The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn by Margaret Willes (review)

The two greatest English diarists of the second half of the seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, were also close friends for over thirty years, from shortly after their first meeting in 1665, until Pepys’s death in 1699. This friendship, embedded as it was in complex networks of personal, political, intellectual, and affective relations, is the topic of Margaret Willes’s very fine book, which expands outward from its apparently limited focus to become a wide-ranging and richly documented account of the world of post-Restoration London.

Willes is best known as a garden historian. Her previous books include The Making of the English Gardener: Plants, Books and Inspiration, 1560–1660 (2011), and The Gardens of the British Working Class (2014). Not surprisingly, therefore, her treatment of her subjects’ interests in gardening and landscaping is one of the great strengths of this book.

That Evelyn and Pepys would become close friends was by no means predictable. Certainly, their social backgrounds were very different. Evelyn, born in 1620, was the second son of a prosperous, land-owning Surrey family; Pepys, born in 1633, the son of a tailor, but with family ties to Edward Montague, later earl of Sandwich, whom he followed into the navy. They met in 1665 during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, when Pepys was Secretary of the Navy, and Evelyn a commissioner responsible for foreign prisoners. At first, Pepys had some reservations, referring to his “little conceitedness,” but within a few months, he would declare, “The more I know him, the more I love him.” The difference in age allowed Evelyn, throughout their long friendship, to assume a somewhat didactic role in his dealings with his friend.

Both, of course, kept diaries, and the publication history of these texts points to the changes in attitude toward both figures over the last two centuries. Evelyn’s diary was first published in 1818; Pepys’s followed in 1837, inspired in part by the public success of the earlier work. For most of the nineteenth century, Evelyn was the more celebrated of the two, admired for his moral probity in the face of the culture of the Restoration court. By contrast, sections of Pepys’s diary were deemed unpublishable until the second half of the twentieth century. The turning point, however, was Virginia Woolf’s famous 1925 essay, “Rambling Round Evelyn,” in which she suggested he was “something of a bore, a little censorious, a little patronising.” A more nuanced picture did not emerge until recently, with Gillian Darley’s biography and with the recent availability of more manuscript materials.

These fluctuations in their critical reputation also reflected the access to the primary materials for both authors. Pepys’s manuscripts and library have been continuously housed at Magdalene College, Cambridge since 1723. The difficulties that editors of the diary have had to overcome relate both to the stenographic hand in which the manuscripts are composed, and the explicitly sexual passages which were omitted until the great edition of Robert Latham and William Matthews. By contrast, Evelyn’s diary has been continuously in print from 1818, and was superbly edited by Esmond de Beer for Oxford. But even de Beer worked without access to the rest of the enormous Evelyn archive, housed at Christ Church, Oxford, for much of the twentieth century, and acquired by the British Library in 1995. It is these materials that have permitted a more rounded appreciation of Evelyn, and provide much of the documentary foundation for Willes’s book.

Willes distinguishes her work from biography by noting that both authors have received such treatment in the recent past. Instead, she takes as a metaphor Evelyn’s cabinets of curiosity, and organizes the book as a series of explorations of their socially-embedded friendship. Early chapters describe the differences between their social worlds, and their involvement in politics and public affairs. But the core of the book is its third section, “I Do...