EVERYBODY knows of Samuel Pepys, and of his Diary written in the 1660s. But Pepys's mildly picaresque adventures unfairly overshadow the more sober scribblings of another diarist of the same period. John Evelyn recorded his Memoir, day by day, in meticulous detail, for nearly 50 years, as opposed to the mere nine years and five months covered by the narrative of Pepys.
Evelyn was born in 1620, and died 290 years ago today, on February 27th, 1706. For much of his life he was what we nowadays would call a "green activist", and was perhaps the first to protest publicly to the powers that be about the pollution of the London air. In 1661 he published The Inconvenience of the Air and Smoke, or London Dissipated, better remembered by its Latin name of Fumifugium. In it he paints a graphic picture:
"The city of London resembles more the face of Mount Etna, the court of Vulcan, or Stromboli, or the suburbs of hell, than an assembly of rational creatures and the imperial seat of our incomparable monarch. For when in all other places the air is most serene and pure, it is here eclipsed with such clouds of sulphur that the sun itself which gives day to all the world besides is hardly able to penetrate."
Evelyn began his Memoir in 1740, and continued with it almost until the day he died. The voluminous document is less spontaneous and personal than that of Pepys, but it gives a valuable insight into the English, and indeed the Continental, society of the time. He is one of our principal informants, for example, about the Great Fire of London in 1666. His entry for September 3rd that year begins: "This fatal night, at about 10 o'clock, began that deplorable fire near Fish Street in London - a miserable and calamitous spectacle, such as happily the world had not seen the like since the foundation of it, norm would be outdone till the universal conflagration of it all".
We also gain much insight from Evelyn's diaries into the harshness of the winters during the Little Ice Age, which was at its height around that time. On January 24th, 1684 he writes: "The frost continuing more and more severe, the Thames before London was still planted with booths in formal streets, all sort of trades and shops furnished and full of commodities, even to a printing press where the people and the ladies took a fancy to have their names engraved, and the day and year set down when it was printed on the Thames."