Pepys and Evelyn, chroniclers of the English Renaissance

The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. By Margaret Willes. Yale University Press; 282 pages; $27.50 and £20.

SAMUEL PEPYS and John Evelyn were among the most determinedly inquisitive chroniclers of 17th-century England. Of all the period’s diarists and emergent memoirists, it was Pepys and Evelyn who offered the most complete vision of what it meant to embrace the great experiment that was the English Renaissance.

Both men were inveterate collectors of curiosities and books. Both were marked by civil war, regicide, the advent of a republic and the restoration of monarchy. Both endured the threat of plague, the closing and the reopening of the theatres, the outbreak of the Great Fire of 1666 and the political turmoil of the Glorious Revolution in 1688. And both were involved with the Royal Society in London, in the flourishing of empiricism and natural philosophy that took place across the country and in the trying of exotic and newly available food and drink—tea, coffee, chocolate, pineapples. On occasion, their feelings about these innovations conflicted. Yet they were united by a commitment to the importance of finding things out, and over the course of their lives they became dear friends.

Margaret Willes’s new book shows more clearly and more engagingly than most previous works how this friendship developed, and offers a vivid and subtle depiction of her subjects’ sensibilities. Pepys, who was born to quarrelsome and barely literate parents and rose to become a principal officer of the navy, could be radical in religion and politics, exuberant in friendship, restlessly bibulous, guiltily devoted to music and theatre, congenitally lascivious, prone to bouts of violent jealousy, and often generous to friends and family.

Evelyn, unfairly dismissed by Virginia Woolf as “something of a bore”, was born into minor aristocracy, conservative in matters of church and state, controlling and misogynistic, and obsessed with garden design and horticulture. Yet he would sometimes, like Pepys, take women as friends and treat them as equals. He was also civic-minded; in the 1660s he wanted London planted with an array of vegetation to counteract the city’s pollution.

Ms Willes establishes and expands on these qualities by attending to both men’s diaries (Pepys kept his from 1660 to 1669, Evelyn from 1640 to 1706), by examining their correspondence, and by placing those writings alongside the papers of their contemporaries. Still, her book is not strictly a biography. Rather, it is an attempt to use the strange and inquiring lives of Evelyn and Pepys to illuminate the peculiarity of their age.

The result is a finely balanced work. It succeeds in offering a strong impression of the period’s two great diarists: the reader learns a great deal about their reading habits, their domestic and romantic difficulties, their love of animals (Evelyn kept a tortoise, Pepys a monkey and a tame lion). It also captures the bizarre world they inhabited. Robert Hooke, a philosopher, tries cannabis; a man is encased in a diving bell and submerged in the Thames; men of science assemble in private to administer opium to dogs—and then dissect them.

Such occurrences are entertaining and instructive. But Ms Willes’s book is not without its shortcomings. Her prose can be inattentive (“take the bull by the horns”; “putting on a brave face”); her account of the period’s social and political unrest is laboured and lacking in fresh insights; and her consideration of the writing of Evelyn and Pepys suffers from a lack of comparison with that of the century’s other great life-writers—one thinks of George Fox, a Quaker, or John Rogers, a member of the Fifth Monarchy, an extreme Puritan sect.

However, when weighed against the abundance of insight, enthusiasm and wonder in the work, these are minor complaints. Ms Willes brings Evelyn and Pepys fully and vibrantly to life. She makes the reader feel their foibles, their virtues, their pleasure and their pain; and on almost every page there is a detail to be thought about, recorded, relayed. It is a fitting tribute to two figures who so cherished curiosity—and who did so much to contribute to the curiosity of their age.