great Plague of London killed an estimated 100,000 in 18 months - about a fifth of the capital's population at the time.

Between 1665 and 1666, as plague deaths climbed in the capital, some sections of society were not simply passive victims, McBride's study found.

They were reading, interpreting and reacting to the data available to them, using weekly death figures to navigate one of the deadliest years in the city's history.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3v7551q55eo

Samuel Pepys: diarist, administrator … budding fashionista

From theguardian.com

New analysis of 17th-century diarist’s French fashion engravings shows he was not only a shrewd political operator but had a keen eye for new trends

He may be best known for his juicy diary, administrative prowess and wandering eye – but new research has highlighted a different side of Samuel Pepys: that of a budding fashionista.

A historian from Cambridge University has conducted a fresh analysis of the diarist’s collection of French fashion engravings, arguing they not only show Pepys was keeping up with the scholarly and gentlemanly trend of collecting prints, but reflect a long-term interest in the latest styles of dress, and the link between clothes and social status.

“It demonstrates that Pepys had – to put it in very colloquial terms– a finger in a lot of pies,” said Marlo Avidon, whose study has been published in the journal The Seventeenth Century. “[He] was very concerned with appearing a certain way and cultivating this gentlemanly reputation – both in an intellectual capacity but simultaneously as a member of fashionable society.”

A detail from Jean Dieu de Saint-Jean, Habit Noir, c1670, etching. Photograph: Reproduced by permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College Cambridge

But Avidon added while these concerns have previously been considered separately, the prints show they are not mutually exclusive.

Born in London in 1633, Pepys was the son of a tailor and a washerwoman, who became an MP, secretary to the Admiralty, and president of the Royal Society.

But he is perhaps most famous for the diary he kept for almost a decade during the 1660s. As well as offering a first-hand account of a number of momentous events such as the plague and Great Fire of London – during which he buried his wine and parmesan cheese in the garden for safekeeping – it provides fascinating insights into more mundane aspects of daily life.

After Pepys’s death, his diary and other papers were bequeathed to his alma mater, Magdalene College, Cambridge. Among them were ballads referencing clothing, and two volumes that contained his collection of French fashion illustrations. Printed between 1670 and 1696 these depicted the latest styles, as modelled by the French elite.

While not the first time the prints have been examined, Avidon said her work considers them alongside Pepys’s diary to demonstrate that throughout his life he had a very keen interest in clothing – his own, and that of the people around him.

“Even when he stopped writing the diary in 1669, what these prints help us see is that that interest in clothing didn’t necessarily go away, it just manifested in another form,” she said.

The diary reveals Pepys could be controlling and overbearing regarding the attire of his wife, Elisabeth, while reflections on his own wardrobe are also carefully noted.

Avidon cites one entry of 1663, in which Pepys records a colleague approving of some of his new clothes – including a velvet cloak. As a result Pepys writes he is “resolved to go a little handsomer than I have hitherto”.

But not all of his clothes struck the right chord. In 1669 Pepys shelved his new summer suit “because it was too fine with the gold lace at the hands, that I was afeared to be seen in it”. When he did wear it out and about, a colleague criticised the cuffs as being too fancy for Pepys’s position. Pepys subsequently resolved to have the trim removed.

Yet, perhaps tellingly, he later bought a print depicting an elite Frenchman bedecked in similar lace cuffs, with ruffles and ribbons.

Avidon said Pepys’s diary also reveals his eye for new trends, be it the introduction of periwigs or the emergence of the vest – a precursor to the three-piece suit.

The prints not only tie into these interests, Avidon suggested, but provide a lens through which to consider wider social behaviour and cultural attitudes towards French fashion in the late 17th century – including economic concerns regarding textile imports, and moral worries arising from the association of French fashion with vanity and excess.

Yet while Pepys criticised Frenchified English fops in his diary – describing one as “an absolute Monsieur” – he also seems to have admired the styles.

The prints may even provide a link to Pepys’s later life, with Avidon suggesting the “unsteady, untrained hand” that coloured them could have been that of Mary Skinner, who became Pepys’s housekeeper and mistress after Elisabeth died.

