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A Life in Documents: The Archive of John Evelyn
From: The British Library
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Frances Harris |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
John Evelyn is best known as the author of a notable diary of his life in seventeenth-century England. But he also left an enormously rich archive of other letters and papers. In an interview with Fathom, Frances Harris, senior curator in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Library, reflects on how the archive, acquired by the library in 1995, reveals Evelyn's complexities and contradictions. |
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| Portrait of John Evelyn, engraving by Bartolozzi after Kneller. | |
Frances Harris: The diary of John Evelyn is a fascinating document. It's a very detailed record of his experiences, of his travels and of important people he met. But it does leave out large and important areas of his life, and this is where the whole of his archive comes in. There's a sense in which John Evelyn is significant because he left us such a comprehensive record of his life. |
I think he kept it in a deliberate way. And it's useful to think about what this kind of record is. An archive isn't just a collection of documents, it's almost a by-product of an historical process. It's the written record generated by an historical process. This may be an institutional and legal process, but it may also be a creative process. It may be a process of simply living and interacting in society. |
I've always been interested by that quality of an archive: how if you assemble it fully and correctly it can reveal a whole historical process. Evelyn was particularly concerned with the preservation of his life record in all its aspects. I think this does allow us to know him particularly intimately in the whole range of his intellectual life; in his spiritual life, too, because he wouldn't have separated the two; and in his social and public roles, his private life and family relations. It's the completeness of the record of a life in all its aspects which makes it such a rewarding body of material to explore. |
Fathom: Was gathering this material a very self-conscious process for Evelyn? And was it structured in the way he kept it? |
Harris: The archive came down to us, when the British Library acquired it, in 1995, in quite a disordered state. But things have a tendency to fall into disorder over time, don't they? It's one of our tasks at the library to restore a meaningful order. I think Evelyn started out in his young manhood with a strong sense that he should keep a full record of his life and thoughts in a systematic way, that this would be the foundation of all his ambitions and achievements. |
So you get, first of all, the wonderful series of commonplace books, great folios in uniform bindings, in which he kept his notes of his reading and his correspondence and conversations, his records of experiments and technological processes, even his recipes and sermon notes, in different categories. |
Inevitably, the record keeping became more complicated as he began particular projects and started to adapt his material to them. You can see this most strikingly in the various manuscripts and notes which he compiled for his magnum opus, the gardening encyclopaedia Elysium Britannicum, which eventually became so cumbersome that he could never bring them to a publishable form. But I think he never lost a strong sense that there was an ideal which you aspired to in each aspect of your life. You didn't allow yourself to drift where you might feel inclined, or to be led by events. You had a sense of how a life should be lived. This is definitely reflected in his archive, and the records there sustained the ideal. |
The commonplace books, and also his library catalogues, all show this concern with a total system of knowledge. It wasn't just an ad hoc thing, or a personal collection; it was how best to classify information. But then it was necessary to consider how best to apply this for particular purposes. |
To give one example: He was very interested in the history and techniques of engraving, not just for artistic purposes but for the dissemination of scientific knowledge. And he was quite capable of experimenting with small engraving projects of his own--for his garden plan, for example. And he understood something of the technique of bookbinding, of the connoisseur arts of that kind, and he could practise them himself. I think he always had a very strong sense, derived from Francis Bacon, that knowledge should be socially and economically useful. It should be for the good of the whole, and it should be a collaborative process. |
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| John Evelyn's drawing of his family home, Wotton House, near Guildford, made in 1640, when he was 20 years old. | |
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One of the themes which runs through Evelyn's life, from the time you first get to know him as a young man to his old age, is how best to live a life. Is the best kind of life a private life? Are you morally most praiseworthy if you keep yourself retired from the corruption or the compromises of public life? Or is it your duty to go out and contend with these events and make yourself useful and adapt your knowledge to the public good? |
I think he was very strongly drawn towards the ideal role of the "hortulan saint": the hermit in his cell, who doesn't have public ambitions, who cultivates his garden, who rules his passions in private, who is a model of retired virtue. But he also had, almost in spite of himself, conflicting ambitions; a very strong sense of duty; a sense that you had to make yourself useful in your generation. Of course, this was very much a humanist view, something which strongly influenced his whole period. |
It makes sense of many aspects of his life; his horticultural work, for example. Evelyn was the most influential gardener of his day; his famous garden at Sayes Court, in Deptford, created from a wasteland, became one of the showplaces of England. For him gardens had a dual role. They were places of beauty and recreation. Spiritually, they were places to retire to, places of regeneration. But they were also places where you cultivated plants to acquire botanical knowledge, to naturalize foreign species, to improve the environment and the processes of husbandry, to explore the whole scientific realm. It's interesting to find that Evelyn's garden had a laboratory where he could experiment with chemical processes concerning vegetable matter. |
So his whole life was, I think, an attempt to balance these two opposing views, and in that he was very characteristic of his age. He so fully and articulately reflected the central dilemmas of his own period that his life illuminates a whole culture. |
Fathom: What does the archive reveal about him as a religious figure? |
Harris: The devotional manuscripts are the biggest single category in his archive, and the theological and religious books are the biggest single category of his library. He had a sense of a guiding providence over all. The fundamental purpose of a life, as he put it once, was to make your "calling and election sure"; to work out your salvation. You might do this while being strenuously engaged with public events, but this was the most ultimate end. |
He was a devout Anglican but very much a layman, who studied divinity for its own sake and not just, as he put it, to get his bread. He remained a committed Anglican during the most difficult period of the seventeenth century, the 1650s, when the Church was under threat, and when he had to think very carefully about the basis of his faith. In the process he compiled what is probably the most comprehensive archive of devotional manuscripts of any lay Anglican of his time. |
