Blackwell Reference Online

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John Evelyn (1620–1706) was a diarist and writer whose interests ran from education to horticulture, and from bibliography to numismatics. He was also a respected advocate of the arts, publishing works on sculpture, painting, and architecture, and was one of the founding fellows of the Royal Society. Evelyn was born on 31 October 1620 at Wotton in Surrey. From the age of five, he lived with his maternal grandfather, John Stansfield, in Lewes. In 1630 he was enrolled in the free school at Southover, where he remained until 1637, when he was admitted to the Middle Temple. The same year he was also admitted as a fellow commoner to Balliol College, Oxford, matriculating on 29 May, but he did not take a degree. For much of the 1640s he travelled on the Continent in the company of fellow Royalist exiles. In Paris he became acquainted with the ambassador there, Sir Richard Browne, and in June 1647 he married Browne's daughter Mary. Shortly afterwards he returned to England, and in 1652 he and Mary took the lease of Sayes Court, her family home in Deptford. Evelyn's fame today comes mostly from his voluminous Diary . From the age of 11 he kept notes of his life, perhaps in the waste leaves of an almanac, from which the Diary was later composed. (It was not until 1684 that he kept a diary on a daily basis.) The first part of the Diary , which covers events from his birth to his visit ... log in or subscribe to read full text