                                           Inside the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Photograph: Douglas Atfield

Robert Blyth, senior curator of maritime history at the Royal Museums Greenwich, said Pepys had a fascination about the world around him and a desire to be at the forefront of knowledge.

“It doesn’t surprise me that this applies to fashion prints as well,” Blyth said, describing Pepys as “a man of the now”.

Blyth noted Pepys would not only have seen the latest trends on the streets, but had access to the court of King Charles II where he would have seen high-end fashions.

“During the diary, he is a young man. He’s a man about town,” Blyth said. “So he’s continuing this interest in fashion into his middle age.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/22/samuel-pepys-diarist-administrator-budding-fashionista 

Peeping on Pepys

From historynewsnetwork.org

By Caroline Wazer

How moving Samuel Pepys’ diary off the bedside table changed history on the internet

In a 1970 New York Times review of the first unexpurgated edition of the diary of Samuel Pepys,  the literary critic Paul Delany wrote of how easy it is to commune with Pepys, who “experiences and records reality in just the way we do ourselves, as a turbid flow of incomplete, half‐coherent perceptions, connected only in that they all impinge on a single consciousness, our own.” This intimacy came with a price, according to Delany, who warned that modern readers should brace for the “salutary, even shocking experience” of recognizing “in Pepys’ secret life, hidden behind a superficial gregariousness, the degree of our own isolation from our fellows.” 

Reading Pepys in 1970 would indeed have been mostly a solitary endeavour, as it had been since the first expurgated edition was published in 1825, a few years after the publication of John Evelyn’s diary proved there was a market for the genre. The work of transcribing the cryptic shorthand that filled the six bound volumes Pepys had bequeathed to his alma mater, Cambridge University’s Magdalene College, upon his death in 1703, fell to an undergraduate student named John Smith. 

                                                 Samuel Pepys, by John Hayls, 1666. [National Portrait Gallery, London]

Twenty-six-year old Pepys, a clerk in the office of the Exchequer, had begun the diary in 1660; in his first entry he described his station as “very handsome, and esteemed rich, but indeed very poor.” Later the same year, his acceptance of a different clerkship, this time for the royal dockyards, kicked off a decades-long career in naval administration. Pepys continued recording his daily activities and thoughts until 1669, when he stopped out of concern for his eyesight. 

In the centuries since, Pepys’ diary has developed a double reputation. On the one hand it contains an enormous amount of valuable information about important historical events as well as everyday life in 1660s London. Pepys’ career gave him easy access to high-ranking government figures, which made him a useful reporter of high-level information about political, economic, and military affairs. He also covered the return of Charles II from exile, the Great Plague of London, and the Great Fire of London. Pepys loved being out in the city and talking with fellow Londoners of all ranks; through his diary he takes us with him to shops, church, taverns, neighbours’ houses, and theatres. As a result, his diary is a primary source that has continued to hold interest for historians even as the field has moved away from 19th-century “great man” history and toward examinations of the past through social and cultural lenses.

On the other hand, the diary has a literary reputation largely distinct from its historical value. It is, in anglophone and especially British culture, often held up as being the right sort of book for casual nightly reading: interesting enough to dip into regularly, but not so exciting as to tempt the reader to stay up late. Among the figures that either kept a copy of Pepys’ diary bedside or have recommended others do so are the economist Edith Penrose, the British politician and TV personality Gyles Brandreth, and Arthur Bryant, a Pepys biographer who in the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Pepys deems the diary “probably, after the Bible and James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, the best bedside book in the English language.”

Interested in reading the diary but sceptical of his own ability to commit to finishing it in book form, a British web designer and programmer named Phil Gyford began considering a different way to digest Pepys in 2002. As Gyford himself has explained in interviews, structuring the diary as a daily blog “seemed such a simple and obvious idea that I thought someone must have created such a website already.” Nobody had, and PepysDiary.com launched in December 2002.

