“By God, I think the devil shits Dutchmen”: why @samuelpepys is the future of history writing

There’s nothing quite like opening Twitter to do a bit of boring marketing and finding something like this in your feed:

Samuel Pepys’ diary is amazing: salacious, intimate, packed with war and whoring, farts and fires, booze and bitchy gossip. And now it’s on Twitter. Possibly the best thing on Twitter. Possibly just the best thing. Ever.

The Dutch have burnt the British ships at Sheerness, the King’s mistress has threatened to dash her baby’s brains out in Parliament unless the King acknowledges he is the child’s father, and Samuel Pepys has lured a girl called Peg up to his room, but he can’t get it on with her because some other bloke is hanging about. It’s confessional blogging at its  finest, given glorious immediacy by being live on Twitter.

Really readable, entertaining diarists have historically been few and far between – James Boswell, Chips Channon and Alan Clark spring to mind, but not many more.  That’s going to change. The ability to record daily events in a manner that others find entertaining is no longer an unusual hobby, but an essential social skill. Around a quarter of the people in Britain keep some sort of online diary, whether it’s a blog, a Twitter feed, a Facebook account, or regular boring emails to a huge list of friends about how the family are and what they did on their holidays. We are a generation of diarists, and the digital natives who grew up with the social web write very, very good ones.

A single illuminating quotation is often the best tool a social historian has for bringing an era to life. Age of Austerity, David Kynaston’s brilliant depiction of post-war Britain, is structured around evocative moments from ordinary people’s diaries: “Oh for a little extra butter”, “Jolly good, as a whole”, Christ, it’s bleeding cold”.

The David Kynaston who looks back on our era won’t have to dig so deep. Future historians will portray life in the early 21st century not as 900 pages of elegant descriptive writing, and diligently researched quotes, but by building feeds of the finest, funniest and most typical of our contemporaries, and releasing them day by day.

@samuelpepys is the shape of things to come.