Brown leather spine with red and blue marbled paper boards. Gilt title and banding with decoration on the spine. Dimensions are for one volume.

It is the intent of F.B.A. to provide an in-depth photographic presentation of this book offered so to almost stimulate your feel and touch on the book. If requested, more traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

A well-dressed edition counterpoising the work of Samuel Pepys

John Evelyn FRS (31 October 1620 – 27 February 1706) was an English writer, gardener and diarist.

John Evelyn’s diary, or memoir, spanned the period of his adult life from 1640, when he was a student, to 1706, the year he died. He did not write daily at all times. The many volumes provide insight into life and events at a time before regular magazines or newspapers were published, making diaries of greater interest to modern historians than such works might have been at later periods. Evelyn’s work covers art, culture and politics, including the execution of Charles I, Oliver Cromwell’s rise and eventual natural death, the last Great Plague of London, and the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Evelyn’s posthumously “rival” diarist, Samuel Pepys, wrote a different kind of diary, covering a much shorter period, 1660–1669, but in much greater depth, within the same era. Over the years, Evelyn’s Diary has been overshadowed by Pepys’s chronicles of 17th-century life.

The Diary of John Evelyn (31 October 1620 – 27 February 1706), a gentlemanly Royalist and virtuoso of the seventeenth century, was first published in 1818 (2nd edition, 1819) under the title Memoirs Illustrative of the Life and Writings of John Evelyn, in an edition by William Bray. Bray was assisted by William Upcott, who had access to the Evelyn family archives. The diary of Evelyn’s contemporary Samuel Pepys was first published in 1825, and became more celebrated; but the publication of Evelyn’s work in part prompted the attention given to Pepys’s.

Evelyn’s diary has entries running from 1640, when the author was a student at the Middle Temple, to 1706. Its claim as a memoir to be a diary is not strict; up to around 1683 the entries were not daily additions, but were compiled much later from notes, and show in some cases the benefits of hindsight. When his travels are described, buildings or pictures may be described anachronistically, revealing the later use of other sources.