Almost immediately, it became clear that the blog format offered readers more than just convenience: it also enabled a giant Pepys book club. “Entries and footnotes are already being annotated by readers who provide explanations and additional information, creating a more communal experience than conventional publishing allows,” Gyford told the BBC in January 2003, shortly after the first entry went live. “So rather than simply publishing a dead — albeit fascinating — text, I now find myself in charge of a far more exciting living read.”

Pepys’ final diary entry, dated May 30, 1669, was first posted online in the spring of 2012. “Thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal,” Pepys wrote. “And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave.” (Pepys would live another 34 years, but, true to his word, he never returned to his diary.) The comments left on the entry by PepysDiary.com readers were similarly funereal. “It’s a bit like hearing of a close friend’s passing,” commenter Stan Oram wrote. Commenter Eric Walla observed that “Sam has been truly alive for us in ‘real time,’ and having the diary come to a close we must ourselves awake and remember how Sam has been gone from us for these centuries.”

PepysDiary.com is now in its 22nd continuous year of operation, a little more than a year into the third “reading” of the full diary. (The second reading ran from 2013 to 2022.) Gyford originally planned to run through the full nine years and five months of the diary just once, which was, in 2002, an incredibly long time to imagine keeping a single internet project functional. In a 2012 retrospective for Wired, Russell M. Davies philosophically compared the emergence of PepysDiary.com to the development of the Clock of the Long Now. He also asserted that the Pepys blog teaches us “that web success can be built with things other than venture cash, spammy PR, and rapid scaling. PepysDiary.com has a community because people found it, hung around and started contributing.”

Perhaps the earliest and most dramatic contribution made by commenters was to challenge Gyford’s choice to pull his text from the most complete copyright-free version available, Henry Benjamin Wheatley’s edition from the 1890s. This edition had been digitized and made freely available online through Project Gutenberg, which was founded in 1971 and began distributing free eBooks through ARPANET more than a decade before the internet existed. The use of Wheatley’s text meant that entries on PepysDiary.com were, initially, pockmarked with ellipses signifying expurgations. 

Many of these passages had been struck because they detailed Pepys’ lively (and not always consensual) extramarital sex life, although plenty were simple mentions of biological functions. One sentence concerning Pepys’ wife Elizabeth’s menstrual cycle from Pepys’ first entry, dated January 1, 1660, originally appeared on Gyford’s website as follows.

My wife …  gave me hopes of her being with child, but on the last day of the year … [the hope was belied.]

The early comments on this first post broadly expressed excitement for the project, but several readers, unhappy about the elisions, posted the missing excerpts themselves, basing their corrections on the aforementioned 1970 edition reviewed in the Times, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews and published by the University of California Press. It was the first and only exhaustive publication to print all previously expurgated text. It was also still under copyright.

“I got tired of waiting for someone to post the omitted material,” Steve Dodson, a long-time blogger who uses the nom de plume Languagehat, posted several days after the first entry went live, “and went to the library on my lunch hour to find it.” Thereafter, readers with access to the Latham and Matthews edition reliably posted the expurgated material underneath each daily entry, always in chunks short enough to constitute fair use (not a difficult feat, considering that the diary contains more than a million words).

Eventually, in late 2022, Gyford himself began incrementally adding the expurgations from the comments into the body of the text. By the time Gyford embarked on his third reading cycle, at the beginning of 2023, the same passage from Pepys’ first entry had been updated to read as follows. 

My wife … [, after the absence of her terms for seven weeks, – L&M] gave me hopes of her being with child, but on the last day of the year … [the hope was belied.] [she hath them again. – L&M]

The campaign for the restoration of Wheatley’s elisions — and the de facto freely accessible, digital, unexpurgated edition of Pepys’ diary that resulted — was not the only material change to the website that resulted from reader initiative. Sometimes these innovations were technical, reflecting the site’s immediate popularity among tech-savvy internet denizens. In one notable example, commenter Hugo van Kemenade’s 2016 Python script, which calculates sunrise and sunset times for each day of the diary, was made an official feature of the website in 2023. 

