The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An intimate portrait of two pivotal Restoration figures during one of the most dramatic periods of English history
Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn are two of the most celebrated English diarists. They were also extraordinary men and close friends. This first full portrait of that friendship transforms our understanding of their times.
Pepys was earthy and shrewd, while Evelyn was a genteel aesthete, but both were drawn to intellectual pursuits. Brought together by their work to alleviate the plight of sailors caught up in the Dutch wars, they shared an inexhaustible curiosity for life and for the exotic. Willes explores their mutual interests—diary-keeping, science, travel, and a love of books—and their divergent enthusiasms, Pepys for theater and music, Evelyn for horticulture and garden design. Through the richly documented lives of two remarkable men, Willes revisits the history of London and of England in an age of regicide, revolution, fire, and plague to reveal it also as a time of enthralling possibility.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawing deeply on the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn, as well as on archival research, Willes (Reading Matters) skillfully probes the diarists' wide-ranging reflections on and often strong opinions about Restoration England. Although Pepys's earthy reports on two notable London catastrophes, the Great Plague of 1665 and 1666 and the Great Fire of 1666, have long been anthologized, Evelyn's less colorful accounts of the same events are comparatively obscure. Willes corrects this oversight in her thoughtful readings of both men's diaries while also tracing the deep friendship that grew between them in spite of their many differences. For example, Pepys loved music and theater and became proficient in the former; Evelyn appreciated but had no ability to play music and detested what he saw as the theater's vulgarity. Both men, on the other hand, enjoyed the "exotic extravagances" newly available through overseas trade, with Evelyn especially intrigued by the importation of tropical plants. He wrote prolifically on gardening, publishing a short but significant book, Fumifugium, on the threat posed to plant life by coal pollution. Although Willes adds little regarding Pepys not to be found in Claire Tomalin's energetic 2002 biography, Samuel Pepys, her splendid book has performed the yeoman's work of recovering Evelyn and his diary for us.