Its centre-piece is his folio Bible in two volumes, which he had interleaved with blank pages on which to write his own notes and commentary. And then there is his volume of sermon notes, part of the series of his commonplace books; his personal history of the Christian religion, which he wrote in the 1650s as a systematic means of examining and setting down the basis of his Anglican faith; and above all a whole cycle of meditations and private devotional offices. |
These were begun during the 1650s, when Anglican services were in effect proscribed, but he carried on the practice into his later life and worked it into an elaborate cycle which began with the major religious festivals and finally included a special meditation for each day of the week. These in turn take their subject matter from all his practical and intellectual interests: gardening, nature, exploration, trade and commerce, the whole known world. You can see him drawing on each one of these interests to compose these meditations--it's a fascinating process of assimilation. His plan to adapt the whole cycle for publication didn't come to fruition, but each of these little books which he composed and wrote out so carefully survives in the archive, 20 or 30 of them. |
Fathom: Does he write about his life in a private way? |
Harris: Yes, in certain contexts; in his letters, of course, but also in more unexpected contexts. One documentary outcome of his strong sense that there was an ideal way to live a life was the series of private conduct manuals which he wrote for his family and friends: one for his wife early in their marriage, one for his son and daughter, another for his grandson, and so on. |
In one way these can seem very oppressive, overly didactic documents; perhaps they did even to those who received them, though they were more accustomed to such things. Evelyn was a man of strong moral certainties, and in relation to some of his Restoration contemporaries, for example, he can seem very straitlaced. But he was not prudish; he was quite ready, for example, to discuss sexual relationships between a man and his wife, to give frank advice to his son when he was preparing for his marriage. He was aware that these were large and important areas of people's lives and that one needed as much guidance in them as in social matters. These private conduct books are therefore quite revealing and intimate documents, without being at all prurient or confessional. They give us an unexpected insight into family lives--their tensions and difficulties as well as their prescribed relationships. |
Fathom: You know Evelyn's archive today as well as anyone. Does this make you keen to have known him? |
Harris: Yes, you often feel when you have come to know people through the written record that it would be fascinating to meet them in the flesh. |
I think I would have found certain aspects of his personality quite difficult to deal with. He had very inflexible attitudes about the roles of men and women. He strongly believed that a woman was naturally subordinate first to her father and then to her husband. He was very much against women learning, other than in the most exceptional cases. He would say that it encouraged them to be conceited and have thoughts above their stations. Housekeeping was their prescribed duty, and at that time, of course, running a house of any size was a demanding occupation requiring many skills. It was one which he fully respected, but he had a very clear sense of the different roles of men and women in this respect. |
On the other hand, he thought that women had the capacity to be better friends than men. He believed in the possibility of platonic friendships between men and women, and what made these congenial to him was that in friendship there was no subordination; men and women could meet each other on equal terms. I think there are some interesting complexities there that it would have been quite instructive to encounter face-to-face. |
Fathom: What happened to his archive after his death? |
Harris: The archive remained at Wotton, the house Evelyn inherited some six or seven years before his death, until the mid-twentieth century. His son, with whom he was never on easy terms, predeceased him. His heir, whom he very much educated in his own image, was his grandson, Sir John Evelyn, First Baronet, and after him came a succession of descendants, who continued to own the estate and preserve and add to the archive. In the early nineteenth century, the autograph collector William Upcott came to know the widow of the Fifth Baronet when he was employed to recatalogue the library. He brought to light the diary manuscript and persuaded her to publish it. A few other volumes, Evelyn's History of Religion, for example, were published later in the century. But otherwise the contents of the archive remained comparatively little known. |
In the late 1940s it was deposited at Christchurch, Oxford, for reasons of security and access, although it remained in the ownership of the family. But it was increasingly in need of the care and conservation which only a very large national institution could provide, and I think it was a natural choice that it was offered for sale to the British Library. This was in 1995. |
Fathom: How is the archive being used by the library? |
Harris: First and foremost, we have a dedicated programme of conservation in progress, to restore the paper and bindings, so that the documents can safely be handled by our users. At the same time, we are restoring the whole body of documents to their archival order and preparing a full catalogue. This is an enormously rich source for so many different subjects and disciplines, as we have found from the great variety of use it has had since it came to us. And it includes much else besides Evelyn's own archive. His wife was a notable letter writer. Her own manuscripts are also there, and those of her ancestors, who were administrators of the navy under Elizabeth I. Her father, Sir Richard Browne, was Charles I's representative in Paris. He left an important body of material about the Royalist community in Paris. Some series of documents, relating to the estate and the Evelyn library, for example, span many generations. John Evelyn is the central character, but there is much else besides. |
Just by identifying what belongs to each generation of the family, putting together the parts of documents which have become accidentally separated over time, and making an order reflecting the origin of each, which goes back to the process that created it, a great deal can be done to open up these riches for researchers. In addition to the catalogue, we are also planning an international conference at the British Library in 2001, which will provide a forum for the research in progress on the many different aspects of the archive. |
Fathom: Did the British Library acquire Evelyn's library as well? |
Harris: The library was kept separate from the archive, and was sold at auction in 1977. The British Library acquired the largest single portion of it, particularly the volumes which have Evelyn's annotations in them. The archive, of course, contains his manuscript library catalogues and the commonplace books in which he made notes from his books, so there are many connections between the two. This opens up the fascinating possibility of a virtual construction of his superb library, which was the basis of all his work and thought. |
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