More often, however, the commenters simply share observations, crack jokes, and ask and answer each other’s questions in each daily entry’s comments section. A short but characteristic example is Pepys’ missive from April 3, 1661, which reads in full:

Up among my workmen, my head akeing all day from last night’s debauch. To the office all the morning, and at noon dined with Sir W. Batten and Pen, who would needs have me drink two drafts of sack to-day to cure me of last night’s disease, which I thought strange but I think find it true.

Then home with my workmen all the afternoon, at night into the garden to play on my flageolette, it being moonshine, where I staid a good while, and so home and to bed.

This day I hear that the Dutch have sent the King a great present of money, which we think will stop the match with Portugal; and judge this to be the reason that our so great haste in sending the two ships to the East Indys is also stayed.

Some of the comments left below this entry consist of poking good-natured fun at Sam for his hangover (a commenter named Judy: “I wonder how Sam stood the pain in his aking head”) and the lack of concern he showed for his neighbours by staying up late in his garden tooting his flageolette, a wind instrument similar to the modern recorder (a commenter named Dirk: “Lucky that Sam didn't get any flower pots thrown at his head. Some people need their sleep, you know!”). 

A meatier discussion, however, was kicked off by Vincent’s assertion, based on historical astronomical data, that the “sky must have been very clear” that night for there to have been any moonlight visible, “as [the] new moon was on 30 of March.” Immediately, other commenters jumped in to point out that Vincent had his dates wrong: Pepys used the Julian calendar, not the Gregorian one we use today and on which Vincent’s astronomical information was based. Properly converted, Pepys’ April 3, 1661, would have been the equivalent of “our,” i.e., the Gregorian calendar’s, April 13, 1661, a day on which the moon was in fact very close to full. 

From there, the commenters launched into a wide-ranging discussion on the nuances of Julian–Gregorian conversion and the role of the lunar cycle in Church festal calendars. Vincent left his initial comment about the moon on April 4, 2004; the conversation is still attracting new comments as of April 2024, 20 years and two reading cycles later.

The diary fans community is not limited to PepysDiary.com. In May 2009, Gyford set up the @samuelpepys Twitter account to automatically post snippets from entries at approximately the time Pepys would have engaged in whatever activity is described in the snippet. This continued until August 2023, when, frustrated with Twitter’s increasingly erratic policies regarding automated tweets, Gyford stopped updating the Twitter account; the only social media account now associated with PepysDiary.com is on Mastodon. 

As is probably unsurprising to anyone who spends time on the internet, the comments left on PepysDiary.com pages differ in length and tone from those responding to its social media posts. The website version of Pepys’ entry of January 28, 1661, in which our correspondent describes being accidentally spat upon by an attractive lady while at the theatre — he specifies he did not mind in the least — provoked discussions about the historical meanings of various details of the entry, including a genuine interrogation into the 17th-century etiquette of spitting for ladies. When the same entry was posted on Twitter, on January 28, 2014, and on Mastodon, 10 years later, reactions were more visceral and off-the-cuff, ranging from “what a perv” to the pithy “bro what.”

Sometimes social media commenters respond with visual memes, as a Mastodon user named Kolya did to a section of Pepys’ entry for April 6, 1661, in which Pepys describes cornering and kissing a pretty barmaid.

Sometimes social media commenters respond with visual memes, as a Mastodon user named Kolya did to a section of Pepys’ entry for April 6, 1661, in which Pepys describes cornering and kissing a pretty barmaid.

Although disgust at his sexual proclivities is the subject of many social media users’ interactions with Pepys’ tweets and toots, some of his entries prove fertile ground for readers to self-identify with the diarist, usually in a self-deprecating manner. When it was posted on Twitter in 2023, the opening line of Pepys’ July 19, 1660, entry, which reads “I did lie late a-bed,” was answered by a litany of “Same,” “Me too,” and “Goals.”

Although these social media responses are generally nowhere near as deep or serious as the website comments (somewhat fittingly for Pepys, whose diary shows him to have been equally at home in high and low culture, from Magdalene College and the Navy Office to London’s seediest taverns and playhouses), each one still represents a moment of human connection with Pepys, whether it be one of self-recognition, disgust, or humour. And like the website comments, the social media interactions, at least those posted by public accounts, are just that, public, meaning they are by their very nature not an individual, introspective form of interaction with Pepys’ diary. 

