The Very First Pandemic Blogger

"If you need a role model for life in a plague, it is hard to beat Samuel Pepys. Pepys (pronounced Peeps) was a man about town in the London of the late 17th century, a member of Parliament and of the Royal Society, and an official in the Royal Navy as the British were fighting the Dutch. But his true claim to fame is that he wrote a personal diary for ten years of his life in the 1660s. Kept private in his lifetime, and much of it in code, he used it to tell the story of his days and nights, with disarming frankness and occasional hilarity, charting his thoughts and feelings, ups and downs, love affairs and marital woes. His diary is now one of the richest accounts of what life was actually like for an aspiring social climber in the period in England when the monarchy was restored. And he lived through the Great Plague of London in 1665 — and, as we might say, blogged about it.

Pepys’s jottings have been a tonic to read in lockdown — fascinating and, with the perspective of time, oddly calming. Unlike Daniel Defoe’s later semi-fictional work A Journal of the Plague Year, Pepys wrote with no knowledge of what the future might bring, and in that way, he was just like us now, as a plague summer beckons in 2020, but with far less information. He had the means to move to the countryside, where most of the elite decamped during the crisis to escape infection, but he opted to stay in London. He had work to do at the Admiralty, organizing and handling logistics for the second Anglo-Dutch war, and he had a quirky curiosity about most things — so he lingered, moving about the city, night and day, noting what he saw and heard."

read article by Andrew Sullivan​

Andrew Sullivan: Blogging a 17th Century Pandemic: