The Letterbooks of John Evelyn ed. by Douglas D.C. Chambers and David Galbraith (review)

Abstract

Douglas D.C. Chambers and David Galbraith, eds. The Letterbooks of John Evelyn. Two volumes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 1328 pp. $195. John Evelyn had all the qualifications to be a virtuoso, being a rich gentleman, with a powerful and enquiring mind, who enjoyed the social life of Restoration London. It was as a virtuoso and public servant that his peers knew him: they read his books and pamphlets on tree-planting, gardening, engraving, the study of commemorative medals, and the smoke of London and met him on committees, at dinner parties, and at the Royal Society. In the nineteenth century, the diary that he kept from his youth in the 1630s to his death in 1706 was rediscovered and published. It is not as vivid and personal as the diary that his friend Samuel Pepys kept in the 1660s, but it is an impressive sustained self-portrait and a major historical resource. The definitive edition of Evelyn's diary appeared in 1955 in six volumes, edited by the independent scholar Esmond de Beer, with a learned commentary and a stupendous index. The British Library includes two large volumes into which he copied a selection of his outgoing correspondence, comprising 810 letters written between 1644 and 1698. Like the diary, these letter books were compiled toward the end of Evelyn's life as a self-portrait for posterity. They are the subject of the edition under review here. This edition has its origins in a plan to edit the whole of Evelyn's correspondence, formed by Douglas Chambers more than twenty years ago. The result of this plan would have been comparable to great modern editions such as those of the correspondence of John Locke (by Esmond de Beer again, 3648 letters in eight volumes, 1976 to 1989) and of Robert Boyle (by Michael Hunter and others, over two thousand letters in six volumes, 2001). Chambers soon decided that an edition of the letter books would be more practicable than one of the entire correspondence of Evelyn. This was very reasonable decision: Evelyn's own selection of the letters by which he wanted to be represented does call for treatment as a work in itself. He worked on this project until 2004. Ill health then forced him to suspend work; some of his project materials were lost in a fire, but enough essential materials were preserved for his Toronto colleague David Galbraith to take the project up in 2008 and to complete it. The first thing to say about this edition is that it makes a very large, and very important, primary text available for the first time. (Selected letters of Evelyn's were published in nineteenth-century editions of his diary, and his correspondence with Pepys was edited by Guy de la Bedoyere in 1997, but most of the letters published here are new, and they have never before been presented as the unit which Evelyn intended them to be.) Its publication is a landmark in our understanding of Evelyn and of his context. The diary only told half the story of Evelyn and his interests, and the letters naturally tell much more, because a diary presents its writer to some extent in isolation and letters present the writer in connection with other people. So, we see Evelyn in action as a virtuoso, learning, arguing, and advising: the introduction notes well that the natural philosopher John Beale, to whom Evelyn wrote a number of important letters, is not mentioned in the diary (xxxii). We see him as a social networker, engaged in the intricate lifelong rhetorical process of cultivating and exploiting relationships with powerful men and women. We see him as a man of feeling avant la lettre: the diary is a source for his spiritual love affair with Margaret Blagge, his consternation at her marriage to the politician Sidney Godolphin, and his intense grief after her death after childbirth, but this story is only completed by reading Evelyn's long series of letters to Sidney Godolphin, one on every anniversary of Margaret's death, quoting again and again from a letter which Sidney had written early in his bereavement. …