John Evelyn and His World

John Evelyn (1620–1706) was a man with an insatiable curiosity.

A keen reader and avid traveller, Evelyn had an unquenchable thirst for new knowledge in nature, science and the arts. He wrote and published on a huge range of topics, including theology, music and architecture, although today he is principally recognised as a pioneer of English gardening and forestry, his Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees bringing him fame in his lifetime.

A friend of Samuel Pepys, Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren, and patron of Grinling Gibbons, Evelyn was in high favour at the court of King Charles II and a valued member of the Royal Society, both of which presented curiosities to Evelyn’s observant eye and vivid pen. He lived through turbulent times, writing in his Diaries of the Anglo-Dutch Wars, the plague, the Great Fire of London, the Popish Plot and the Glorious Revolution.

Historian John Bowle draws upon Evelyn’s many and varied writings to bring to life the personality of John Evelyn in the context of his times, producing a fascinating and rewarding picture of the man and his world.

John Evelyn and His World is an authoritative literary biography of one of seventeenth-century England’s great diarists.