When, in 1970, Paul Delany wrote of the “shocking experience” of realizing one’s own isolation that might strike readers of Latham and Matthews’s edition of Pepys’s diary, he was referring to how, in his view, the “fragmented, dissociated culture of modern capitalism” led to a “disappearance of a communal sense of life,” with the result that as individuals we are each left with “large realms of experience that only we have known” but can never share. As a “massive labour of introversion,” he continued, Pepys’s diary was an early-modern foretoken of the unsatisfying individualism that would dominate the 20th century.

Setting aside the question of whether interacting with Pepys’ diary entries online is necessarily satisfying, the fact that people still enthusiastically engage with and publicly reflect on Pepys’ daily exploits both on PepysDiary.com (which, according to site statistics Gyford shared in January 2024, garnered nearly 3,000 new comments in 2023 alone) and through social media channels is evidence that reading Pepys’ diary does not have to be an inherently lonely experience, despite what Delany predicted.

Every so often, commenters on PepysDiary.com are inspired to reflect on the fact that they themselves are embedded in history, that new readers may find details of their earlier comments nearly as alien as the unfamiliar details of Pepys’ 17th-century reality that the commenters spend so much time dissecting. In one comment left on April 28, 2024, a reader going by the name Keith Knight reflected upon the inclusion of the term “palm pilot” in a first-cycle reader’s comment from 2004. “Some younger people reading this now, only 20 years later,” he wrote, “wouldn’t know what this is, which highlights the issue of grappling with meaning of words and phrases from over 350 years ago.”

In other cases, readers found that reading about Pepys’ experiences helped them to process the global or personal high-stakes moments they were living through in the present day. In a May 2020 comment left on a diary entry dated August 12, 1665, during the deadliest days of the Great Plague of London, a reader named San Diego Sarah wrote of Pepys, “I now understand why he did not document more of the horrors. Like him, I look for diversions from the reality — I'm eating too much comfort food, while Pepys found his comfort in wine, women, and song.” 

Similarly, in September 2009, a commenter named Australian Susan responded to a September 6, 1666, entry in which Pepys described the great pleasure he enjoyed eating a simple meal just after the Great Fire of London was finally extinguished. “Sam describes a universal feeling I can relate to: the best meal I ever had in my life was the fry-up lunch my family ate at a greasy spoon near the Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital after we had had the reassurance that there was nothing wrong with my young son’s heart. To know you have got through something safely and to share companionship and food brings a sense of relief and goodwill.” 

The longevity of PepysDiary.com, combined with its cyclical reading schedule, means that readers sometimes encounter past versions of their own selves. In 2013, one reader wrote of the comments, “They are just as much a diary of a time past as Sam’s is.” Because the annotations from previous reading cycles are preserved with each new round, new readers wishing to leave a comment are likewise confronted with previous cycles’ questions, answers, and musings, which must be scrolled through to reach the comment box. 

At least for some readers, the copiousness of 10- and 20-year old reader thoughts about Pepys is an enormous asset to the site. “The history captured in the annotations, especially those from 2003,” a new reader named 3Lamps wrote in March 2023, soon after the start of the third reading, “is as historically fascinating as the diary itself.”

The poet Dave Bonta, who has been using Pepys’ diary entries as material for erasure poems for more than a decade, has similarly expressed the sense that the collective project of reading and responding to Pepys’ diary online has produced something historically valuable. “Reading (or at least skimming) the copious and informative annotations left by readers ten years ago,” he wrote in an essay for the poetry blog Via Negativa, “gives me a sense of inhabiting three historical periods at once. The diary is no longer just about them, those far-away Englishmen and women of the 17th century; it’s also about us.”

Caroline Wazer is a writer, editor, and translator based in Central New York. She has written for outlets including Lapham’s Quarterly, The Atlantic, and Atlas Obscura

https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/peeping-on-pepys