A figure of renewed interest since the British Library's 1995 acquisition of his papers and archives, John Evelyn has provided recent scholars with a field of contextual resources to illuminate aspects of life, politics, and garden design in the late seventeenth century. Modern scholars, however, were left to complete Elysium Britannicum, his magnum opus. This massive undertaking was brought to fruition in 2000 by scholar John Ingram, who transcribed and gave shape to Evelyn's unwieldy and never-completed manuscript. In recent decades a field of other scholars has likewise worked to shed light on Evelyn's poetry, relationships, politics, and influence in landscape design, and the virtuoso, once known primarily as a diarist, continues to emerge as a figure of significance in pre- and post-Restoration England.
His focus on domesticity enables John Dixon Hunt to explore essential questions about the diarist's work, relationships, and influence. In this way, Hunt's study is best understood as an intellectual biography, paying special emphasis on Evelyn's intellectual development in light of his lifetime habit of encountering, engaging with, and then adapting foreign materials into formats suitable for English sensibilities.
Hunt begins by establishing the preeminence of the family's Wotton Estate on Evelyn's imagination. For the diarist, these ancestral homelands loomed large in light of the fact that, as the second son, he was destined not to inherit them. Only late in life, when his brother Richard passed with no heirs, would he come into possession of the family estate. Hunt then establishes how the domesticizing process continued during Evelyn's continental travels, which enabled his exposure to Italian art, culture, architecture, and estate design, and especially his overt interest in French garden design and theory. Associating with like-minded virtuosi with interests in art, collecting, gardening, and estate management, Evelyn's time abroad was made expedient during the Interregnum. The Royalist Evelyn availed himself fully to continental design influences which he translated and adapted over the decades following the Restoration.
The full corpus of Evelyn's work featured successes as well as failures, and Hunt devotes sufficient and appropriate consideration to both. The influential Sylva (1664), Evelyn's great contribution to English arboriculture, was calculated not only to return English estates and forests to their former verdancy but also to refortify the nation's timber stores for shipbuilding to enhance its economic standing and national security. Not alone in his desire to elevate gardening and landscape designs above mere practical arts, Evelyn's desire to spiritualize the arts of cultivation stands as one of the distinctive hallmarks of his thinking. Hunt remarks on the importance of two later works, his 1693 translation of Jean de La Quintinie's The Compleat Gard'ner and his own 1699 publication Acetaria, a subsection “rescued” from the disorder of his unfinished Elysium, as the best practical illustrations of this point.
With its origins in Samuel Hartlib's range of contacts to a post-Restoration community rooted in Baconian idealism, the Royal Society offered Evelyn a means to associate with like-minded proponents of land-use reform and other proto-scientific ventures. These associations were not without their disappointments, as shown in Hunt's account of the London Fire of 1666 and Evelyn's aspirations, muted by contributors deemed more qualified, in imaging a rebuilt and redesigned city. Hunt also aligns Evelyn's lifetime habits in offering instructional advice—to his daughter Mary Evelyn, to his grandson John (“Jack”) Evelyn, and with his many correspondents—as another example of his domestic sensibilities, focusing particularly on his “seraphic” relationship with the much younger Margaret Godolphin, whose life the diarist paid tribute to upon her untimely death.
Positioning Evelyn within that familiar “battle between the ancients and the moderns,” Hunt examines the diarist's “considerable and visible place as both a careful, yet sometimes awkward, adjudicator of those rivalries” (182). Just as Dryden “educated” Virgil and Pope updated Horace, so Evelyn adapted and interpreted ancient gardening practices and tastes, updating them as much within his translations of the ancients as within the garden designs of select English estates. Following Bacon's lead in unlocking the secrets of nature for modern usage, Evelyn approached the wisdom of the ancients through a comparable process of exploration and translating—of domesticizing—which required the effort not only to make ancient wisdom accessible, but also to establish its contemporary relevance.
Evelyn's magnum opus, his Elysium Britannicum, was poised to become the fullest embodiment of the diarist's domesticizing habit. Hunt's most penetrating discussions of Evelyn's thinking are devoted to the diarist's inability to bring this ever-growing tome to a close, locating in his translation of Lucretius and Epicureanism a major spiritual conflict that only intensified as the work proceeded, exploring the “growing sense” that the effort was “clearly contrary to his faith and conscience” and “must have eaten away at his resolve to proceed” (208). In this failure to reconcile Lucretian atomism and Epicureanism with the effort to complete Elysium Britannicum, Hunt locates a spiritual conflict that Evelyn never worked through—an attempt to acknowledge the atheistic self-interests of Epicureanism with his own desires to invest garden design with heavily spiritualized dimensions related to the recovery of Edenic spaces on earth. Hunt devotes a chapter to exploring these competing tensions, plumbing the depths of the diarist's intellectual conflict, a crucial matter given that the Elysium was likely to displace Sylva as Evelyn's signature work.
Whatever anxieties of completion Evelyn felt in his multi-decade effort to bring order to the ever-growing project of Elysium were contemporaneously applied to the ongoing designs of his London estate at Sayes Court. This effort reflected, according to Hunt, his “empirical insistence on the making of a place” (133), and these two aligned projects are perhaps worth exploring more fully as conjoined efforts.
All told, Hunt's elegant, well-illustrated, and easily readable work represents an indispensable resource for scholars of seventeenth-century England, offering in its detailed analysis of the sensibilities and patterns of thinking in one of its most visible and quietly influential figures a larger study of the intellectual history that defined this most turbulent and transformational age.
