Tercentennial fever is hard for publishers and would-be biographers to resist. The diarist and virtuoso John Evelyn died in February 1706, and the three hundredth anniversary of this has been another case in point. Maggie Campbell-Culver brought out her A Passion for Trees: The Legacy of John Evelyn (London, 2006), and a conference devoted to Evelyn was held under the auspices of the Garden History Society and Surrey Garden Trust (the papers delivered at this comprise the forthcoming A Celebration of John Evelyn, published by the Surrey Garden Trust). But chief among these publications is the volume under review, Gillian Darley's John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity. As Darley suggests, the Victorians established Evelyn as an exemplary gentleman scholar: a moralist and dilettante with an independent income and a fondness for gardening. His reputation has waxed and waned since then according to taste; by turns stuffy, earnest, prolix, and etiolated, he suffered through comparison with his friend Samuel Pepys. In her Living for Ingenuity, Darley aims to redraw this picture, getting at the real Evelyn whose interests—including chemistry (and alchemy), education, librarianship, classical scholarship, urban planning, forestry, chalcography, numismatics, and theology—were as broad as his social connections. That Darley has settled on “ingenuity” to define Evelyn's life is thus entirely appropriate. In the seventeenth century, it connoted the ability to think creatively in the widest possible range of fields, and it also helps us to understand the one-dimensional nature of Evelyn's historical reputation; as William Hazlitt phrased it, ingenuity became “genius in trifles.”

A study of Evelyn such as that proposed by Darley is long overdue but only became feasible after Evelyn's vast archive arrived at the British Library in 1995. Darley makes solid use of this potentially overwhelming resource, but Living for Ingenuity does not answer all, or even most, of what Evelyn and his Nachlass demand.

The spine of Darley's study is provided by Evelyn's diary. As this was not written in its present form until the 1680s, this is not without its problems (of which Darley only seems sporadically aware). It is nevertheless an understandable decision: chronology and personality are two of the few readily perceptible threads holding Evelyn's story together. The reader is guided through Evelyn's early years and education, his travels around Italy, exile with the Royalist court in Paris, cautious return to Cromwellian England, quest to achieve and maintain government office in the four decades after the Restoration, and involvement in the infant Royal Society. Darley is particularly strong on Evelyn's relationship with his wife and family, profitably mining archival correspondence to suggest the blood and anxiety that his piety can cause us to overlook. The difficulty with all this is that the reader is given no sense of what made Evelyn tick; the events in which he was caught up were as notable as some of the places he visited, but we are told little of Evelyn's motivations or intellectual life. Instead, much of the book is a procession past points of architectural and horticultural interest, from Rome, Amsterdam, and Paris to London, Deptford, and Norfolk. We are told what Evelyn might have felt before them, what they might have put him in mind of, and how they related to what were (and might have been) his own ideas on buildings and gardens. But then, when it comes to putting his architectural knowledge to use, it becomes clear that Evelyn was out of his depth, fit only to enthuse and to fund-raise (199–200). Darley is an architectural historian, and it is easy to see why she fell back onto familiar territory for the chapters on Evelyn's early years—sources for them are thin on the ground—but there is simply no warrant for maintaining this approach across the richly documented last fifty years of Evelyn's life. To take just one example of this, we are given seven pages (218–25) of context and analysis relating to Evelyn's Londinium Redivivum—the largely unread pamphlet with which Evelyn petitioned Charles II on how London might have been rebuilt after the Great Fire. (It remained unpublished until 1756.) Compare this to the treatment of his massive History of Religion, also published posthumously (in 1850), and on which he worked from 1657 to 1704: Darley alludes to it once, in a short sentence containing two significant errors (274). The emphasis on the first of these is fair enough, but the author's obliviousness to the range of Evelyn's preoccupations embodied in his History of Religion is altogether regrettable. Although Darley's account is more elaborately colored than any yet written, the problem with Living for Ingenuity is that it has very much the shape of the familiar, and tired, life of Evelyn that it was intended to displace.

It did not have to be this way. We are informed that Evelyn “had become as familiar with Francis Bacon's writings as if he had written them himself” (115), and although Darley's claim is questionable (the date is 1652, before the appearance of Bacon's unpublished works in editions by Gruter and Rawley), we catch her drift: Bacon's great instauration was something to which Evelyn was deeply committed. Darley has read Bacon's Essays, but had she gone further into his works, then she might have found better ways of integrating Evelyn's scholarly, religious, political, and protoscientific interests. (It is, for instance, perplexing that Darley imagines the involvement of Evelyn, Boyle, and Hartlib in (al)chemical experimentation to have been in conflict with their Christianity.) Evelyn's was a bookish existence, but from translation and the history of trades to commonplace books and horticulture, he made sure that he was in on the ground floor of Solomon's House.

Yale University Press has produced a handsome and affordable volume, but it is vitiated by some slovenly copyediting and the supremely frustrating imposition of endnotes on a work whose chief claims are archival. Coffee-table books are viewed, and works of scholarship are read; Yale must decide where its ambitions lie.

Living for Ingenuity is not the definitive study of Evelyn. Indeed, perhaps on account of being rushed to meet its tercentennial deadline, its substance suffers from being both partial and undigested. Nonetheless, it has begun to open up Evelyn's archive. When a proper account of Evelyn is written—and let's hope it is sooner rather than later—its author will be grateful for Darley's labors.