Happy the man who lived content
With his own Home and Continent.
EVELYN AFTER CLAUDIAN
To know men one must isolate them. But after a long experience, it seems right to put back such isolated reflections into a relationship.
RILKE, TRANS. WILL STONE
MOST PEOPLE HAVE HEARD of John Evelyn, but he is far less known for either his writings or his life. He was a private man, yet always wished for responsibility within a larger and, during his lifetime, troubled England. His Diary, published in a modern annotated edition, tells us much about his public life, little about his private one. The diary of his friend Samuel Pepys is more widely used, more fun, and more in tune with what we assume were the mores of the Restoration: intimate, gossipy, occasionally racy. Little of Evelyn’s considerable writing is available, but much of it is intriguing; yet it has to be found mostly in collections of rare books. He wrote about urban planning, fashion, London weather or what we would call climate change (and that small book has been reissued in modern times). For those in the know he was an accomplished gardener and a specialist on trees. He is, then, if not wholly unnoticed, not really known.
Yet he was somebody to be reckoned with during a heroic period of English intellectual culture. He was a devoted follower of Francis Bacon and applied that master’s rigour to a wide range of ideas and materials, augmenting much of the Baconian agenda. As a young man he travelled widely in Europe, attended carefully to everything he saw, found important books to translate for English readers, became an accomplished, if somewhat withdrawn and modest, personage around the court, was a prominent member of the newly formed Royal Society, and knew some of the most exciting virtuosi and scientists of his age (Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Wenceslaus Hollar, Robert Boyle); he also advised his contemporaries on the two matters that always mattered most to him – gardening, arboriculture – and their role in a new and Enlightened England. Yet his monumental manuscript on gardening was only transcribed and published in 2000, while the garden he created at Sayes Court in Deptford no longer exists; the wonderful tree book, Sylva, went through so many editions, and confusingly changed its title to Silva, so that his concern with arboriculture has perhaps lost its edge today.
He also lived through one of the most troubled times that England ever encountered (until the Great War in the twentieth century), with a king executed, a failed republican experiment, military dictatorships, forms of religious belief and practice challenged and changed, another king banished for trying to govern autocratically, to be replaced with a foreign statesman from the Netherlands, confronting wars in Europe, and a developing colony in North America, all driven by and driving a profoundly transformed economy. He found himself living and sometimes serving under five monarchs, yet all the while keeping both his own counsel and a level head, and a firm conviction that his faith in the Church of England and in the probity and usefulness of family life mattered above everything else.
While he was a person who focused upon his family, he also sought to play a role in an England that, once the Commonwealth was abandoned and the monarchy resumed in 1660, was to be a community of promise. He wrote that he was content to exist in ‘his own home and continent’, but that inclination saw him travelling widely and at length in Europe as a young man. On his return, he nourished ambitions within the state and culture of England to bring home ideas that he encountered abroad, translating important foreign works that he wanted his contemporaries to read, and raising an awareness of European building, town planning and landscape architecture. He worked outward from his own enthusiasms, his own commitments, not wholly given over to a full participation in a country where he found both religion and politics sometimes uncongenial. Yet he also recognized how much he wanted to put his own individual experience into fruitful contact with his contemporaries, for he himself knew that in the late seventeenth century ‘isolation’ was not an option, though many others did take that path.
Evelyn was caught on the cusp of a society and culture that was developing rapidly, if never smoothly; he contributed to some of its important changes, yet held back from others. While he grew more conservative as he aged, more pious, and sceptical of things around him, he also encouraged younger men to push ahead in what he considered the essential concerns of place and country, learning and knowledge. He was above all an alert, even obsessive, observer of things, a model member of the Royal Society’s determination to review, annotate and understand what was happening in the world. Yet his energy and enthusiasm for collecting information on so many fronts, most obviously in matters of garden design, managed to overwhelm his desire to publish new ideas and theories of place-making and garden design. If he had lived beyond his eighty years, he would have encountered thinkers like Joseph Addison, Stephen Switzer and even Alexander Pope. In their world, his own visions of place-making might have prospered.
His considerable range of interests, not particularly unusual at that time, has also meant that his modern biographers have found him difficult to pigeonhole, when specialization today is prized and the boundaries between disciplines have been radically altered. Besides his published diary, there is a wealth of information on Evelyn’s various activities. But it is also a vast and sometimes heterogeneous mass, with the Diary itself, the most visited of his writings, often an agenda and inventory of activities with little need to provide any meaningful structure. He was engaged throughout his life in many enterprises and projects, not all of which are relevant to ‘seeing him whole’. Maybe he found this same difficulty himself, for he seems to have wished retrospectively to construct a meaningful pattern or narrative for his own life – revising and rewriting his Diary after the events it first described and compiling a careful collection of his own letters in a compendium of letterbooks, also recently published.
When the large archive of Evelyn materials arrived at the British Library in March 1995, it presented Evelyn as a person of endless curiosity but with little clear sense of what really mattered to him. My own book relies upon some of his earlier biographies, like John Bowle’s John Evelyn and his World (1981), which is clear, straightforward, sympathetic; Bowle’s was preceded by Arthur Ponsonby’s John Evelyn (1933) and W. G. Hiscock’s John Evelyn and his Family Circle (1955), and then followed in 2006 by Gillian Darley’s much bulkier John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity, where she was able to draw heavily on the Evelyn collections now at the British Library.
My own, slimmer account, while necessarily following the outline of Evelyn’s life and contacts, focuses upon what my subtitle terms his ‘Domesticity’. I explain this in my first chapter, but it has to do with a double meaning of domesticity in the seventeenth century: that, which we retain today, of living in families with the support and trials of home life; but domesticity also emphasized, in the new world of the early English Enlightenment, accommodating or domesticating foreign ideas, new theories, new resources and technologies, as well as learning to live with a rapidly changing and expanding world. In the face of many of those changes, Evelyn was attentive, concerned and by turns frustrated and uncertain.
While it is hard to isolate one particular theme for him, domesticity offers a fresh perspective on this quintessentially seventeenth-century figure, whose life and career took him through a variety of political, religious and social upheavals which he witnessed and in part contrived to influence. To facilitate this focus, and given his multifarious endeavours, it seems useful to avoid ‘the gridiron of chronology’ and accept the responsibilities of both a diachronic and synchronic narrative; this allows me to cluster some of his activities around central moments and places of both his family life at Sayes Court and his larger concerns involving the Royal Society, and gives some priority to isolating the man without losing our sense of his intimate relationship with his age.