PARLIAMENT is under siege, London is ablaze, everybody is falling down dead and the master of the house has been caught fondling his wife’s maidservant.

Welcome to the daily diary of Samuel Pepys, revisited now in arguably the internet’s most improbable blog. One entry, for example, reads: “Captain Cocke’s having his mayde sicke of the plague a day or two ago and sent to the pest house.”

For anyone who ever balked at ploughing through thousands of pages from the diaries of one of Britain’s greatest recorders of historic times, Pepys’s observations are now appearing on the internet as they were written almost 350 years ago — in easily digestible daily updates.

Pepys’s unexpected emergence as a popular posthumous blogger is part of a unique literary awakening that has ushered several long-dead writers and their works off rarely visited library shelves and into a brave new world of blogging, Facebook and Twitter.

Despite gloomy predictions that the internet will one day kill off books and that literature will be replaced by text messages, a dedicated group of tech-savvy bibliophiles have seized on new social networking technologies to reinvent their literary heroes for the 21st century.

“The internet has a fantastic potential to represent cultural works and figures in a more approachable way,” said Matt Poland, a writer for Splice Today, an online arts magazine.

When Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice in 1796-7, the only keyboard she had seen was on the family piano. Yet thanks to DeeDee Baldwin, a 29-year-old Mississippi librarian, Austen’s greatest masterpiece can now be read as a series of announcements in the style of the Facebook social networking website.

Baldwin has cleverly condensed Austen’s plot to a few dozen pithy statements of the kind that Facebook members routinely post on their home pages. “Charles Bingley is renting a house in Hertfordshire!” she writes. “Kitty Bennet can’t stop coughing . . . Elizabeth Bennet promises never to dance with Mr Darcy . . . Charles Bingley is now friends with Mr Bennet.”

Baldwin was, in turn, inspired by a similar reworking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, labelled the “Facebook news feed edition”, by Sarah Schmelling, the American writer and editor. It opens: “Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.” Soon we learn that “Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends”. Later, Hamlet “added England to the ‘Places I’ve Been’ application”.

Yet there’s more to the internet interest than jokes. The Pepys blog, devised by Philip Gyford, a British actor and freelance website designer, represents a serious attempt to open up literary classics to a 21st-century audience with a notoriously short attention span.

“It’s a simple but brilliant idea,” said Poland.

“Rather than face down a discouraging brick of a book, I read an entry [from Pepys] a day.”

This year’s edition of the website started on January 1, 2009, with Pepys’s entry for January 1, 1666, and continues to publish each day’s corresponding entry from 343 years ago.

The same blogging technique has been applied to the diaries of George Orwell, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, who has also attracted an online following for his posts on Twitter, the voguish messaging site for dedicated internet users. Yet some of his fans appear to have been startled by diary/blog entries that seem far from literary gems.

“He was a great man, but his journal was pretty dull,” noted one visitor to the site maintained by the Orwell Trust. On November 1, 1939, Orwell’s entry read “One egg”. A month later it read “Three eggs”. The following March, Orwell wrote, “The other day caught a young water-tortoise”. One visitor to the blog noted: “At least he’s not counting eggs any more.”